2027: Done deals, dumb deals

“A snake cannot bite you unless it is close to you.” African proverb   There is a something eerily unprecedented about the current circumstances of political parties in Nigeria. In a way, they are the dream of the speculator and a nightmare for politicians looking for firm grounds to stand on as the contests for […]

“A snake cannot bite you unless it is close to you.” African proverb

 

There is a something eerily unprecedented about the current circumstances of political parties in Nigeria. In a way, they are the dream of the speculator and a nightmare for politicians looking for firm grounds to stand on as the contests for mandates in 2027 go through twists and turns. Records, at least going back to 1998 will be poor guides here, no thanks to the massive shift in influence over political choices between the politician and the voter. What we have today is a ruling party bursting with spoils from the opposition and a leadership with seemingly unlimited resources accruing from greed and contempt for accountability. The prospects for halting the drift towards the consolidation of APC’s stranglehold over the entire political and democratic process do not look very encouraging. Since 1999, we have never had such impotence in the opposition, and a level of dominance by the ruling party which can only be explained by prebendal philosophy and practice.

From 1999 until 2015, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stood firm and unbeatable, even boasting at one stage that it will govern Nigeria for 60 years. Its strength was its roots in a national spread of Nigerian politicians who had enjoyed a supporting hand of a retiring military. It could defeat opposition in four elections because it lived with other parties at subnational levels, and the opposition itself was too weak to challenge it until it lost its national image and the capacity to lead the country to defeat security threats and limit corruption.

Still it was, up until this stage, substantially the voter’s democracy, not the politicians’ playground. While history has favoured the narrative that the watershed 2015 election was a reflection of the popularity of Buhari, a more credible version of that election has to acknowledge the hefty hand of the PDP leadership in its own defeat. Indeed, the mass defections of elected people that is now looking routine in our political culture could be said to have genuinely matured when an entire segment of PDP’s foundation changed identity overnight and secured victory for another party. APC built that treachery into its arsenal, and has now turned it into political art.

By the middle of next year, APC is very likely to have at least 30 state governors and control of the same number of state assemblies. It already has 75 per cent of membership of the Senate and the House of Representatives, effectively rendering opposition legislators virtually irrelevant to the most vital responsibilities of  the legislature. When governors defect with ‘their’ legislators, local governments and entire party structures, APC obliterates opposition, and can do just about anything it wants to with the country. The leadership on its platform can change our structural foundations, allocate resources as it wishes and bear on sensitive governance institutions to do its bidding. Even as we speak, President Tinubu is the most powerful President we have had since 1999. Good readers of political systems have consistently observed that our constitution makes the Nigerian president one of the most powerful in the world. Now we face a worst-case scenario: a powerful leader being handed even more power by the very people who should police the dangerous boundaries between democracy and dictatorship. On current form, size, weight and resources, it will be foolhardy to bet against an APC victory in 2027.

There will be Nigerians who will say it is uncharitable to blame the APC for eating up the opposition, when those who should play the opposition role submit themselves to it as snack. They will be right, of course, to the degree that no one has pointed out any illegality in elected people who abandon honour, obligations to their party platforms and citizens who elected them and their parties and rejected those they are defecting to. If the current wave of defections shows the Nigerian politician in the worst light, it is only fair to ask why it has become a badge of honour, particularly among PDP decampees. Answers here are not too difficult to find. The typical Nigerian politician is basically transactional and contemptuous of any moral standards above the ground. PDP politicians set fire on their party a long while ago. Every politician who has defected has made the fire worse. Those who stay lack the imagination and the discipline to close the door against the wind feeding the fire, or eject those fueling it from within. More and more, PDP heavyweights will be confronted with a dilemma: put out the fire or run out and join the ranks of those who lit the fire.

It is very likely that PDP has lost the battle to survive, recover and take on the behemoth that APC has become, either alone or with others. If its fractions swim towards boosting the opposition, they will find two likely allies: small parties without the the frightening muscle and resources to even make a dent on the APC’s ambitions, and the African Democratic Party (ADC) sitting on its hands waiting for a miracle. The APC could collapse from too much weight and poor digestion. Rumps of the PDP, smaller parties and an anaemic ADC could gang up and pull a surprise. There are options, but not everyone has them. We still have a year to go.