State Power and Party Formations

Reflections on Nigeria’s democratic transition

Twenty years after the inauguration of democratic rule and the Fourth Republic, it is important to take an audit of civil/democratic rule in Nigeria to see how far we have come or how fast we are departing from accepted and acceptable international norms. This is particularly so in the aftermath of an election that has stretched the ethnic, cultural, religious and demographic fabric of the nation to its elastic limits.

The joke about INEC’s alleged incompetence has become legendary. Yet not even the most brutal and unsympathetic of critics could fail to notice the stress and strain on the face of its highest officialdom. Five nights after the state elections and while the mysterious men and women still showed up late at night on television counting and collating figures, a friend phoned in to insist that the counting would probably go on until the next elections four years away. In the event, we have ended up with a series of inconclusive elections that has left the polity seething with tension and distrust.

In the light of the violence, the ethnic and social discord and the open confrontation along religious fault lines that characterized the elections, there are many who have concluded that once again, the democratic process has unravelled in Nigeria and that the earlier we began all over again, the better for the nation and all of us.

On the other hand, there are others who are of the opinion that no matter how badly we wobble and fumble, the democratic process has an internal self-correcting mechanism which allows us to learn and profit from our errors and mistakes. There is therefore no need to throw the baby away with the bath water.

Democracy is not about satisfying the yearnings of the aggressively vocal few over the often more rational desire of the silent majority. Democracy is about finding the aggregate median among many contending notions of how to move the nation forward in a way and manner that conduce to national unity and cohesiveness. Nigerians are very poor and sour losers indeed.

Those who were bemoaning the emphatic nature of President Mohammadu Buhari’s victory only two weeks ago have started jubilating after the PDP punched a hole in the heart of APC’s regional hegemony in the north and the old west. As far as they are concerned, what favoured them was the authentic and unedited result and the other a massively rigged concoction. But for the grace of God, there goes your local intolerant tyrant.

In twenty years of civil rule, the only constant factor that has guaranteed the survival of democracy in Nigeria is the absence of military intervention. Keeping the military in check is the greatest achievement of the Fourth Republic. After toying with the destiny of the nation for several decades, it has dawned on the military that its role is not to rule but to subordinate itself to civil rule as a powerful anchor of stability and national cohesiveness.

But since old habits die hard indeed, the Nigerian military often behaves erratically sometimes acting with Prussian hubris as an army with a nation rather than the army of a nation. There can be no doubt that its highest echelon often chafe at what they consider to be the vacillation and weak resolve of civil rule obviously longing for the epoch when their word was the incontrovertible law.

There is evidence of procedural insubordination and unauthorized statements emanating from its organizational redoubt.  Often, the comportment of some of its officers before civil authorities leaves much to be desired. But by and large and despite stiff temptation, the military has kept to its word and has refrained from acting in a way and manner that would have gravely imperilled civil rule.

If the military truce with the nation is holding, the elite consensus which undergirds democratic transition and transformation in many societies has long disappeared. In what may initially appear a paradoxical and oxymoronic formulation, democracy may well be a mirage if it is not underwritten by elite consensus. In virtually all modern nation-states, political and economic breakthroughs are often preceded by elite consensus about the destiny of the nation.

This is when the elite sit down to map the way forward for the nation. Irrespective of their political ideologies and worldviews, the political elite are often compelled by historical circumstances to find ways and means to spring the nation from the vicious trap of self-inflicted traumas and existential dilemmas.

In three different political epochs, elite consensus has been instrumental to the political destiny of the nation. In the run up to independence, the various conferences in London allowed Nigeria’s regional leaders to come up with an acceptable federalist formula to run the nascent nation. In the process, they were compelled to moderate and modulate their hard line stance about the way forward.

Consequently, an Awolowo was persuaded to drop his notions of a classical and Utopian federalism for a more workable version adaptable to Nigeria’s peculiar condition. A pan-African intellectual and unrepentant unitarist like Zik was nudged towards a federal arrangement for the emergent regions, while a feudal scion like Ahmadu Bello was encouraged to drop his con-federal vision of the new nation for a more federal arrangement in which the centre was strengthened and reinforced at the expense of a regional stronghold.

It was this elite consensus that led to the most visionary and productive phase of governance in Nigeria. It was to end with declaration of emergency in the old west and the subsequent military take-over of 1966.

The run up to civil rule in 1979 was preceded by the Rotimi Williams Constitutional Conference which recommended a switch from the Westminster type of parliamentary rule to the American type Executive presidency. Although the conference produced a minority report by the Marxist duo of Segun Osoba and Bala Usman, the overarching elite consensus that powered its majority report was to determine the trajectory of the Second Republic.

The Fourth Republic was predicated on the Obasanjo Settlement of 1998. After the mysterious deaths of both General Sani Abacha and MKO Abiola, the harried and hard-pressed military hierarchs came under national and international pressure to find an acceptable solution to the political stalemate that had lingered for five years.

It would have been impossible to move the nation forward without the elite consensus which ceded power to the south to compensate for the unjust detention and death of the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. Twenty one year after, it is obvious that both the Obasanjo Settlement and the elite consensus which produced it have gone up in flames. Obasanjo himself has since transformed into a principal adversary of the state.

The nation has never been more divided. There is so much elite rancour in the air that you get a sense that something is about to give. It has produced an election in which two solid ethnic and religious blocs in the nation (the core north and the South East /South South) stare down at each other in sullen confrontation with the third (the South West) acting in grudging arbitration.

The state of the parties tells us about the state of the post-colonial state as well as the nation itself. Of the three parties that started the journey twenty years ago, only the PDP remains standing. But it has become a poor and pathetic shadow of its former self; a slumberous and disoriented bear with a thousand wounds. Until recent political developments, particularly the namby-pamby desultoriness of the ruling APC gave it a new lease of life, the dominant party of the old military/civilian oligarchy was a subject of open speculation about its imminent death.

The other legacy parties of the Fourth Republic, the AD and APP, cannot be said to be in full existence. Having survived internal mutations and reconfigurations, both parties now linger on in luminous limbo, with either often called to service by political merchants whenever there is a political tie to be broken or a stalemate to be financed.

This is where state power and its impact on party formation can be very crucial or even critical for elite consensus in post-colonial Africa. Whereas it was possible in the early years of the Fourth Republic for state power to be brought to bear on party formation and its many contradictions particularly by a military autocrat in civvies, that option is no longer available as the situation has become too amorphous and unwieldy.

In the infamous 2003 elections, General Obasanjo, in order to maintain his notion of national cohesion, brought state power to bear on party formation with decisive gusto. Already weakened and badly enfeebled by Obasanjo’s relentless massaging and caressing, the two opposition parties succumbed to a major political drubbing. By the time the rubble cleared, the AD had been forcibly dislodged from its famous Yoruba redoubt while the APP had been wiped out.

Sixteen years and four presidential elections after, it is proving impossible for General Buhari to bring the parties to heel, and this is not for want of trying. By political temperament and professional inclination, both Obasanjo and Buhari remain dyed in the wool military autocrats. But whereas Obasanjo was dealing with only two parties, Buhari has on his hand over eighty recalcitrant parties and more dangerous dissidents.

The result has been a curious bifurcation of authority and legitimacy. While Buhari’s charisma and hypnotic sway over the northern masses has ensured that they gave him overwhelming victory, the increasing sophistication of the voters and their rebellious resolve to exact punitive retribution on their tormentors even where they belong to Buhari’s party has led to a significant erosion of APC’s commanding influence in areas hitherto regarded as its stronghold.

If Mallam Ganduje eventually falls in Kano as widely predicted, it would mean that the same Kano electorate that gave overwhelming victory to General Buhari two weeks earlier has returned to punish his party for the insalubrious conduct of its flag bearer. In Oyo state, the electorate has punished Abiola Ajimobi twice in as many weeks leaving contrary forces to seize the jugular of the old West.

The times are a-changing indeed and in this turbulent era, the name of the old lion of Ibadan politics, Adelabu Adegoke, aka Penkelemesi, could no longer work magic for his grandson. As this column predicted a long time ago on Segun Mimiko’s secession, the idea of a political homogeneity and common cause for the old west will continue to recede into the political antiquity of romantic delusions.

Mimiko himself, as the column noted then, would have reached the limits of his political possibility. Meanwhile, the Sisyphean efforts to recapture Ibadan have commenced even as the ground is threatening to give way near the ancestral homestead. The dominant political tendency in the old West will soon learn that it is impossible to fight a modern war with ancient weapons. It all reminds one of the great French hero, Marshal Foch, who famously proclaimed that although his flanks may be collapsing, he was nevertheless advancing.

So, where does all this leave us and the nation? In a lurch, we suppose.  But it is a splendid and very pleasant lurch indeed.  The portents from the streets and the turbulence from below indicate that the political class is fast losing the initiative. The old order is dying but the new is unable to come alive. Meanwhile the streets are filled with the political corpses of ancient tyrants. In Ilorin, the jamma are jubilating over the fall of the Saraki dynasty.

In Akwa Ibom and Imo they are celebrating the fall of Godswill Akpabio and Rochas Anayo Okorocha. In Ibadan and Abeokuta, there are abusive ditties commemorating the political end of Ajimobi and Ibikunle Amosu. In Ogbomosho, they are abusing Alao-Akala on the streets. In Kano, the rumour is that the state house has been abandoned to red cap chiefs—an ominous signal of fiery republicanism. The almajiris who dethroned the old order are waiting in the wings.

As we have said in this column, history moves forward but not in a linear progression. There are cunning detours and devious diversions. Nigeria is in the grip of a long revolution. A long revolution is itself a paradoxical and oxymoronic formulation, full of countervailing and countermanding possibilities. The battles you think have been fought and won simply erupt all over again. The tyrants you think you have seen off suddenly reappear in fresh battle formations.

Meanwhile as the political elites roil in utter confusion, elite consensus recedes into remote historical antiquity leaving the nation completely at the mercy of fissiparous forces. Central authority is threatened as state power proves utterly impotent in reining in the centrifugal forces threatening to impale party formation.

Bogged down by an organic crisis of the state, their authority and legitimacy virtually destroyed by open rebellion and bitter confrontation, the two major parties are in a complete shambles and a gross caricature of what real parties should be. They are unable to assert themselves against powerful individuals who have cocked a snook at them too many times. Neither have they been able to re-impose their central authority on collective membership.

If party authority is not re-imposed in the ruling APC in a matter of weeks, if the attempts to emasculate the party from within are not immediately reversed, if erring members are not sanctioned or expelled as a salutary warning to others, Nigeria is likely to drift into a no-party political autocracy in a matter of months.

If and when that happens, the party is likely to fragment into its old components loosely held together by federal largesse. This is when the legacy parties will discover that you cannot step into the same river twice and neither can a nation whose demographic variables continue to change in favour of disillusioned youth remain the same for long.