Four days away from May 29 Democracy Day, Editor, Politics/Features, EMEKA ALEX DURU, attempts a critique of the current civilian dispensation, noting that politicking has been accorded more attention than governance.
Dilapidated school structure
At the height of his revolutionary music engagement, Sonny Okosuns had, in one of his songs, posed a philosophical question on the actual focus of Nigeria’s journey towards statehood. The anti-apartheid crooner had asked “Which way Nigeria?” stressing that after many years of Independence, the country was still finding it hard to stand. Okosuns had gone further to ask how long it would take the country to get to the biblical Promised Land.
The question was not addressed by those in authority. But it had relevance in the affairs of the day.
The civilian administration of the then President Shehu Shagari, which took off in 1979, after 13 years of military dictatorship, had demonstrated gross incompetence in leading the country on a path of genuine democracy. What perhaps marked the height of its rudderless leadership and scant regard in widening the frontiers of democracy was its poor handling of the 1983 general elections.
Consumed by the desire for a re-election, the then National Party of Nigeria (NPN)-led administration virtually trampled on all known democratic ethos in actualising its controversial “landslide victory”. The furore generated by the flawed election watered the ground for the General Muhammadu Buhari-led military coup of December 31, 1983.
The putsch took the country back to the dreaded days of the military jack boots, especially as the austere-looking head of state made no pretension of not returning the country to civil leadership in the foreseeable future.
Cashing in on this sentiment, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB), then the Chief of Army Staff, staged a palace coup against Buhari on August 27, 1985 and announced his intention to return the country to democracy.
Babangida later unfolded a political transition agenda in what appeared as an attempt to give vent to the announcement. However, by 1993, clearly eight years after, it had become apparent that the government’s transition exercise was a charade.
The presidential election, presumably won by the late Moshood Abiola, that was to be the hallmark of the transition, was annulled by the government in hazy circumstances. When the seat became too hot for IBB and his lieutenants, he “stepped aside” for a civilian in the person of Ernest Shonekan.
The ensuing confusion paved way for another phase of military dictatorship headed by the late General Sani Abacha, whose attempt at transmuting to a civilian president was fatally abridged, as he dropped dead on Monday, June 8, 1998.
The succeeding regime of Abdulsalami Abubakar rushed through a 10-month transition agenda that produced a retired General, Olusegun Obasanjo, as civilian president in 1999.
Obasanjo, who incidentally had been imprisoned earlier by the ravenous Abacha regime, was initially thought to be an agent of change. Many factors were considered in arriving at the speculation. For one, he had once been in the saddle as a military head of state. It was in that capacity that he willingly handed over to Shagari when, incidentally, some of his contemporaries elsewhere had held on to power.
Even out of office, Obasanjo had lent a stabilising voice at critical moments of the nation’s history. These and his heroic role during the decolonisation period of the southern African countries easily sold him to unsuspecting Nigerians. More so, he had pledged shortly on assumption of office that the era of cutting corners in the country’s democratic enterprise was clearly over. Besides, he had at local and international fora advertised himself as the new face of Nigeria’s democracy, pledging to be guided by the rule of law.
It did not, however, take time for perceptive observers to read into Obasanjo’s real agenda and decode an unprecedented duplicity. It was, for instance, discovered that his banner of democracy was a mere smokescreen intended to hoodwink the Nigerian electorate. By the 2003 general election, therefore, it had become apparent that the president and his fellow members of the political elite had not learnt much from the errors of the past. The election, which was characterised by rigging, ballot-box stuffing and, in some cases, violence, was adjudged below international standard. Both local and international observers, who monitored the exercise, recorded it low in many aspects.
Four years later, what was considered the anomalies of the 2003 general elections turned out to be mere child’s play. In virtually all the 36 states of the federation, there were various reports of electoral malpractice, in some cases, with active connivance of government and party officials.
Ballot box snatching, violence and falsification of results were the major issues of the exercise. Poor arrangement on the part of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) equally affected the conduct of the polls. In both the state and federal elections, there were reported cases of election materials not getting to the polling centres on time or outright.
Fifteen years after the onset of this current civilian dispensation, the situation has not changed. If anything, critics accuse elected officials at all levels of abandoning governance for politicking, especially in the run up to 2015 general elections.
Confused Presidency
The Presidency seems to be the major culprit in this regime of confusion. Critics blame policy insincerity and poor leadership recruitment processes of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), for the ugly turn of events.
Incidentally, at the formation of the party on July 29, 1998, the facilitators were guided by far-reaching visions. They had, for instance, dreamed of a party that would put the Nigerian nation on a new phase of political engineering.
Part of their intention was to put in place a political platform that would ensure a “re-creation of civil political institutions, reconciliation of Nigeria, rekindling of the spirit of unity and brotherhood in the polity and the revitalisation of powers of the people to build a prosperous industrial democracy”. Propelled by these lofty ideals, the founders of the party had aimed at bringing together all patriotic and like-minded Nigerians into a single formidable party capable of renewing and re-focusing the loyalties and productive energies of the nation to work for national reconciliation, economic and social reconstruction, respect for human rights and rule of law and to restructure the country in the true spirit of federalism.
Their long term aspiration was to erect a framework that would ensure a just and equitable distribution of power, resources, wealth and opportunities to conform with the principles of powershift and power-sharing, rotation of key political offices and equitable devolution of powers to zones, states and local governments, so as to create socio-political conditions conducive to national unity and to defend the sanctity of electoral democracy.
The encompassing principles of the party were adequately complemented by an embracing motto: Justice, Unity and Progress, while the slogan of the party instructively acceded “power to the people”. To add up, the PDP had in its fold a generous spread of the nation’s first rate politicians. It also appropriated to itself the tag of the largest party in black Africa. In a way, its claim of greatness had paid off, as it had garnered many electoral victories, though often questionable in some cases.
Juxtaposed with its victories at the polls, the party, in irony of sorts, has always been enmeshed in crises, most of which were incidentally traced to the contradictions by its successive leadership, especially in the conduct of its affairs.
Inability of the party to harness the potential at its disposal has been identified as the bane of the nation’s democracy growth and good governance.
Kaduna State Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) governorship candidate in 2011 and currently All Progressive Congress (APC) chieftain, Tom Meyashi, argued in this respect in an encounter with TheNiche.
PDP, he recalled, had in 1999 won majority of the elections across the country, including local governments. It also controlled majority of the states, the Senate, House of Representatives and the Houses of Assembly, stressing that such feat could have put the party in a position to evolve a development agenda that would get Nigeria out of the woods, particularly as it was coming out of military interregnum.
“The PDP had a unique opportunity to build a political culture that all other parties and democratic institutions in the country would have to imbibe and use as the baseline. Unfortunately, that has not happened 15 years down the line. The culture that has been built is the politics of money, politics of regionalism, politics of religion and all other vices,” he lamented.
Opposition in disarray
Opposition political parties, incidentally, failed in filling the void occasioned by the absence of vision by PDP leadership. Given their antics, enlightened commentators had even, back into the early days of the present dispensation, taken a hard look at the opposition political parties and literally dismissed them as lacking in cohesion and focus. Until the fusion of major opposition parties leading to the formation of APC lately, the bulk of the country’s opposition parties seemed only interested in the annual grant they used to receive from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This obvious lethargy had made the coast clear for PDP to wobble and fumble, in the process, toying with the destiny of the nation.
But with the coming of APC, the ruling party has lately been experiencing sleepless nights.
Crisis in governors’ fold
However, what many had thought was going to be the gains to Nigerians by the coming together of the opposition appears to have been lost by the cracks in Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) that has been torn along PDP/APC partisan lines.
Established in 1999, NGF is a coalition of the elected governors of the country’s 36 states. It is a non-partisan association which seeks to promote unity, good governance, better understanding and co-operation among the states and ensure a healthy and beneficial relationship between the states and other tiers of government.
While unity prevailed among members of the forum, it provided a reasonable platform for peer review and engendered healthy competition among the governors.
Deep cracks, however, developed within the body last year following the quest by Rivers State governor, Rotimi Amaechi, who had been its chairman, to go for a second term. Even when Amaechi was then a member of PDP, there were insinuations within the Presidency that his aspiration was a ploy by the opposition to truncate President Goodluck Jonathan’s unexpressed second term ambition, using the forum.
On account of this suspicion, efforts were made by Jonathan’s foot soldiers to prevent the governor from the contest. But buoyed by support from the opposition and other aggrieved PDP governors, Amaechi persisted, pleading enforcement of his inalienable rights.
At the May 2013 election of the forum, those that supported the Rivers governor announced him the winner, while those sympathetic to Jonathan swore that Governor Jonah Jang of Plateau State carried the day. Ever since, the forum has not spoken with one voice.
Dr. James Udoh, a public opinion analyst, told TheNiche that it was from the day the schism in NGF became a public issue that governance at all levels in the country took flight.
“The governors have, since that crisis, practically abandoned governance. They are now governing from Abuja where they are attending one meaningless meeting or another,” he observed.
Politics of succession/re-election
Seven months to the February 2015 general elections, investigations by TheNiche indicate that elected officials at all levels in the country are involved in politics of succession and/or re-election. A South South governor, who spoke off the tapes last week, described the obvious rat race as “the in-thing”.
He said: “I don’t see anything wrong in one getting involved or even determining who succeeds him. It is the in-thing. Even at the level of family business, there is nothing wrong in a father determining who, among his sons, that can take over from him. The same applies in public service. I don’t see myself handing over my state to somebody I do not trust; somebody who would come on board and mess up all that we had put in place. No, it doesn’t happen like that,” he quipped.
While the governors on their second term are busy with politics of succession, those on first term are putting everything on board to be re-elected. In Ekiti, for example, Governor Kayode Fayemi has, since last year, literally thrown his hat in the ring in his efforts to gain re-election in the June 21 governorship election in the state. While the governor advertises his achievement profile for his aspiration, his critics accuse him of having abandoned governance for his second term bid. The same scenario plays out in Osun where the governor, Rauf Aregbesola, is running in the August gubernatorial race.
The presidency is not spared the bug. In fact, shortly after his election in 2011, analysts had accused Jonathan of already making arrangements for his second term. Though the president had regularly parried the question of his second term agenda in his media chats, his body language and engagements by his henchmen had always exposed him as not wanting to exit Aso Rock till 2019.
According to Udoh, the immediate outcome of the 2015 agenda has been engagement in politicking and abandonment of governance.
Oronto Douglas, Special Adviser to the President on Research, Documentation and Strategy, however, disagrees that governance has been dumped, especially at the federal level.
“The (Goodluck) Jonathan administration, without doubt, will leave Nigeria a much transformed country,” he had declared recently, in what seemed a riposte to allegations of non-performance on the administration by its opponents.
Douglas, who took the position in Lagos, at the presentation of the “Sure and Steady Transformation: Progress Report of President Goodluck Jonathan’s Administration (Volume 2), listed some of its efforts at impacting on Nigerians, stressing: “That is why government is in place to serve the people.”
The presentation – the second in the series – captured government’s activities in the agriculture, health, petroleum resources, works and aviation sectors. Media handlers of the governors flaunt similar achievements in their states.
