Short Essay 15
By Dr. Aliyu Tilde
PDP: The Day of Reckoning is Here
Parliamentary elections are taking place in Nigeria today. In the polling booth just few meters from me, it is expected that the ruling party, the PDP, will suffer a terrible loss. Ahmadu, one of the busybodies in the village, just left here, confirming my fears –- or say delight -– about the mammoth, saying, “PDP fa ta tafi”, meaning PDP is gone. The story will be the same in many parts of the North and the Southwest. What will permit it to linger on with some degree of strength is the inability of other parties to field in candidates in many constituencies, as someone correctly observed in an interview yesterday. It will lose its dominance in the National Assembly if the elections are free and fair.
PDP will not die right away. No. I do not think so, for two reasons. One, the opposition parties are too weak to give it a lethal blow now. Two, it will reinvigorate itself especially when the opposition fails to do better in office particularly at the centre. People would begin to compare the present with the past. And in most comparisons between the two, human judgement has favoured the past that it is remote, forgiven and barely remembered against the present that is here, dominant and biting. This has happened in Kano and Bauchi states where the ANPP ousted the PDP, on both occasions with the help of Buhari, in 2003 and 2007 to the extent that in Kano today, Kwankwaso, the former PDP governor, has bright chances of winning the gubernatorial race. In Bauchi too, the masses are anxiously waiting to humiliate their one time saviour, Yuguda, and whom they have dropped like a hot potato.
The opposition must therefore know that victory is a burden. In Nigeria it should only celebrate it briefly; thereafter, the it must rush to face the daunting task of meeting the high expectations of Nigerians – who are as impatient as a baby awaiting delivery. This is an area we will dwell on in later discussions.
If the PDP loses substantial number of seats in the National Assembly but keeps the Presidency by a small margin, it will serve its future well if it uses the next four years to redeem its image among Nigerians. It must run a transparent government with a clear commitment to break away from it's notorious culture of corruption and incompetence. It must also give up its culture of impunity that has generated so much hate against it in the hearts of citizens and prevented it from meeting our expectations. In 1999, the expectation was that Obasanjo would save the country from its path of collapse. We dubbed him the messiah, then. However, in less than a year, his dictatorial tendencies and tolerance for corruption made him lose every goal he aimed at and miss his every target he set. His successors, who he handpicked, have not proved to be better administrators either. Today, PDP at the centre has little to show in 12 years. This failure was its greatest undoing. I, like many Nigerians, would not care which party is in power, so long as it performs.
Then came the anger the PDP generated from rigging elections. The party at all levels blocked any attempt by Nigerians to peacefully register their protest at the polls in 2003 and 2007. Despite its dismal performance at the centre, the party continued to wax stronger and stronger with every election until it was controlling at one time 27 of the 36 states we have. Incumbency was at its worst. Now the people have found their voice. In areas where they feel aggrieved, today presents them the opportunity to unreservedly demand for their pound of flesh from the PDP.
Finally, the opposition in the North has gained a lot from the zoning controversy in the PDP. In fact, a lot of the votes the party would lose in this part of the country will be as a result of Jonathan's intransigence. He has seen how he was coldly received in every gathering he attended in the North, despite the billions he dolled out and the promises he made. It was a big miscalculation that he was impervious to our advice when he assumed office as President: conduct a free and fair election and leave, then return as a celebrated statesman in 2015 to be received warmly across the country. Instead, he chose to use incumbency to win the ticket of his party. If a northerner were given the PDP presidential ticket, the opposition would not have garnered so much support. Many PDP supporters in the region will now be voting for the opposition in the presidential elections.
Well, I will not be surprised if the PDP tries its tricks once more in the following hours. In the senatorial by-elections in Bauchi and Gombe states, we saw a rehearsal of what is likely to happen today. The PDP will allow free and fair elections in cities and semi-urban areas while it will rig them in rural areas where traditional institutions are still strong and the population is less enlightened about its right. Election officials and materials will be diverted to unknown locations for ballot stuffing and people will be repressed if they attempt to protest at collation centres. The government has not hidden its strong disapproval of the vote protection strategy of the opposition. Money will be used to induce election officials, of course. Many local governments have already refused INEC trained agents, claiming that they have trained their own. INEC at the bottom remains as rotten as ever. These were the flaws that characterized those by-elections. Yet, INEC under Jega said they were free and fair! I hope it will not be so this time. How successful will the PDP be in executing its plan remains to be seen; but both the precept and the possibility are here.
The outcome of today's elections will give a lot of insight into the chances of the opposition in subsequent elections. The strengths and strategies of both sides will become clear. It is a legitimate source of worry that the opposition has not united behind one candidate as we pleaded. Perhaps, the results of the elections today will bring home the wisdom for such a unity.
Whatever happens, we do not expect that the PDP will have a smooth ride this time. The paper is spread and the ink that is chronicling its decline is already flowing through the votes of the Nigerian masses.
Tilde,
9 April 2011
Showing posts with label PDP Nigeria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PDP Nigeria. Show all posts
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Impeachment, the Only Option for PDP
Impeachment, the Only Option for PDP
By
Dr. Aliyu Tilde
aliyutilde@yahoo.com
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is increasingly getting into a fix. Writing about it has become imperative, a priority you may say. This stems from the dominant role the party plays in our democracy today. It is the ruling party in this country, having the President and the majority in both Senate and House of Representatives. It has 22 out of 36 governors plus the Minister of the Federal Capital, who is another PDP man appointed by the President. In addition to this, by tribal allegiance to the President, the five Alliance for Democracy (AD) governors are also members of the PDP. Finally, there are some APP chieftains and governors, few though, who are busy eating the roasted maize (the symbol of APP) under the umbrella (symbol of PDP) held by the President. Some of them are right now in the Southwest campaigning for the superiority of the umbrella over the maize, as they did in 1999. What a conspiracy!
Also, the economy and politics of the country is literally in the hands of PDP. Its members determine who gets what share in the economy through budget formulation and implementation, contracts award and appointments into the most lucrative offices in the country. Politically, as the sole proprietor of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), it determines the course of events in the political process. This body, whose overwhelming majority are PDP members, is required to ratify not only the conventions and congresses of the PDP but also of the other parties. As a demonstration of its power, last month it boycotted the national convention of the APP and the gathering of over 10,000 people had to disperse in disappointment because by law no convention is valid without the attendance of INEC.
I will therefore like to submit that when only sheer size and power are considered, PDP is the party to reckon with, so far. We can validly argue, based on that premise, that until it is toppled in the next election, if PDP is in trouble, our democracy is in trouble. However, unlike Fairouz who, out of love for Damascus said, “Syria! Your people, if they are in trouble, my heart is in trouble,” our writing about PDP is not informed by love for the party but by the impact which its troubles will have on our democracy.
The Problem
The troubles in the PDP are many but two are particularly disturbing. The first problem is Obasanjo. His government is a total failure, a fact that has been chronicled by many writers. All what the government is good at is quoting figures, but the work cannot be substantiated. The reports of gross corruption in the federal government including those given by international organizations have reached alarming levels. The levels of insecurity, ethnic conflicts, poverty, etc. have never been so high. All these are common knowledge among Nigerians today.
The trouble with Obasanjo does not stem from his failure but from his resolve to remain in power as it is the tradition with other African rulers. He is bent on using whatever resources are in his control to win elections next year. He has proved his ability to crudely get his way in previous conventions of his party and in the Senate. He changes the leadership of the Senate and the party at will, three for each in the last three years. His control over INEC and other bodies makes him feel confident that victory must be his companion in 2003.
Knowing the degree of his low esteem on the one hand and his resolve to maintain his seat through whatever means on the other, many members of his party have expressed their fear over the fate of the party and the future of democracy. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most consistent and eloquent in this. He has threatened to leave the party if Obasanjo comes out of the next convention as its flag bearer. The convention will come and in it, Obasanjo may or may not contest. Everything will depend on what happens to him between now and then. We will come back to this later in the article.
The second problem of PDP is the flood of aspirants seeking its ticket at the local government and state levels. As Obasanjo is sitting tight on the presidency, so also are the governors of the party. There are many aspirants within the party who would wish to replace the present state governors. Seeing how the governors have manipulated the congresses of the state, they are left with no choice but despondency which has led some of them to entertain, in revenge, anti-party activities, others have decamped to other parties as we have seen in Plateau state recently.
At the local government level, in addition to intrigues and decampment, violence has been employed as a means of expressing dissatisfaction with the affairs of the party. Almost all the violence that took place during the local government primaries did so only within the PDP. Some local government primaries could not hold. And they may never hold because attempts to do so have resulted in the loss of lives and property. A clear example is that of Jos North local government where, no thanks to recent ethnic disturbances, the majority has awakened from its slumber to claim its democratic right. The last PDP ward congress there only succeeded in renewing the ethnic animosity and led to an instant loss of hundreds of lives.
Ordinarily, one would rejoice that the dominant party is crumbling; that its absence will guarantee other parties breathing space in the political atmosphere. However, I am of the opinion that the loss of the PDP will hardly change much, as things are today. But this argument can only be substantiated if we probe the source of the party’s problems such that we can say precisely whether or not these problems are peculiar to the PDP or not and whether other parties that will move to occupy the space it will vacate will be more promising.
Source
To begin with, I believe that none of the parties would have done better if it were in the position of the PDP, if we discount the extremely bad case of Obasanjo. This is because, both AD and APP have shown similar degrees of opportunism and weaknesses in the domains they control. Their governors are no better than those of the PDP. They have emasculated the opposition in their states and they are playing the incumbency factor as good, or say as bad if you like, as the PDP is playing its at the state and federal levels. In the appointment commissioners to State Independent Electoral Commisions for example, the APP governors did not show a better degree of restraint. They appointed their own men. Therefore, Obasanjo, Makarfi and others in the PDP are not alone.
The leadership of the other two parties have also shown weaknesses similar to that of the PDP. The AD has shown strong inclination towards ethnic chauvinism to the extent that it is willing to vacate the presidency for Obasanjo. The APP on its part has been controlled not by the whims of its followers but by manipulations of the rich and the powerful both inside and outside its membership. Its leadership sold the presidential ticket of the party to an AD candidate even after it has a candidate nominated by the convention. Recently, four times, its leadership has failed to hold a convention and it has tried, without success, to sell out the entire party to the Babangida group when the latter was not sure of getting INEC’s registration. By the time it was sure of it, it abandoned the merger project and pursued the registration. That matter is now revisited, seeing that Nigerians are not enthusiastic about joining the new parties, for whatever reasons. Finally, in the last convention of the APP, the candidate who poised to unseat the incumbent chairman was strongly alleged to have been sponsored by the PDP presidency. A nan, biri yayi kama da mutum.
Since we have established that other functioning parties, as of now, do not stand on a higher moral ground than the PDP, then abandoning it will not help the democratic process; it can only help individuals in the pursuit of their selfish goals. If they see PDP as losing, or if they cannot find enough space for the expression of their desire to oust current incumbents, they will jump the fence over to these other parties, as some of them are doing now. Money and expedience, therefore, are the strongest stimuli to which our politicians respond, not to pride, esteem and principle.
Secondly, the parties themselves are not based on any ideology, but on pure opportunism. The PDP and APP are conglomerates of different interests, groups and individuals. They are together when there is something common to share, usually selfish, and part ways when there is nothing to scramble over. What is common, for example, to the PDP is that its founding members – the G38 – had nothing in common other than their interest to oust Abacha. Today, they are in the position of Abacha, doing worse than he did. This has compelled some of them, like Sunday Awoniyi, who are more inclined to principle than to greed, to leave the party; others have remained in it, disgruntled over the denial to partake in the spoil of governance and therefore waiting in revenge to give Obasanjo a fight he deserves in the next primaries of the party.
The final migration will be after May 2003. If the PDP will lose the next presidential elections, it may never win it back because most of its members will decamp to the victorious party as a response to their survival instinct. They are only being clever; because it is difficult to have best side of the two worlds. That is what happened to other parties. They have lost many of their influential members to the PDP because they cannot withstand the ‘Agadez weather’ of opposition – dry, hot and windy.
Thirdly, the high degrees of poverty and illiteracy have made both the masses and the elite subjects of manipulation by whoever is in power. Almost all businesses are dependent on government. This has turned most elite into willing sycophants, ready to bury the truth alive and flying, instead, the flag of falsehood, corruption, incompetence and failure. Whenever they are on power or close to it, they would hold on to their positions by all means. They will never accede to any democratic principle that might result in losing an acre out of their vast political estate.
Finally, there is the difficulty in managing victory. Victory does not always bring ease. In many instances, it engenders a burden of responsibilities. The PDP had a responsibility to manage well its decisive victory in 1999 by exemplifying prudence, fairness and self-restraint. Instead, it preferred to be wild, partial and dissolute. Thus, failure, acrimony and resent logically became its fortune.
These are some of the characteristics of our politics, past and present. It is the mindset of majority of our politicians today. What we need is to move forward. So let us focus on the solutions.
Solutions
If we truly want democracy to have a footing in this country, then we must work hard to refine the way we conceptualise and practice politics. But as a matter of urgency, generally speaking, no party will succeed in giving this country a better leadership than the first outing of the PDP without committing itself to the principles on which leadership and democracy are based. Leadership is based on competence, steadfastness, self-sacrifice, rectitude and service to the people. Government belongs to them, and it must be put to their service. Our parties and officials are deficient in these. In the choice of candidates, therefore, only the popular, selfless and competent must be chosen. In governance, the weaknesses of the soul – greed, ignorance and envy – must be tamed. Responsibility must be given to the honest and competent. This was the advice we gave to Obasanjo on the pages of this column three years ago. Unfortunately, we did know that we were speaking to the dead, as an ancient Arab poet would put it.
The choice of presidential candidates deserves particular caution and attention, given the dominant role of the office in our society. Our parties will do this country a great favour if they will, at least for a day, suppress other desires and choose the suitable even if it means dragging them from their homes to stand. It is in accordance with this goal - enriching our list of presidential aspirants - that this column called on Buhari to join politics and possibly contest the presidency. Other good candidates should be encouraged to overcome shyness and fear and come forward so that whichever party wins we are assured that the country will have a better leader than Obasanjo come 2003. Giving the ticket to the highest bidder this time, as it has been the tradition, would be like passing a death sentence on democracy.
The PDP in particular carries a greater responsibility in ensuring that it conducts the coming transition with all sense of responsibility. Right now, Obasanjo has earned it a bad repute, that he cannot even allow INEC to compile voters’ register, something that all past military dictatorships did promptly without any hitch or complaint. Obasanjo is unable to do it because, in his attempt to rig elections through the compilation, he starved the INEC of funds and burdened it with tasks that it cannot accomplish. The party must call him to order.
I will implore Ghali Na-Abba and his like to remain in the party. They should stay there and fight, just as Rimi has resolved to do. I appreciate that Obasanjo is a big liability to the party. If they are really serious about solving the problem of maladministration, they must do away with Obasanjo and replace him with a better candidate. Anything short of this will mean failure for the party and likely for democracy in Nigeria.
Right now they have two gates opened before them. They can either impeach Obasanjo now or wait until the national convention when they intend to defeat him in the primaries. I will not advise them to take the latter. Allowing Obasanjo to reach the convention will mean catastrophe for the party, whether he wins it or not. If he wins the primaries, the party has to contend with his unpopularity and with his bad record of recklessness, incompetence, inefficiency, inattentiveness and corruption. This surely means that they must be prepared to be strangers at Aso Rock after May 2003. Agadez!
On the other hand, if they defeat Obasanjo at the primaries, it means they must be ready to forego the largest concentration of physical votes that they expect from losing Southwest – because AD will as a result nominate a candidate in protest – as well as the largest concentration of invisible votes that they hope to get from the incumbency factor.
So the safest thing for the PDP is to encourage the National Assembly to impeach Obasanjo before the next PDP convention. I hope this is the truth behind the impeachment move by the House. At least, this will gurantee them the ability to rig elections.
I do not believe that impeaching Obasanjo is a threat to our democracy as his sympathizers are claiming. Nothing will happen. Impeachment is a constitutional matter. If the President has committed the fifteen impeachable offences the House is charging him with, the system must be bold enough to punish him. Those trying to persuade the members of the house to drop the idea of impeachment are not being fair. Where were they when Obasanjo was committing all these offences? If he is impeached, the right signal will be sent that no one is above the law. No one should take the government and people of Nigeria for granted simply because he is under the wrong impression that he is doing the country a favour or because he has the backing of imperialist forces outside. It will be a lesson which coming presidents will learn from.
A big question though remains regarding the impeachment. Has the House mustered enough courage to challenge the President, knowing very well that hardly would any ‘Ghana must go’ pass over the roof of the National Assembly without being gunned down by the vigilant rocket launchers of its members? If their past record is anything to go by, this affair may come to pass as others did before. And that will surely put the PDP in a bigger problem come 2003. Then it will look back and wished it had supported Na-Abba. It is not too late. The chance is there. PDP, impeaching Obasanjo is your best bet. Please take it.
Interested readers can read last week’s article, Obasanjo: the Sinking Titan from my page at gamji.com
By
Dr. Aliyu Tilde
aliyutilde@yahoo.com
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is increasingly getting into a fix. Writing about it has become imperative, a priority you may say. This stems from the dominant role the party plays in our democracy today. It is the ruling party in this country, having the President and the majority in both Senate and House of Representatives. It has 22 out of 36 governors plus the Minister of the Federal Capital, who is another PDP man appointed by the President. In addition to this, by tribal allegiance to the President, the five Alliance for Democracy (AD) governors are also members of the PDP. Finally, there are some APP chieftains and governors, few though, who are busy eating the roasted maize (the symbol of APP) under the umbrella (symbol of PDP) held by the President. Some of them are right now in the Southwest campaigning for the superiority of the umbrella over the maize, as they did in 1999. What a conspiracy!
Also, the economy and politics of the country is literally in the hands of PDP. Its members determine who gets what share in the economy through budget formulation and implementation, contracts award and appointments into the most lucrative offices in the country. Politically, as the sole proprietor of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), it determines the course of events in the political process. This body, whose overwhelming majority are PDP members, is required to ratify not only the conventions and congresses of the PDP but also of the other parties. As a demonstration of its power, last month it boycotted the national convention of the APP and the gathering of over 10,000 people had to disperse in disappointment because by law no convention is valid without the attendance of INEC.
I will therefore like to submit that when only sheer size and power are considered, PDP is the party to reckon with, so far. We can validly argue, based on that premise, that until it is toppled in the next election, if PDP is in trouble, our democracy is in trouble. However, unlike Fairouz who, out of love for Damascus said, “Syria! Your people, if they are in trouble, my heart is in trouble,” our writing about PDP is not informed by love for the party but by the impact which its troubles will have on our democracy.
The Problem
The troubles in the PDP are many but two are particularly disturbing. The first problem is Obasanjo. His government is a total failure, a fact that has been chronicled by many writers. All what the government is good at is quoting figures, but the work cannot be substantiated. The reports of gross corruption in the federal government including those given by international organizations have reached alarming levels. The levels of insecurity, ethnic conflicts, poverty, etc. have never been so high. All these are common knowledge among Nigerians today.
The trouble with Obasanjo does not stem from his failure but from his resolve to remain in power as it is the tradition with other African rulers. He is bent on using whatever resources are in his control to win elections next year. He has proved his ability to crudely get his way in previous conventions of his party and in the Senate. He changes the leadership of the Senate and the party at will, three for each in the last three years. His control over INEC and other bodies makes him feel confident that victory must be his companion in 2003.
Knowing the degree of his low esteem on the one hand and his resolve to maintain his seat through whatever means on the other, many members of his party have expressed their fear over the fate of the party and the future of democracy. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most consistent and eloquent in this. He has threatened to leave the party if Obasanjo comes out of the next convention as its flag bearer. The convention will come and in it, Obasanjo may or may not contest. Everything will depend on what happens to him between now and then. We will come back to this later in the article.
The second problem of PDP is the flood of aspirants seeking its ticket at the local government and state levels. As Obasanjo is sitting tight on the presidency, so also are the governors of the party. There are many aspirants within the party who would wish to replace the present state governors. Seeing how the governors have manipulated the congresses of the state, they are left with no choice but despondency which has led some of them to entertain, in revenge, anti-party activities, others have decamped to other parties as we have seen in Plateau state recently.
At the local government level, in addition to intrigues and decampment, violence has been employed as a means of expressing dissatisfaction with the affairs of the party. Almost all the violence that took place during the local government primaries did so only within the PDP. Some local government primaries could not hold. And they may never hold because attempts to do so have resulted in the loss of lives and property. A clear example is that of Jos North local government where, no thanks to recent ethnic disturbances, the majority has awakened from its slumber to claim its democratic right. The last PDP ward congress there only succeeded in renewing the ethnic animosity and led to an instant loss of hundreds of lives.
Ordinarily, one would rejoice that the dominant party is crumbling; that its absence will guarantee other parties breathing space in the political atmosphere. However, I am of the opinion that the loss of the PDP will hardly change much, as things are today. But this argument can only be substantiated if we probe the source of the party’s problems such that we can say precisely whether or not these problems are peculiar to the PDP or not and whether other parties that will move to occupy the space it will vacate will be more promising.
Source
To begin with, I believe that none of the parties would have done better if it were in the position of the PDP, if we discount the extremely bad case of Obasanjo. This is because, both AD and APP have shown similar degrees of opportunism and weaknesses in the domains they control. Their governors are no better than those of the PDP. They have emasculated the opposition in their states and they are playing the incumbency factor as good, or say as bad if you like, as the PDP is playing its at the state and federal levels. In the appointment commissioners to State Independent Electoral Commisions for example, the APP governors did not show a better degree of restraint. They appointed their own men. Therefore, Obasanjo, Makarfi and others in the PDP are not alone.
The leadership of the other two parties have also shown weaknesses similar to that of the PDP. The AD has shown strong inclination towards ethnic chauvinism to the extent that it is willing to vacate the presidency for Obasanjo. The APP on its part has been controlled not by the whims of its followers but by manipulations of the rich and the powerful both inside and outside its membership. Its leadership sold the presidential ticket of the party to an AD candidate even after it has a candidate nominated by the convention. Recently, four times, its leadership has failed to hold a convention and it has tried, without success, to sell out the entire party to the Babangida group when the latter was not sure of getting INEC’s registration. By the time it was sure of it, it abandoned the merger project and pursued the registration. That matter is now revisited, seeing that Nigerians are not enthusiastic about joining the new parties, for whatever reasons. Finally, in the last convention of the APP, the candidate who poised to unseat the incumbent chairman was strongly alleged to have been sponsored by the PDP presidency. A nan, biri yayi kama da mutum.
Since we have established that other functioning parties, as of now, do not stand on a higher moral ground than the PDP, then abandoning it will not help the democratic process; it can only help individuals in the pursuit of their selfish goals. If they see PDP as losing, or if they cannot find enough space for the expression of their desire to oust current incumbents, they will jump the fence over to these other parties, as some of them are doing now. Money and expedience, therefore, are the strongest stimuli to which our politicians respond, not to pride, esteem and principle.
Secondly, the parties themselves are not based on any ideology, but on pure opportunism. The PDP and APP are conglomerates of different interests, groups and individuals. They are together when there is something common to share, usually selfish, and part ways when there is nothing to scramble over. What is common, for example, to the PDP is that its founding members – the G38 – had nothing in common other than their interest to oust Abacha. Today, they are in the position of Abacha, doing worse than he did. This has compelled some of them, like Sunday Awoniyi, who are more inclined to principle than to greed, to leave the party; others have remained in it, disgruntled over the denial to partake in the spoil of governance and therefore waiting in revenge to give Obasanjo a fight he deserves in the next primaries of the party.
The final migration will be after May 2003. If the PDP will lose the next presidential elections, it may never win it back because most of its members will decamp to the victorious party as a response to their survival instinct. They are only being clever; because it is difficult to have best side of the two worlds. That is what happened to other parties. They have lost many of their influential members to the PDP because they cannot withstand the ‘Agadez weather’ of opposition – dry, hot and windy.
Thirdly, the high degrees of poverty and illiteracy have made both the masses and the elite subjects of manipulation by whoever is in power. Almost all businesses are dependent on government. This has turned most elite into willing sycophants, ready to bury the truth alive and flying, instead, the flag of falsehood, corruption, incompetence and failure. Whenever they are on power or close to it, they would hold on to their positions by all means. They will never accede to any democratic principle that might result in losing an acre out of their vast political estate.
Finally, there is the difficulty in managing victory. Victory does not always bring ease. In many instances, it engenders a burden of responsibilities. The PDP had a responsibility to manage well its decisive victory in 1999 by exemplifying prudence, fairness and self-restraint. Instead, it preferred to be wild, partial and dissolute. Thus, failure, acrimony and resent logically became its fortune.
These are some of the characteristics of our politics, past and present. It is the mindset of majority of our politicians today. What we need is to move forward. So let us focus on the solutions.
Solutions
If we truly want democracy to have a footing in this country, then we must work hard to refine the way we conceptualise and practice politics. But as a matter of urgency, generally speaking, no party will succeed in giving this country a better leadership than the first outing of the PDP without committing itself to the principles on which leadership and democracy are based. Leadership is based on competence, steadfastness, self-sacrifice, rectitude and service to the people. Government belongs to them, and it must be put to their service. Our parties and officials are deficient in these. In the choice of candidates, therefore, only the popular, selfless and competent must be chosen. In governance, the weaknesses of the soul – greed, ignorance and envy – must be tamed. Responsibility must be given to the honest and competent. This was the advice we gave to Obasanjo on the pages of this column three years ago. Unfortunately, we did know that we were speaking to the dead, as an ancient Arab poet would put it.
The choice of presidential candidates deserves particular caution and attention, given the dominant role of the office in our society. Our parties will do this country a great favour if they will, at least for a day, suppress other desires and choose the suitable even if it means dragging them from their homes to stand. It is in accordance with this goal - enriching our list of presidential aspirants - that this column called on Buhari to join politics and possibly contest the presidency. Other good candidates should be encouraged to overcome shyness and fear and come forward so that whichever party wins we are assured that the country will have a better leader than Obasanjo come 2003. Giving the ticket to the highest bidder this time, as it has been the tradition, would be like passing a death sentence on democracy.
The PDP in particular carries a greater responsibility in ensuring that it conducts the coming transition with all sense of responsibility. Right now, Obasanjo has earned it a bad repute, that he cannot even allow INEC to compile voters’ register, something that all past military dictatorships did promptly without any hitch or complaint. Obasanjo is unable to do it because, in his attempt to rig elections through the compilation, he starved the INEC of funds and burdened it with tasks that it cannot accomplish. The party must call him to order.
I will implore Ghali Na-Abba and his like to remain in the party. They should stay there and fight, just as Rimi has resolved to do. I appreciate that Obasanjo is a big liability to the party. If they are really serious about solving the problem of maladministration, they must do away with Obasanjo and replace him with a better candidate. Anything short of this will mean failure for the party and likely for democracy in Nigeria.
Right now they have two gates opened before them. They can either impeach Obasanjo now or wait until the national convention when they intend to defeat him in the primaries. I will not advise them to take the latter. Allowing Obasanjo to reach the convention will mean catastrophe for the party, whether he wins it or not. If he wins the primaries, the party has to contend with his unpopularity and with his bad record of recklessness, incompetence, inefficiency, inattentiveness and corruption. This surely means that they must be prepared to be strangers at Aso Rock after May 2003. Agadez!
On the other hand, if they defeat Obasanjo at the primaries, it means they must be ready to forego the largest concentration of physical votes that they expect from losing Southwest – because AD will as a result nominate a candidate in protest – as well as the largest concentration of invisible votes that they hope to get from the incumbency factor.
So the safest thing for the PDP is to encourage the National Assembly to impeach Obasanjo before the next PDP convention. I hope this is the truth behind the impeachment move by the House. At least, this will gurantee them the ability to rig elections.
I do not believe that impeaching Obasanjo is a threat to our democracy as his sympathizers are claiming. Nothing will happen. Impeachment is a constitutional matter. If the President has committed the fifteen impeachable offences the House is charging him with, the system must be bold enough to punish him. Those trying to persuade the members of the house to drop the idea of impeachment are not being fair. Where were they when Obasanjo was committing all these offences? If he is impeached, the right signal will be sent that no one is above the law. No one should take the government and people of Nigeria for granted simply because he is under the wrong impression that he is doing the country a favour or because he has the backing of imperialist forces outside. It will be a lesson which coming presidents will learn from.
A big question though remains regarding the impeachment. Has the House mustered enough courage to challenge the President, knowing very well that hardly would any ‘Ghana must go’ pass over the roof of the National Assembly without being gunned down by the vigilant rocket launchers of its members? If their past record is anything to go by, this affair may come to pass as others did before. And that will surely put the PDP in a bigger problem come 2003. Then it will look back and wished it had supported Na-Abba. It is not too late. The chance is there. PDP, impeaching Obasanjo is your best bet. Please take it.
Interested readers can read last week’s article, Obasanjo: the Sinking Titan from my page at gamji.com
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
PDP is Terminally Ill
PDP is Terminally Ill, We Need a New Party
Looking at the trend of political developments in the country since the death of General Sani Abacha, an objective mind will not help but reach the conclusion that the country is in earnest need of new political parties. It is clear that the high hope that Nigerians entrusted in the hands of Obasanjo and his party has been dashed away. The trend is clear. Politically, Nigerians are not getting closer to one another from where they were two and a half years ago. In fact they are more apart. The animosity between our peoples has reached the intolerable threshold of barbarism where lives are lost at a rate never witnessed since the civil war. Every sector of the economy is only not stagnant but also increasingly sinking down into the deep hole.
The sad thing is that there does not seem to be light at the end of the tunnel. And as human beings we can wait no longer, particularly when promises are given in the morning and broken by the afternoon, just as the late Mamman Shata once put it: Kui magana da safe ku kulla, su rantse su ce ta zanna, yamma nai su ce sun fasa, su mai da mutum kamar yammata. We cannot wait any longer to witness the age long trust, brotherhood and friendship among our peoples torn apart by deliberate inaction of a government or by its calculated partiality. We need to act quickly – a damage control measure if you like – and save the situation by restoring confidence in one another. Neither could we risk the continuous deterioration of the economy through policies that fall short of the minimum efficiency a dynamic society of the competitive world of today can tolerate.
Provisions have been made in the doctrine of democracy for checks and balances; checks that will ensure that the inherent tendency of dictatorship is averted at its slightest manifestation, and balances that will guarantee that equal opportunities are given to individuals and groups to express their ideas and interest on partisan and national matters. Nigerians would have easily counted on such democratic stipulations to circumvent the crisis. But the level at which the provisions apply presently have fallen short of the efficacy requisite of a solution.
One of those provisions is the existence and tolerance of opposition, not necessarily in the conventional sense of inter-party politics, but also, and more importantly, within the PDP itself. We have helplessly witnessed the executive arm of government, in one form, buying over the opposition as in the case of APP or, in another, anaesthetizing it through perpetration of intra-party crisis, as in the case of AD. Who heard about Dr. Mahmud Waziri, the former leader of the APP, ever since he was appointed an adviser to the President on something most of us cannot even recall? It has also strangulated the PDP into inaction. Worse still, it has dipped its long nails into the throat of the party, suffocating it to death… With both might and money in its hand, the political cartel in power has all the resources it takes to perpetrate its dominance of our political landscape.
The second provision is election. Ordinarily, Nigerians would have sat back and waited for 2003, as I have always advised. But in the archives of my deep thought, I stumbled on two evidences that necessitated a shift in both mind and strategy. Both evidences are historical events but their strong chances of recurrence would compel any impassionate mind to qualify them as enduring. One of them was the contribution of rigging to the process that brought this government to power. We should not forget that the closest friend of the Obasanjo among the overseas team that came to monitor the election, former US President Jimmy Carter, left without congratulating him. He was disappointed at the lack of complete transparency in the conduct of the election. On this count, the PDP, as a party, has proved itself lacking in the capacity to carry out trust. Nigerians are fully aware of what happened. We decided to overlook it simply because we were eager to see the return of democracy. We also thought that it would not be repeated with a person of Obasanjo’s caliber at the helm of our affairs.
We were mistaken. The down turn in our expectation came when the PDP held its last convention. What happened there was a total disappointment and a reckless abandon of the principles of democracy and decency. The Awoniyi group is a better authority on this. Here was a father blatantly favoring some of his children over others. With such a record, how do we expect that he will treat the children of other people equally? In other words, I am saying that we run the highest risk of having the next national election rigged by the PDP, going by its records.
The argument we are trying to build so far in our discourse is that with the barrel of opposition silenced through a delicate blend of persuasion and emasculation both within the PDP and outside it; with the hope deposited in the party to solve the myriad of tribulations that have hamstrung our progress as a nation; with the risk contained in hoping and wishing that the party will become ‘born-again’ and baptized of electoral misappropriation, an original sin in the ‘religion’ of democracy; it has become indispensable for Nigerians to start thinking of a national party or parties that will at least take them a step closer to the promised land that we have dreamt of since the demise of the Second Republic.
Urgency
We are able, so far, to establish that the leadership niche that exists in our political space is occupied by dysfunctional elements. There is therefore the need to make sure that at the next given opportunity – 2003 – its space is occupied by people that are willing and capable to meet the functional demand of that position.
The next thing is to explore the time dimension of the issue and find out the degree of urgency it foreshadows. I sincerely feel that it is really urgent. All moves to form new parties must start NOW given the intensive contacts required for the conference of thoughts and their centrifuging. Rushing political formations would naturally result in the conglomeration of strange bedfellows, the like of our present PDP and APP. There will also be problems with registration and campaigning that I do not believe should be left until the last six months to election. It is important that the direction which the party would take be well thought of, concretely framed and convincingly presented to the electorate of every kind in every nook and cranny of the country. Enough time should be allowed even for the natural flood of willing politicians from their present position on the hilltop of unfulfilled promises down to the plain progress, transparency, and collectivity. For the rest of us that are not politicians, we are already standing on the plain waiting for the arrival of the party itself.
These early moves will definitely serve another important purpose: it will put the present government on its toes. A new party of our dream will become a pebble in its shoe. The ruling party will be saddled with decampings, one after another, that will drain out its blood and aggravate its anemia. It was born a sickler. We have seen this scenario happen before. The UNCP for example was thought to be formidable. Even when they attempted to form the APP after failing to justify their existence, they failed to gain the confidence of the population. People preferred to opt for the PDP not because they were perceived as more pious, but simply to quench the thirst for a ‘plot’ upon which a new edifice of hope could be built. That is how G34 and all those with substantial grudge against the Abacha regime ganged up, hoodwinked us and got into power.
Now, the same card could be played against them successfully. And you know, the human mind is less bitter when its hope is kept low than when brought down after it was raised high. At the emergence of the PDP and this administration in particular, our hopes could nearly touch the roof of the sky. But as soon as it came in, it did not take long to dwarf it to ant level.
Given this background, and coming in good time to jump over the hurdles and smash away the barricades that will certainly be placed on its path, it is my sincere belief that a new party that would meet the conditions mentioned below would be received with an unprecedented joy. The first to join it, I gladly foresee, would be over half of the membership of the present PDP, people who were wrapped into its fold of promises and sweet talks. It will be received in all regions except one, the very one that has refused to step outside the tight confines that tribalism – now barbarism – could afford them. Let the party come up and prove that it is capable of holding our trust and we will be ready to hug it and accommodate it in both our hearts and homes.
Characteristics
It is not our intention, neither are we in a position, to give a manifesto of our dream party. Rather, we would prefer to describe the requisite features that would characterize its political waveband. First, it has to be national in both outlook and composition. By outlook I mean focus, the body of ideas and programs that will differentiate it from the parochial inscriptions of class interests that typify the present parties. I wish the outlook would be sharp; it has to be clear enough to be understood and appreciated by majority of Nigerians. It does not have to be founded on a particular ideology other than the universal and all-embracing concept of social justice.
This implies that it will allow little or no room for corrupting practices. To do so it has to define the minimum of conduct for its leadership below which nothing else would be tolerated. Achieving this requires three things. One is the people chosen to lead the party before the election. When the election comes, there will definitely be a demand for nominees with transparent records. This is a decisive step in winning our confidence. I doubt if Nigerians will ever listen to the corrupt leaders whose reckless conduct in office precipitated our present predicament.
The second is the structure the party intends to put in place to check corruption and the willingness on the part of its leaders to see it work. Without this, the leadership, no matter how transparent, would be rendered helpless. It will simply be holding the horns at the top for others to milk the cow at the bottom.
The third has to do with the capacity of the party to address issues of direct relevance to the common man, issues like unemployment, declining standard of education, insecurity, poor health delivery, deteriorating infrastructure, and above all is what in the parlance of federalism is called “the national question.” I think it is time for leadership to be based on competence, not on luck or machinations. We are tired of people dragged into it. Anybody requesting to lead us has to prove his ability to diagnose our problems and the willingness to solve them.
On the lane of composition, the party should be truly national. Its leaders should have the large heart that can accommodate everybody. The party should be ready to deal with as many people as the ethnic spectrum of this country demands. It is natural for it to start at a spot on the ethnic map of the country, but it must have the ability to spread out to other regions within the shortest period possible, giving everybody a sense of belonging, young and old. It does not need to hide behind the evil masquerades of newbreed politics, zoning or power shift. Under no circumstances shall we be cajoled or intimidated into accepting such rubbish again.
It is only such a party that will be able to restore confidence in our people, not the present PDP that will make the inevitable blunder of nominating Obasanjo or Atiku for a second term. We are waiting for the politicians to take up the challenge. Our votes are waiting for them. They only need to prove their worth.
Looking at the trend of political developments in the country since the death of General Sani Abacha, an objective mind will not help but reach the conclusion that the country is in earnest need of new political parties. It is clear that the high hope that Nigerians entrusted in the hands of Obasanjo and his party has been dashed away. The trend is clear. Politically, Nigerians are not getting closer to one another from where they were two and a half years ago. In fact they are more apart. The animosity between our peoples has reached the intolerable threshold of barbarism where lives are lost at a rate never witnessed since the civil war. Every sector of the economy is only not stagnant but also increasingly sinking down into the deep hole.
The sad thing is that there does not seem to be light at the end of the tunnel. And as human beings we can wait no longer, particularly when promises are given in the morning and broken by the afternoon, just as the late Mamman Shata once put it: Kui magana da safe ku kulla, su rantse su ce ta zanna, yamma nai su ce sun fasa, su mai da mutum kamar yammata. We cannot wait any longer to witness the age long trust, brotherhood and friendship among our peoples torn apart by deliberate inaction of a government or by its calculated partiality. We need to act quickly – a damage control measure if you like – and save the situation by restoring confidence in one another. Neither could we risk the continuous deterioration of the economy through policies that fall short of the minimum efficiency a dynamic society of the competitive world of today can tolerate.
Provisions have been made in the doctrine of democracy for checks and balances; checks that will ensure that the inherent tendency of dictatorship is averted at its slightest manifestation, and balances that will guarantee that equal opportunities are given to individuals and groups to express their ideas and interest on partisan and national matters. Nigerians would have easily counted on such democratic stipulations to circumvent the crisis. But the level at which the provisions apply presently have fallen short of the efficacy requisite of a solution.
One of those provisions is the existence and tolerance of opposition, not necessarily in the conventional sense of inter-party politics, but also, and more importantly, within the PDP itself. We have helplessly witnessed the executive arm of government, in one form, buying over the opposition as in the case of APP or, in another, anaesthetizing it through perpetration of intra-party crisis, as in the case of AD. Who heard about Dr. Mahmud Waziri, the former leader of the APP, ever since he was appointed an adviser to the President on something most of us cannot even recall? It has also strangulated the PDP into inaction. Worse still, it has dipped its long nails into the throat of the party, suffocating it to death… With both might and money in its hand, the political cartel in power has all the resources it takes to perpetrate its dominance of our political landscape.
The second provision is election. Ordinarily, Nigerians would have sat back and waited for 2003, as I have always advised. But in the archives of my deep thought, I stumbled on two evidences that necessitated a shift in both mind and strategy. Both evidences are historical events but their strong chances of recurrence would compel any impassionate mind to qualify them as enduring. One of them was the contribution of rigging to the process that brought this government to power. We should not forget that the closest friend of the Obasanjo among the overseas team that came to monitor the election, former US President Jimmy Carter, left without congratulating him. He was disappointed at the lack of complete transparency in the conduct of the election. On this count, the PDP, as a party, has proved itself lacking in the capacity to carry out trust. Nigerians are fully aware of what happened. We decided to overlook it simply because we were eager to see the return of democracy. We also thought that it would not be repeated with a person of Obasanjo’s caliber at the helm of our affairs.
We were mistaken. The down turn in our expectation came when the PDP held its last convention. What happened there was a total disappointment and a reckless abandon of the principles of democracy and decency. The Awoniyi group is a better authority on this. Here was a father blatantly favoring some of his children over others. With such a record, how do we expect that he will treat the children of other people equally? In other words, I am saying that we run the highest risk of having the next national election rigged by the PDP, going by its records.
The argument we are trying to build so far in our discourse is that with the barrel of opposition silenced through a delicate blend of persuasion and emasculation both within the PDP and outside it; with the hope deposited in the party to solve the myriad of tribulations that have hamstrung our progress as a nation; with the risk contained in hoping and wishing that the party will become ‘born-again’ and baptized of electoral misappropriation, an original sin in the ‘religion’ of democracy; it has become indispensable for Nigerians to start thinking of a national party or parties that will at least take them a step closer to the promised land that we have dreamt of since the demise of the Second Republic.
Urgency
We are able, so far, to establish that the leadership niche that exists in our political space is occupied by dysfunctional elements. There is therefore the need to make sure that at the next given opportunity – 2003 – its space is occupied by people that are willing and capable to meet the functional demand of that position.
The next thing is to explore the time dimension of the issue and find out the degree of urgency it foreshadows. I sincerely feel that it is really urgent. All moves to form new parties must start NOW given the intensive contacts required for the conference of thoughts and their centrifuging. Rushing political formations would naturally result in the conglomeration of strange bedfellows, the like of our present PDP and APP. There will also be problems with registration and campaigning that I do not believe should be left until the last six months to election. It is important that the direction which the party would take be well thought of, concretely framed and convincingly presented to the electorate of every kind in every nook and cranny of the country. Enough time should be allowed even for the natural flood of willing politicians from their present position on the hilltop of unfulfilled promises down to the plain progress, transparency, and collectivity. For the rest of us that are not politicians, we are already standing on the plain waiting for the arrival of the party itself.
These early moves will definitely serve another important purpose: it will put the present government on its toes. A new party of our dream will become a pebble in its shoe. The ruling party will be saddled with decampings, one after another, that will drain out its blood and aggravate its anemia. It was born a sickler. We have seen this scenario happen before. The UNCP for example was thought to be formidable. Even when they attempted to form the APP after failing to justify their existence, they failed to gain the confidence of the population. People preferred to opt for the PDP not because they were perceived as more pious, but simply to quench the thirst for a ‘plot’ upon which a new edifice of hope could be built. That is how G34 and all those with substantial grudge against the Abacha regime ganged up, hoodwinked us and got into power.
Now, the same card could be played against them successfully. And you know, the human mind is less bitter when its hope is kept low than when brought down after it was raised high. At the emergence of the PDP and this administration in particular, our hopes could nearly touch the roof of the sky. But as soon as it came in, it did not take long to dwarf it to ant level.
Given this background, and coming in good time to jump over the hurdles and smash away the barricades that will certainly be placed on its path, it is my sincere belief that a new party that would meet the conditions mentioned below would be received with an unprecedented joy. The first to join it, I gladly foresee, would be over half of the membership of the present PDP, people who were wrapped into its fold of promises and sweet talks. It will be received in all regions except one, the very one that has refused to step outside the tight confines that tribalism – now barbarism – could afford them. Let the party come up and prove that it is capable of holding our trust and we will be ready to hug it and accommodate it in both our hearts and homes.
Characteristics
It is not our intention, neither are we in a position, to give a manifesto of our dream party. Rather, we would prefer to describe the requisite features that would characterize its political waveband. First, it has to be national in both outlook and composition. By outlook I mean focus, the body of ideas and programs that will differentiate it from the parochial inscriptions of class interests that typify the present parties. I wish the outlook would be sharp; it has to be clear enough to be understood and appreciated by majority of Nigerians. It does not have to be founded on a particular ideology other than the universal and all-embracing concept of social justice.
This implies that it will allow little or no room for corrupting practices. To do so it has to define the minimum of conduct for its leadership below which nothing else would be tolerated. Achieving this requires three things. One is the people chosen to lead the party before the election. When the election comes, there will definitely be a demand for nominees with transparent records. This is a decisive step in winning our confidence. I doubt if Nigerians will ever listen to the corrupt leaders whose reckless conduct in office precipitated our present predicament.
The second is the structure the party intends to put in place to check corruption and the willingness on the part of its leaders to see it work. Without this, the leadership, no matter how transparent, would be rendered helpless. It will simply be holding the horns at the top for others to milk the cow at the bottom.
The third has to do with the capacity of the party to address issues of direct relevance to the common man, issues like unemployment, declining standard of education, insecurity, poor health delivery, deteriorating infrastructure, and above all is what in the parlance of federalism is called “the national question.” I think it is time for leadership to be based on competence, not on luck or machinations. We are tired of people dragged into it. Anybody requesting to lead us has to prove his ability to diagnose our problems and the willingness to solve them.
On the lane of composition, the party should be truly national. Its leaders should have the large heart that can accommodate everybody. The party should be ready to deal with as many people as the ethnic spectrum of this country demands. It is natural for it to start at a spot on the ethnic map of the country, but it must have the ability to spread out to other regions within the shortest period possible, giving everybody a sense of belonging, young and old. It does not need to hide behind the evil masquerades of newbreed politics, zoning or power shift. Under no circumstances shall we be cajoled or intimidated into accepting such rubbish again.
It is only such a party that will be able to restore confidence in our people, not the present PDP that will make the inevitable blunder of nominating Obasanjo or Atiku for a second term. We are waiting for the politicians to take up the challenge. Our votes are waiting for them. They only need to prove their worth.
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