About a year to the 2019 general election, President Muhammadu Buhari has taken several steps towards putting his party, the All Progressives Comgress (APC) in proper shape to come out victorious. After successfully torpedoing the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from power, the APC has been embroiled in a crisis as a result failure to manage its success on the part of its leadership that has left it disunited and factionalised.
With the PDP having a well-deserved rest and unable to function as an opposition party, apparently suffering from the fatigue of 16 years of misrule, the APC has taken up the dual role of both the ruling and opposition party!
In order to reverse what some concerned APC members consider an ugly trend, Buhari has finally stepped out of the shadows, having been criticised severely for shirking his responsibility to provide purposeful leadership for the ruling party.
In a bid to unite the APC towards the next election, a move that may not be unconnected with his second term aspiration, Buhari is beginning to assert his leadership over the APC. Realising the futility of a second term kite being flown by a handful of very incompetent APC governor’s whose terrible records of poor performance would be a blight on his ambition, Buhari’s first step towards achieving unity and cohesion within the rank and file of the APC to march into battle with same force as in 2015 was to appoint veteran politician and strategist, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, who also goes by the honorific of ‘’National Leader’’ of the APC, to chair a reconciliation committee.
As a typical Nigerian politician and a member of the state resource-dependent ruling political establishment since 1999, Tinubu jumped at this tempting offer to negotiate a few more jobs for the boys and possibly settle some scores with his political adversaries within the top echelon of the ruling APC, as a panacea, for stability and to guarantee a second term ticket for Buhari. What the Asiwaju of Lagos Kingdom does not realise is that this is one assignment he cannot undertake successfully, and it might well lead to his demystification as an invinsible political strategist.
In a presidential system of democratic government, the various elected public officers on a party’s platform, from President to councillors, are the leaders of the party. This leadership thrust is not to meddle in the internal democratic structures of the party that produced them but their ability to evolve policies out of their party manifesto and fulfil campaign promises in order to satisfy the electorate with enough democratic dividends in the form of improved welfare and security (physical and fiscal). The failure of the APC’s elected public officers, particularly at the executive arm of government at the three tiers, to substantially meet their obligations in the social contract they entered into with the people to improve their economic wellbeing, social welfare and security, is largely responsible for the crisis in the APC. Party members are products of the larger society, who are also feeling the pressure of excruciating poverty and degeneration in the standard of living, like every other Nigerian.
In a federation like Nigeria, with a strong centre, President Buhari is the biggest culprit in this failure of APC’s leadership to meet its obligations in the social contract with Nigerians to better their lot.
As the supreme leader of the APC, President Buhari has not been able to deliver on the promise of “change” by the ruling party as a result of a combination of a dishonest disassociation of his presidency from some important aspects of his party manifesto and his failure thus far to fulfil his own campaign promises of fixing the economy, ensuring security of life and property and fighting corruption. On the political front, the failure of Buhari to lead the APC from an assemblage of politicians and other interest groups, with card-carrying membership whose aim was to grab power from the PDP, into an ideological platform of a progressive political party wherein the economy forms the basis of political engagements.
The quest by partisan politicians to benefit from a government they helped get elected is legitimate within a democratic setting. Similarly, disagreements on how these benefits should be dispensed are also legitimate. However, the kind of benefits most Nigerian politicians are used to are direct patronage from government in the form of well-remunerated duplicitous political appointments, contracts with inflated monetary value and cash gifts under the pretext of security votes, all at the expense of the lean state purse. The over-reliance on this illegitimate form of direct patronage as a reward system for political loyalty by elected public officers at all levels is no longer sustainable as a result of a combination of factors such as increased greed for primitive acquisition and the ever-increasing army of professional politicians who are economically dispossessed and now crowd the political space looking for crumbs to survive on.
The failure of Buhari as the leader of the APC to replace the illegitimate and corrupt patronage reward system that is increasingly unsustainable because of the inadequacy of Nigeria’s major earning from 2.3 million barrel per day oil money with a robust system that pragmatically aligns politics and economy for the purpose of legitimate wealth creation and shared prosperity for both the state and citizens. A departure from this system of politics that manifests itself in the form of a parasitic relationship between partisan politicians and Nigeria’s common patrimony under the leadership of Buhari would have given a positive meaning to the change Nigerians hoped for when they voted him into power. Achieving this lofty ideal of wealth creation would be for a visionary leader to galvanize all energies and talents of his countrymen by providing proper infrastructure to support individual business enterprise, while securing for them a sizeable share of world trade through the instrumentality of a realistic and economy-focused foreign policy. Unfortunately, Buhari has deepened the age-long system of patronage that corruptly rewards cronies with government jobs, contracts and cash that enriches a few while leaving the majority in penury. With only a few benefiting from this unsustainable system and beneficiaries appropriating all benefits in a most primitive manner, discontent among the majority of party members and unfavourable public perception is inevitable.
Nigeria’s political process is heavily dependent on political parties. Political party structures are pivotal to securing a spot on the dining table for the national cake. With a comatose economy making government the major source of survival, there is mortal combat over the soul of the APC’s party structure, as whoever controls the structure determines who will fly APC flags at the various levels and stages of elections.
Therefore, this mess created by Buhari in the APC is not one Tinubu can solve. In a presidential system of democracy, the buck stops at the table of the President. His successes or failures rob off on the image of the party he leads. Just as President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal went a long way to shape the liberal ideology of the Democratic Party, so did President Olusegun Obasanjo’s neo-liberal economic concept of “government has no business doing business” result in a conservative PDP.
Buhari’s sectional tendencies in favour of his strong base of supporters, drawn mainly from his Muslim northern Fulani section of the country, has given the APC the image of a far-right political party. Like PDP’s neo-liberal economic policies that enriched a few oligarchs and impoverished the vast majority, APC’s far-right politics has favoured a few with privileges of birth than the vast majority with a disadvantage of birth. Expectedly, most Nigerians have become disenchanted with APC’s politicking as they were with the excesses of PDP’s unbridled corrupt capitalism.
The solution to APC’s problems is for Buhari as the leader of the party to begin the process of reform and dismantling of his far-right political structures to give way to an inclusive, purposeful leadership for all in line with the original promise of change. Failure to do this, party members, including Tinubu, should take bold steps to retrieve their party from Buhari and urge him to step down after his first term to give way to a reform-minded leader of the party, who would keep faith with the manifesto of the APC. Such a leader would properly articulate policies and programmes, using the rich manifesto of the APC as a basis that will focus on improving the welfare and security of the people.
If these critical steps are taken, the trust of Nigerians will once more be reposed in the APC, with its chances of victory at the 2019 elections greatly enhanced.