APC’s make or break national convention

If friends or supporters of the All Peoples’ Congress (APC) wrote on the Party’s National Convention which is to hold on Saturday 23rd June, they will be more optimistic than the heading of this column suggests. Even they, however, may have to say it will be a make-or-break event. It could make up for a […]

If friends or supporters of the All Peoples’ Congress (APC) wrote on the Party’s National Convention which is to hold on Saturday 23rd June, they will be more optimistic than the heading of this column suggests. Even they, however, may have to say it will be a make-or-break event. It could make up for a party that had bled from when it achieved its prime goal: to make General Muhammadu Buhari President. It could break the party irretrievably if it carried on with a tradition of ignoring its problems, principally, those that cumulatively arose from weaknesses of leadership, poor management of government-party relations and the tendency to leave everything at the doorstep of President Buhari. The problem has been that in most instance things left there tended to stay there.       

On the 23rd of June, there will be an elephant in Eagle Square, in the shape of a party that lacked a strong leadership, and an administration that failed to live up to expectations. No one will address this obvious reality, because the party will be holding a Convention with the sole aim of papering-over yawing gaps in its cohesion, structure and, more importantly, its preparations for the bruising battles of 2019. All the right apologies will be offered to party faithful who would have been offended or ignored by party leaders at the national level, or powerful governors who trampled with impunity over party rules. Promises will be made to re-engineer a party under a new leadership that will create room for everyone; and win the next elections.

A list of anointed candidates will be passed around for endorsement, and huge muscles would be deployed to ensure full compliance. The contraptions knocked together by dozens of meetings between the president and governors, governors and governors, power bookers who produced lists of delegates and candidates still dripping with tears and anger will be unveiled as a consensus list. 

The few that will insist on stepping out of line will be silenced by a choreographed event that will attempt to cover up skeletons and gaping wounds. The elaborate and passionate appeals for forgiveness, healing and rallying of the troops will barely cover deep sulking in many parts of the nation, as a new chapter is opened in the life of a party notorious for ignoring its little fires, or, in many instances, pouring fuel in the belief that bigger fires solve smaller ones. In all likelihood, there will be many of the party’s major problems, unsolved, untreated and unattended, sitting in persons, in front rows with leaders who believe they are tolerable or expendable.

There will be delegates and nominated candidates who are there only because huge numbers of party members and aspirants have been shut out by impunity and injustice at all levels of Congresses. If the party took stock, it will find its assets severely depleted by the processes which produced party leaders and the delegates at the very Convention it is holding. There is also likely to be a full attendance of nPDP members of the APC, that group which defected with a huge chunk of the PDP and used it to prop up the APC at the 2015 elections. This group has been involved in a cat-and-cat game with the party, and whether it jumps or is pushed out, it is certain that it is on its way out of the party. 

The outgoing party leadership had attempted a fence-mending effort with the very little influence it has always mustered, but this has been shot down by a combination of subversion, ineptitude and a shocking understanding of the current political terrain by a few influential politicians in the APC who have opened the door for nPDP’s exit. The President himself has ruled out a personal involvement in addressing the grievances of the nPDP, a group that could very well do to the APC what it did to the PDP. 

This Convention will offer virtually nothing to this group to entice it to stay, so it will appear that this will be the last APC Convention for the likes of Saraki, a politician with a clout the size of his staying power and baggage; Dogara, the most prominent elected Northern Christian who has now been completely shut out of the APC, Governors Tambawal and Abdulfatah, who exercise considerable influence in their States; Senator Kwankwaso with his ubiquitous red caps all over the nation; former Governor Nyako, powerful Senators like Gemade, Aleiro, Goje, Wammako and an assortment of other politicians who pull a lot of weight. Someone in the APC must be calculating that all these legion of the aggrieved, the alienated and the unsatisfied are expendable. 

This is the only possible conclusion in the face of the seeming indifference of President Buhari and his small circle of influence to the fortunes of the party as it prepares to confront a nation with anaemic record and seek for another terms of four years. You will hear a lot on that record on Convention day, and it will all build up to a thunderous endorsement of President Buhari as the sole candidate for the 2019 elections. You will not hear loud reminders that the Convention that produced him back in 2014 as APC flagbearer was a hotly-contested affair, and the fact that there will be an uncanny resemblance between APC’s Convention and that of the PDP in all its years of infamy will be lost to many who think all the party needs to return for another four years is Buhari as President. 

There will be a few at Eagle Square who will chalk up real achievements of the APC administration. They may even attempt to identify a lot more that could have been achieved. If they have a say, they will caution that the levels of insecurity in the land could come back to haunt the Buhari presidency the same way it led to the defeat of Jonathan. 

A one-eyed fight against corruption detracts from its intrinsic value and reduces its importance to the level of a partisan asset. The elephant at Eagle Square will leave little room for contemplation this deep. 

Jamila Abubakar wrote this piece from Abuja