President Buhari and party discipline and cohesion

I join millions others to congratulate President Muhammad Buhari on his inauguration for a second term and to wish him every success in the next four years. He deserves all the good wishes and prayers.

But what he does or does not do in the years ahead with party discipline and cohesion will determine how history will rate him when he finally leaves the Presidential Villa, known in Nigeria as Aso Rock.

Whether history will be kind to him at the end of his tenure will depend principally on two issues – the amelioration of the grinding poverty in the land and his handling of the crucial issue of party discipline and cohesion.

In his first time out, Buhari did not come out clean in his “I’m not for anyone, I’m for everyone” inauguration comment, which was variously interpreted. The result was the clearly undisciplined defiance of party directive that produced Dr Bukola Saraki and Alhaji Yakubu Dogara as President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives respectively.

For a very long time, the impression was created that it was a Tinubu-Saraki affair, that the former was crying blue murder because his preferred candidates did not win the prized slots. Whatever or however Buhari felt on the matter, he kept to himself, and members of the public, of which this writer is one, thought he was unwisely indifferent to the happenings then or he was complicit in the matter.

But in the fullness of time, it became evident that Buhari was Saraki, Dogara and their sponsors’ target, and that their objective was to make the former impotent and thus render his presidency unpopular as to be unable to secure a second term ticket.

His dismissive assessment of the two principal officers of the 8th National Assembly as “unpatriotic” is telling enough, and it shows the President must have been living in pain of the perfidious activities of the duo in the last four years.

What they did was enough to wreck a political party. The fact of APC’s survival of the subversive activities of its erstwhile top members could only be attributable to God’s love for Mr President and his party.

Yorubas talk of “agbe’ni ma fohun, ao mo teni to nse”. If you resent a move or an action and you hide that feeling and put up an “I-feel-alright” facade instead of condemning such acts outright, party indiscipline will continue to fester here and there as has played out in states, of which Ogun and Imo are the worst examples.

I hail Mr President for finally coming out to lampoon Saraki and Dogara for their many anti-party activities. But the deed had already been done. The horse had bolted from the stable!

It will serve President Buhari well if he uses the opportunity available to send a strong signal out that he would not compromise on party discipline as had happened in the past. The best time to put his stamp is now that he is about to constitute a new cabinet.

For crying out loud, why should people of whatever status, who had been undermining the cohesion of their party in their states, be given federal appointments? Does it not amount to approving of their condemnable acts that were weakening the party in their states?

If that practice persists, it is a matter of time before the ruling party goes the way of the PDP that lost incumbency advantage to bickering within its own house. Or does Buhari want to go down in history as the one that killed the party that offered him the platform to go into history as the Abraham Lincoln of Africa?