IN their continuing but increasingly difficult battle to compel members of the executive arm to answer legislative summons, the senate has warned of an insidious threat to democracy. Few take the warnings seriously. The most visible and recent defiance of the senate was in fact enacted last week by both the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir David Lawal, and the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS), Col Hameed Ali (retd.). Last week’s show of defiance was not the first time members of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration would treat the National Assembly contemptuously. It is unlikely to be the last. Mr Lawal was summoned in respect of the management style of the Presidential Initiative on the Northeast, while Mr Ali was expected to appear in uniform to answer questions relating to a new harebrained order on retroactive duties vehicle owners were expected to pay.
The senate is right to observe that there is a threat to democracy, and that that threat is coming from the executive. But there is not just one threat to democracy, nor that the executive solely personifies that threat. By their indolence and sometimes criminal collusion, state legislative assemblies also constitute a threat to democracy. And by their excesses, incompetence, and corruption, the National Assembly also shares part of the blame for democracy’s insane wobble in Nigeria. In fact, for 16 unbroken and dizzying years, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) engendered a malformed democracy and proceeded to brazenly maltreat it.
The PDP’s inability to build a great democracy for Nigeria, despite their long years in office, was not the main reason they lost the 2015 presidential election. Without the menace of Boko Haram that blighted the Northeast, pervasive corruption that turned the economy inside out, and the impotence and paralysis shown by the Goodluck Jonathan government after over 200 Chibok schoolgirls were abducted from their school in Borno State in 2014, the PDP would probably have retained the presidency. What the PDP did or didn’t do with democracy was the least of the concerns of the electorate in 2015. With the Chibok schoolgirls affair now stalemated, and the economy only now managing to show some signs of life, and Boko Haram largely contained, the country is likely to turn its attention to other more esoteric and idealistic matters in 2019. But it is precisely those other matters that the APC has been unable to comprehend, let alone conceptualise or act upon.
The PDP might have failed in 16 years to conceptualise democracy, and in fact spent the better part of its unmerited years in office subverting its principles, but in less than two maddening years of hubris and indifference, the APC has shown spectacular dimwittedness towards democracy and has done its damnedest to scuttle it. If the new ruling party is not to face a day of reckoning in 2019, it must engraft into its sterile and stubborn DNA a love for and understanding of democracy. Should they be able to do it, it would help them come to terms with the appalling and alienating sectionalism they have enthroned, and give them the impetus to envision a rich blend of democracy from which Africa can draw inspiration.
Sadly for the APC, the party appears to be divided into four main blocks, and may thus find it difficult to achieve its purpose in government. To strive to the noble ideals necessary for them to retain power beyond 2019, they must reconcile the four blocks, harness their strengths, and turn them into a winning team of visionaries and empire builders. The first block is made up of the president and his inner circle, an amalgam of a hobbled leader tenuously holding together a group of aides pejoratively labelled as political and power hijackers, a block whose ideas of governance are at variance with modernity and reality, and whose philosophies bear no resemblance to anything edifying. Rather than encircle and isolate the other three blocks, given the enormous power at their disposal, the president’s block appears to have been confined into a narrow, schizoid group of scheming and angry provincialists.
The second block comprises national lawmakers just discovering identities, strengths, ideas, and potentials. Many of them were birthed in and by the PDP, and saw democracy merely as a convenient vehicle to appropriate power and wealth. In the APC, they have struggled to mould themselves into persons and forces that war against their primordial natural selves. By chance, they are discovering that the democratic vacuum created by the APC has offered them the opportunity to write their mission and vision into the void, no matter how ephemeral. They are, to their own surprise and unease, metamorphosing into unaccustomed and unconvincing champions of democracy and the rule of law. The third block is made up of the party itself and those like Odigie Oyegun who run it on a day-to-day basis. They are not controlled by the presidency, which has no idea what to do with the party and the officials, nor by lawmakers who are locked in combat with the courts, the party, the society and the executive. In fact, the APC is the closest thing to an abstraction.
The fourth block is made up of the frustrated idealists in the party, men and women who see the party in the mould of a mass movement comparable to any in the developed world, people who see the party as an organisation dedicated to championing true democracy, the rule of law, and the rights of the people, a party inspired by the true ethics of fundamental change to cobble together an economic miracle that would attract the envy of Asia, China and the West. Apparently these idealists spent too much time dreaming and envisioning things to pay attention to the frothing rudimentary foundations upon which to grow the political and civic culture of their illustrious imaginations.
It will take a miracle for the Buhari presidency to weld these disparate and often warring groups together and turn them into a powerful force unleashed into the future. For, at the moment, neither the president nor anyone in his inner circle possesses the quality, vision and understanding to find the formula to manage and reconcile the party’s disparate groups. Until that is done, for this is fundamental to the change they mouth so glibly, the APC will be unable to see democracy as the fulcrum upon which to balance the new society of its dreams. Without this vision of democracy, they will be unable to appreciate the concept of federalism, not to talk of building a country that transcends ethnic and religious divides. Far worse, they will also be unable to appreciate the deeper significance of nurturing a great and independent judiciary where court judgements are sacrosanct, a brilliant and self-confident legislature whose powers, resolutions and laws become integrated into the Grundnorm, and an executive and presidency whose aides and ministers are true nationalists incapable of being swayed by ethnic exceptionalism, religious bigotry, and political intolerance.
As they are currently constituted, the APC’s building blocks are at war with themselves. The presidency is seething with intrigues and plots, its innards poised to rupture; the National Assembly is under pressure, its leaders facing judicial and political battles that leave them little room to think grandly and nobly; and the party leaders, whether loyal or disaffected, are consumed by mistrust and regret so much so that the inspiring and invigorating ideas that should propel the party into greatness and a place in history have been spurned or buried. But if they have not written themselves off as many have done, including this column, the starting point for them is to develop a great and uplifting idea of democracy. It is not clear which among its four blocks is capable of triggering this revolution; but except they do it, there is no future for them, as the vainglorious PDP found out about two years ago after trying for sixteen years to build something on nothing, and mistaking the building for the scaffold.
A party that does not have a political or governing philosophy cannot be expected to produce a national philosophy; and without a national philosophy, no country can aspire to greatness. Something can never be built on nothing. If the current woes of the PDP do not demonstrate this fact vividly, then compare Vladimir Putin’s more purposeful Russia with Donald Trump’s regressive and ambivalent United States. Also examine Mao Zedong’s imperial and Deng Xiaoping’s reformist China, Kim Il-sung’s grandiloquent North Korea, and the forceful and captivating concepts of Pax Romana, Pax Brittanica, and Pax Americana. Nigeria since its 1960 birth has not shown purpose. Under the directionless PDP, it could not. And under the distracted and dreamy APC, it has become even more hesitant and confused. Yet until the ruling party discovers the beauty of democracy and the loftiness of a governing philosophy, its efforts will end in futility.
