APC, Buhari and 2023 (2)

THE All Progressives Congress (APC) is still embroiled in the politics of electing the principal officers of the 9th National Assembly. It has temporarily ignored the weightier responsibility of building a party of great principles, platform and ideology. It believes that after discipline is restored to a party that barely held itself together to eke out a victory over the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the last polls, then the other salient issues that give life to the party could be attended to with fervour and dispatch. They and their supporters will hope that, unlike what took place in 2015, no party member would break ranks in the National Assembly to protest the decision of the party to present consensus candidates. They will need extraordinary bargaining chips to mollify the rage building up in the party, and to pacify aspirants to the various offices who have begun to resent the firmness and imperiousness of the party chairman, Adams Oshiomhole.

President Muhammadu Buhari may have won the election by a wider margin than he did in 2015, but his victory, he and his supporters will confess, is attenuated by the controversies and inefficiencies surrounding that election and victory. In many states where he previously did well, particularly in the Southwest, he has been repudiated probably on account of his loathing for issues like restructuring, which weigh greatly on the minds of the electorate in that region, and the manner he exuded a feeling of exceptionalism. Fortunately for him, he cannot go for a third term. The main concern of his party will therefore be that his actions, style and policies, all of which are difficult to embrace even in the best of times, would in the next two or three years not alienate the country. APC leaders may have instinctively grasped that, and seem set to build a far more robust and cohesive party once they can manage not to fall apart in their election of principal officers.

No one doubts the capacity of the cantankerous APC to begin the process of rebuilding its structures, image and platform. Throughout the first term of President Buhari, the party never operated as a party, because the president preferred to run his government as if he was not the product of a party. Those who could hold the party together were also alienated. It took the fear of losing the 2019 polls to trigger what seemed like a forced reconciliation within the party. What matters eventually is that despite harbouring many powerful interest groups operating independent of one another, a contrived reconciliation took place, and a semblance of law and order now prevails in the party. If they can begin rebuilding their party without losing their minds or many of their powerful politicians, and if they can manage to circumscribe the naive politics of the president and castrate the sycophants and opportunists around him, they may hold themselves together and offer a worthy counterforce to the rapidly improving but still weakened PDP.

The PDP will be the main nightmare of the APC in the next two to three years. They may have made a strong showing in the last polls, and are obviously not a pushover, but they are yet to demonstrate the acumen and pertinacity of the great party envisioned by their founders. If circumstances can coax ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar, their nomadic presidential candidate in the 2019 polls, to stay loyal to the party, he seems to have the presence, inflexibility and character to champion the party’s long-term reawakening. His interests are, however, fickle. If he discovers he will unlikely be the party’s candidate in the next polls, given the country’s unwritten rotation principle, will he retain enough interest in the party to manage internal schisms and fund a brilliant and aggressive opposition politics? No one is sure. But the party made huge gains in the last polls and made even far better impression on the electorate than to allow themselves to be ignored or belittled in the coming years. If they can manage to keep a semblance of unity, refine their platform and ideology, and manage their internal wars better than the ruling party has done so far, they may yet regain control of the presidency.

In the 2019 polls, the PDP betrayed a sense of desperation in their effort to win the presidency, whereas all they needed was to express a sense of urgency and responsibility. If they approach the 2023 polls, particularly the presidential election, with that same sense of desperation they showed in 2019, they will come to grief again. The APC on the other hand will likely begin a methodical approach to running their party, mediating internal conflicts and fighting electoral wars. They may be successful in their objectives if Mr Oshiomhole can balance his firmness and purpose with diplomacy and inclusiveness. They will fight a great battle to retune and reset the party, and probably flush out or neutralise a few more rebels, but they must not underestimate the task ahead, one that is likely to be complicated by powerful individuals with close ties to the president, individuals who cannot survive on their own without riding the coattails of the president.

Having lost major elections twice, and were purified by that mere act of defeat, the PDP is unlikely to face more intense internal battles like the APC. The defeats of 2015 and 2019 have  had a laxative effect on the opposition party’s ideology, and a winnowing effect that has to a large extent removed uncommitted politicians from the party. There are many in the APC who can survive and indeed flourish in the PDP. But there are not many in the PDP, which is evidently more conservative than the APC is progressive, who can survive, let alone flourish, in the ruling party. That means that on balance, despite the largess available to members of the ruling party, the PDP has more committed natural conservatives than the APC has disciplined progressives. These ideological and philosophical persuasions are likely to be a factor in the years leading to the 2023 polls. In 2015 and 2019, the APC set great store by a formidable candidate, one with a cult-like following. In 2023, they may find themselves relying more on the formidability of their party and the depth, rather than the charisma, of their presidential candidate.

In the 2019 elections, the APC got away with downplaying many issues, especially restructuring. In the next polls, they will have to confront controversial issues, and face up squarely to the issue of the national question. The country is in turmoil today. That turbulence did not suddenly happen; there was a build-up over the years. Nigerian leaders have irresponsibly evaded the topic of political structure and pretended that the country’s distress was almost entirely one of law and order, or tangentially, one of corruption. The crises breaking out all over the country and overwhelming security agencies were not the product of overnight misunderstanding. Those contradictions steadily grew over the decades, reaching a crescendo in the past few years. Not only is Nigeria’s federal structure a monstrous contraption, the country operates a costly and laborious system that is bleeding everyone dry and stultifying growth. If President Buhari intensifies his law and order approach, he may buy some little time, perhaps a year or two. But it is clear that the status quo cannot be sustained for much longer.

Before the next polls, the APC must find an answer to these existential puzzles in a way that is persuasive and precise. It has waffled over the issue of restructuring considerably, partly because the president lacks the depth and vision to know better, and too many sycophants in the party help prop up his deficiencies. In the years ahead, the party will have no elbow room to manoeuvre, even if the country should enjoy some temporary relief in the interethnic and interreligious battles that are coalescing. The PDP has tried to come to terms with some of these dire issues, and have mellifluously addressed the hot-button issue of restructuring. They sound convincing; but the years ahead will determine whether their view on the matter permeated the entire party or was just an expedient tool of realpolitik in the hands of Candidate Atiku and a few of his close supporters. Whichever party addresses these salient issues more convincingly and coherently in 2023 will likely sway the votes.

Both parties will by now be studying the open and coded messages contained in the electoral outcomes of the 2019 polls, whether at the state and federal levels or at the regional/zonal and ideological levels. They will for instance note that the country has remained essentially divided between North and South, and that the South has made steadier progress in the direction of a civic culture than has the North. Political participation is much more improved in the North than in the South, and the Southwest than in the Southeast, and in the North Central than in the South-South. The parties will want to make sense of these discrepancies and idiosyncrasies, and find explanations for why the Fourth Republic has seemed not to advance significantly beyond the schisms of the First and Second Republics. They will also note that politics in the Southwest has regressed distressingly towards the national mean, indicating their susceptibilities towards primordial cleavages and other ancient and modern prejudices. Outsiders and vote herders may malevolently mine that field in subsequent polls as illiteracy and ignorance run rampant in the Southwest.

However, all is not gloom. The Southwest is also showing that it is possible to be discriminating in embracing candidates and ideologies. At the governorship level, the PDP took Oyo State, made a strong showing in Ogun State and would have done much better had they not been divided, and threatened and are still threatening Osun State. On the whole, with the exception of Lagos State, both parties have won elections by margins that are humane and lost by margins that are not inhumane. Slowly but steadily, Southwest leaders will have to spend extra time and effort in producing candidates that are acceptable to the electorate, while undergirding their campaigns with issues and ideas that the people can cotton onto. Indeed, in the 2019 polls, it was obvious that the Southwest votes appeared to have counted much more than some other regions.

Other geopolitical zones have also advanced beyond the crudity noticed in earlier republics, even if that advancement has not been comprehensively and regionally solid. With each passing election, and regardless of the electoral apparitions conjured by the Obasanjo presidency, Nigerian democracy has grown reassuringly by inches and yards, though not by leaps and bounds. It may get better if the country manages to wean itself off its masochistic delight in voting retired military leaders into office in the mistaken belief that they are capable of instilling discipline in the polity. President Buhari’s Neanderthal style appears to have cured most Nigerians of that infantile craving, except the most extreme laggard.

Between 1999 and 2007, Chief Obasanjo ran a leg of his party’s presidential relay race abominably, and needed to foist an unpopular candidate on his party and country to sustain his schizoid view of life and politics. When Goodluck Jonathan took the baton, he ran an even poorer leg than both Chief Obasanjo and the late Umaru Yar’Adua. It was not surprising that the PDP could not sustain their electoral shenanigans beyond 2015, a far cry from the boastful and arbitrary 60 years they swore oath to uphold. President Buhari has taken the first leg of the APC presidential relay race. He was widely advertised as a fleet-footed sprinter. But instead he is running an appalling leg. If he is not to gift his party a disastrous race in 2023, he must rejigger his leg of the race, assemble a far better team than he did in 2015, come down from his boastful and sanctimonious heights, select a great and inclusive kitchen cabinet of the brightest and the best from around the country, and, despite himself, lay a solid foundation for the rule of law, democracy and human rights. Yet, he has divided the country, and the country is drifting further apart on account of his statements, style, politics and insular preferences. If he is not committed to the change advertised by his party, they will stare apocalypse in the face in 2023.

• Concluded