While it is true that many Nigerians had tittle-tattled over the future of the All Progressives Congress (APC), it was in fact President Muhammadu Buhari who first drew the most attention to fears that the ruling party could be destined for implosion. It is strange; but he was actually honest in expressing his premonitions about his party’s survivability, a party he has done precious little to imbue with life and a philosophical core, as the first part of this piece amply explained last week.
If the president does not, however, climb down from his high horse and be the party’s, and more crucially the country’s, unifier and conscience, the APC will be unable to avoid a bad crash. The party possesses all the ingredients for a crash, as it harbours ambitious, undisciplined and unprincipled politicians who are as much an asset to the party as they are a liability.
The first part of this piece was an exposition of how, by their performance, the president and his party have engendered the fear of party implosion after President Buhari’s second term, especially seeing how his first term virtually crippled democracy, mindlessly exploited the people’s feelings, and left the country destitute of lasting social, political and economic structures. The piece looked at four yardsticks to measure the survivability of the party, to wit, national and party unity; the economy; democracy and the rule of law; and partisan politics and elections. National and party unity as well as democracy and the rule of law were discussed in this place last week.
Partisan politics has presented Africans with a tough bone to chew. For President Buhari, who has had a problematic relationship with the opposition and critics since he ventured into politics to principally redress decades-long injury to his pride, it is an even harder bone. Nigeria has two living Fourth Republic presidents pining away in regret over how they managed the country. They did not of course demonstrate the extreme parochialism that has taken root today, and they did their best to act like they understood the complexities of governing a country of about 200 million people and about 250 ethnic groups. In appointments, they also bent over backwards to engage people they were not familiar with, whether for cabinet positions or electoral commission management duties. In fact, believing that optics were even more crucial than verbal declarations, they took care to appoint people of other ethnic groups to manage elections and found officers of diverse backgrounds spread across the entire country to secure the polity. Despite their best intentions, however, they probably still regret that democracy and the rule of law, not to say governance principles, were not deeply and irreversibly entrenched. They have thus have to battle their successors’ revisionism.
Indeed, in just one term, President Buhari upturned a feeble system that at least manageably welded the country together and replaced it with something worse. Almost as soon as he assumed office, he jettisoned the idea of appointing election managers from ethnic groups different from the president’s, coalesced the security agencies around his section of the country, frowned at debates and those who might dare to question his bona fides, rode roughshod over rights constitutionally vouchsafed the people, and appeared bemused by critics who accuse him of being sectional and nepotistic. He has since remained largely indifferent to the groaning of his countrymen. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo conducted largely illegitimate federal elections but left state polls unattended, and treated the parliament with disdain, playing ducks and drakes with their rules and regulations. Ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, despite his failings and hesitations, improved on the electoral process; and though he squirmed considerably when he faced the unusual demands of the rule of law, he yielded grounds to the opposition and bore revilement with almost perfect equanimity when compelled by judicial and electoral circumstances.
The politics and elections superintended by the two past presidents achieved little success, but a liberal atmosphere still pervaded the country, and politicians and their supporters revelled in the limited glory accorded by the constitution. But since the Buhari ascendancy, that liberal atmosphere has vanished; and though he has done precious little to endear himself to the country, he insists on not being criticised and abhors being despised. If he could not overcome the temptation to specially select some of those close to him for electoral commission jobs, and could not resist peopling his security services and paramilitary agencies with those from his part of the country whom he claimed to know or trust, how could he be trusted to understand the principles of federalism, appreciate the difficult concept of democracy, bow willingly and honourably to the demanding, if not sometimes insufferable, strictures of the rule of law, let alone enable a liberal atmosphere in which his party and other parties could flourish?
The incontestable fact is that Nigerians elected a man who was not convinced about democracy, regards the constitution as a Morse code, and displayed perfect contempt for the rule of law. Only last week, at a function in Abuja, the president once again sneered at the demands of the rule of law, indicating how he felt constrained and incommoded by its slow pace. If after getting a second term he still has not found the discipline and exposure to appreciate and be persuaded about the beauty of democracy and the ennobling services provided by the rule of law as a societal fulcrum to balance governmental power and people’s rights, then the country’s case is next to hopeless. There will perhaps be no end to the president’s whining about the constraining influence of the rule of law, considering that he perceives its relationship with national security as a zero-sum game. It in fact requires depth to appreciate democracy, rule of law and federalism.
So the country must confront what is obviously a looming disaster with patience and commonsense, and try to navigate around the Buhari presidency’s deliberate actions against peace and unity. They must recognise the dangerous precedents he is setting by his mistreatment of the constitution, by his appointments, and by his impossible temperament. They must know he is sowing dangerous seeds for future conflicts, turning the people against themselves, prejudicing one ethnic group against another, supplanting the rule of law with the rule of man, and virtually erasing the last vestiges of democracy. It is not in such illiberal environments that politics can prosper and elections can be well managed.
President Buhari may be in politics, but he is not a politician. He can’t seem to understand how integral the constitution and the rule of law are to politics. Now that Nigerians know that the APC is indistinguishable from the PDP, and having apparently held the party together by virtually the force of arms, it is strange that the president expects the APC to flourish after his exit. Chief Obasanjo, despite running the country far better than he did, and even ran a somewhat inclusive politics, could not guarantee the survival of the PDP beyond a few years, how does President Buhari hope to guarantee his party’s future, despite running a government and party of exclusion?
However, the president probably thinks that a good record in the economy might be enough to ensure his party’s survival. He is, for instance, building the railways. But Dr Jonathan also built railways, obviously with less cost to the economy as a whole. Yes, the former president took external loans; but President Buhari has taken much more, and has in fact become obsessed with loans as the only way of rebuilding infrastructure. His stock response to critics is that had thieves not taken the country’s money, there would be no need for a recourse to loan. So, having grown the debt portfolio by more than $10bn dollars in his first term, he is now set to take another $30bn, bringing the total external debt stock to some $57bn. It is unprecedented, but the president is unruffled, having been bitten by the demoniac bug of rebuilding infrastructure over a few dizzying years, regardless of the punishment it inflicts on future generations.
Then there is the ruinous land border closure issue which he has framed as a policy only smugglers and their sympathisers would dare to criticise. No one would object to the policy, he argued, except those who cared less about local rice production and petroleum import savings. In their propaganda rush, the government failed to understand that while critics support the ultimate goals, they object to the means, and they have a right to be heard regardless of the prevailing sentiments and the vaunted short-term benefits of higher revenue intake, increase in local rice production, and reduced fuel imports. Even if they shut the borders a million times, it will not be a permanent solution to smuggling until they find a better combination of effective and lasting policies to police Nigeria’s extensive and porous borders. It is not only neighbouring economies that are hurt by the closure; Nigeria’s economy is also suffocating, not to talk of the future consequences for regional trade and relationship.
But whether the president likes it or not, and despite the leakages that occurred under previous governments, the economy performed better under both Chief Obasanjo and Dr Jonathan. However, like the Buhari government, there were no permanent structures, and little attention was paid to the long term. Under the present government, policies are also eclectic, as indeed they were under previous governments, and no great economic paradigms and templates are being conceived and instituted for the long term, regardless of the effusive quotations from Chinese model of politics and economics. In the end, no one will link any short-term gains recorded by the Buhari presidency to the APC. He has, mercifully, made his desultory economic policy idiosyncratic, and kicked bad-temperedly at critics who denounce his cloudy macro-economic model. Indeed, if the APC is to survive at all, especially in the face of the great loathing for the Buhari presidency’s sectional policies, its best bet is to distance itself from the president.
Party chairman Adams Oshiomhole and other party leaders may be optimistic about retaining their hold on Edo and Ondo in next year’s governorship polls, and that a better tomorrow would be assured for their party. They are entitled to their optimism. But if they cannot rein in their president whose perverse policies and politics drive people up the wall, the party will be shocked by how quickly it will unravel. In the coming months, perhaps in a year or two, the president will be tempted to turn against his own party with a ferocity that guarantees self-destruction, probably to assure the continuation of the sectional domination programme many Nigerians now read into his presidency. Once that begins, however, it may be a sign of the end. What is not expected is for the president to suddenly turn a new leaf, promote reconciliation in the party, and facilitate inclusive politics in the country. He has gone too far to the other end to reverse his natural self.
*Written by Idowu Akinlotan
