PEOPLE & POLITICS

Dansadau and the botched ANPP Convention

Mohammed Haruna

I don’t know who its witty author is. I don’t even remember how I came by it, but there is this humorous political piece on my notice board which seems to be the star attraction of visitors to my office. The title of the piece is “Politics for Beginners” and it consists of six “one-liners”, as the Americans would say. The piece first defines six of the major “isms” of politics and then goes on to conclude that you should have nothing to do with politics because it can only bring you trouble.

Socialism, it says, means you have two cows and you give one to your neighbour. Communism means you have two cows, the government seizes both and gives you the milk. Fascism means you have two cows, the government seizes both and sells you the milk. Nazism means the government seizes your two cows and shoots you. Capitalism means you sell your two cows and buy a bull. Finally, trade unionism means the union bosses seize your two cows, shoot one, milk the other and throw the milk away.

The moral? “Don’t”, says the piece, “have anything to do with cows. They only bring you trouble.”

Except for the Communist bit, Nigeria’s politics seems to be a portent brew of all these isms -–and more. So portent is this brew that it seems to make the Nigerian politician, in or out of power, so power-drunk that one would be right to stretch the conclusion of our author and say that Nigeria’s politics – and politicians – in the last three odd years has been exceptional trouble. So troublesome that, like a somewhat bemused military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, once said of our economics, our politics defy any rational analysis. Indeed, how the Nigerian political analyst is able to make any sense out of the jungle that is Nigeria’s politics, must be the eighth wonder of the world.

In the last three years, whether it is our inability to raise a voters’ register, or the criminal attempt by the political leadership to forge an electoral law last year, whether it is the inability of any of the three originally registered parties to organise themselves or the laughable spectacle of a nomadic Enugu State House of Assembly trying to conduct business in Abuja, one is at one’s wit’s to really understand what is going on in the land.

It is, of course, obvious to all that there is some method to all this political madness and this method is the use of all means, fair and foul, to grab power. The difficulty in understanding what is going on, however, lies in the details of this method – and as the saying goes, the devil is always in the detail.

Take, for example, the botched All Nigerian Peoples Party, ANPP, (a.k.a APP) Convention of July 27, which is the subject of today’s political analysis. That convention would be the fifth time that the party would abort its convention in the last couple of years or so. July 27, however, must have been exceptionally painful to party delegates because it was the first time that all seemed to have gone well with its convention until the very last minute, when someone decided to spring the joker of a court injunction against holding the convention on the delegates.

For a party which has been touting itself as the most credible alternative to the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), which has, itself, proved thoroughly incompetent at ruling this country and even more incompetent at organising itself, this failure to hold a convention for the fifth time was simply inexcusable. But typical of the political leadership of the country, the party’s leaders have been blaming everyone but themselves for their apparent incompetence.

In a paid advert in several national papers, the party’s National Convention Planning Committee, has been blaming INEC and the authorities in Abuja for their failure. “The Convention of our party”, says the convention committee, “was postponed due to the refusal of INEC to monitor our convention by the use of the anonymous court order and deliberate display of injustice and contempt to our dear party the ANPP”.

The party goes on to accuse INEC of taking instructions from the PDP. “The dependent nature of the Independent National Electoral Commission”, says the party, “has made it a strong ally of the ruling party. This is absolutely dangerous to our nascent democracy and one wonders how the 2003 elections will be conducted by INEC. This is just the beginning. Let Nigerians beware”.

Close observers of the internal politics of the ANPP say that this self righteous self-exculpation is nothing but sheer hypocricy. True, there have been ominous signs even before the PDP tried to rig the Electoral Law last year, that the ruling party does not want any election at all, never mind a free and fair one. One speculation talks of a PDP script which has two options for President Obasanjo’s self-succession. The first option is to frustrate APP and AD in fielding any presidential candidates so that Obasanjo can coast home under the cover of Section 133 of the Constitution which allows for a single presidential candidate, provided, of course, he wins a majority of yes votes over the no votes cast at the election and provided he also has a quarter of the voters cast in each of at least 2/3 of 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

The second option, should the first one fail, is, according to this speculation, to try and exploit Section 135(3) of the Constitution which provides for the extension of the president’s tenure without election. This section says that in the event of an invasion of the country and should the president think that it is not practicable to hold elections, the National Assembly may, by resolution, extend his tenure from time to time, provided each extension does not exceed six months.

If this speculation sounds far-fetched because Nigeria is unlikely to be invaded even by, say, Cameroun against whom we are fighting over Bakassi, consider the brazen manner in which the National Assembly tried to extent the tenure of Local Governments. Consider also the criminal and barefaced insertion of Section 80(1) into the subsisting electoral Law 2001 – remember the president is yet to sign Electoral Bill 2002 – an insertion whose aim was to bar new parties from contesting the next presidential election. Consider, again, the fact that Abuja deliberately starved INEC of funds to raise a voters’ register for two years. Et cetera Et cetera.

In these circumstances, the ANPP may be justified to raise an alarm about the possibility, even probability, of the scuttling of next year’s general elections. Even then the ANPP is hardly in a position to be self-righteous about the political chicaneries of its bigger rival because it has clearly not shown itself to be any different.

Contrary to its claim of outside interference, the party leadership knows very well that the failure of July 27 was squarely its own responsibility. To put in bluntly, the party leadership knew that in a free and fair election, Senator Saidu Dansadu would have beaten the incumbent chairman, my good friend, Alhaji Yusuf Ali, fair and square. It was to forestall this that the party leadership tried to zone the chairmanship to the North-West and even in the North-West, to Kano, where Ali comes from.

This attempt at zoning the post to Ali failed, ironically, because the two generals in the party to whom the party leadership had turned for support – former Head of State, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari and former military vice-president, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu – insisted, to their eternal credit, that there must be an election. But more important than the stance of the two generals was the insistence by delegates that the elections must hold. It is an open secret that the party leadership had engineered the court injunction for use just in case all else failed, and all else did fail.

Not only did the party leadership try to stop Dansadau by zoning its chairmanship to the incumbent, it also embarked on what was clearly a malicious campaign against the senator. He was, said the party leadership, President Obasanjo’s and Dr. Sola Saraki’s - since estranged from the party – agent provocateur whose assignment was to frustrate the emergence of a credible presidential ticket for the party and to also destablise it.

The very sad thing is that even General Buhari seems to have now bought this campaign. In the immediate aftermath of July 27 he had blamed the authorities in Abuja for engineering the court injunction that aborted the convention in an attempt, he said, to thwart his presidential ambition. His interview with the Weekly Trust last Friday suggests that he has now reversed himself.

“It is being observed”, he told Weekly Trust, “that people who were previously not very active, although they are holding offices within the hierarchy of the party suddenly developed so much interest and were incurring expenditure that cannot normally be explained… A leadership was about to be imposed on the party that would sell it again. But we thank God that a court injunction stopped the whole process”.

Clearly, this is a reference to Dansadau’s highly visible and successful campaign. It is also a thinly disguised reference to Dansadau’s closeness to Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi, who, in turn, is speculated to be working hand in glove with the presidency. Dansadau was the coordinator of Shinkafi’s two presidential bids in 1992 and 1998.

As is to be expected, Dansadau has since been defending himself. He told a press conference the other day that he had challenged his traducers to a mutual swearing by the Qur’an and the Bible, since the case was one of their words against his own. It was, instructive, he said, that none of his traducers picked up his gauntlet.

Dansadau, it seems to me, is merely a victim of his own successful campaign for the chairmanship of the party. Because his campaign was highly visible and highly successful, his opponents assumed that it must have cost him a fortune.

This assumption is not necessarily correct. Money may seem central to success in our politics, but a successful campaign does not have to cost a fortune. If you work hard enough and you are creative enough, as Alhaji M.D. Yusuf demonstrated when he opposed Abacha’s self-succession plan in 1998, your campaign may cost you only peanuts. My own little investigations showed that Dansadau worked hard and used his small campaign team in a very creative manner. I know, for example, that he used his in-house skills to create his simple campaign message and he also used an obscure printer in Garki market, Abuja, to print and display all his four billboards and his hundreds of posters. For the rest of his campaign he spent more time and energy than money touching base with the grassroots which was something my good friend, Ali, did not do, smug in the belief that with governors like Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa of Sokoto behind him, his endorsement to remain in office was as good as sewn up.

It is indeed a sad commentary on the character and the confused and confusing nature of our politics that Dansadau who should be regarded as the hero of July 27, is now regarded by even apparently strace-laced people like General Buhari as the villain of the piece.