Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: A take on party constitutions and challenges in democracy
Politics is the staple diet of the Nigerian news media. Its pervasive influence on people’s lives and the subsidisation of its coverage ensure this. Governments and their officials, politicians and their political parties provide the steady subsidies that guarantee the predominance of party politics in the news. This is less so in academia. Nigerian political […]
Politics is the staple diet of the Nigerian news media. Its pervasive influence on people’s lives and the subsidisation of its coverage ensure this. Governments and their officials, politicians and their political parties provide the steady subsidies that guarantee the predominance of party politics in the news.
This is less so in academia. Nigerian political parties have not attracted as much attention among academic publishers as they do among news producers. Although academics are constantly teaching the subject in classrooms and lecture halls and analysing it extensively at conferences and seminars, scholarly publications in the field do not seem to keep pace with this.
And that is the gap Dr Aliyu Mukhtar Katsina’s book ‘Party Constitutions and Political Challenges in a Democracy: Nigeria in the Fourth Republic’ seeks to fill. The author, who is a Dean of the Faculty of Social and Management Sciences at Umaru Musa Yar’adua University, Katsina, did a brilliant job of combining scholarly research and good writing skills to provide the much-needed intervention in the area.
The book attempts to extend the literature produced by other scholars. Professor Ken Post’s (1963) ‘The Nigerian Federal Election of 1959’, late Professor Billy Joseph Dudley’s (1968) ‘Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria’, Professor Richard Sklar’s (2004) ‘Nigerian Political Parties’, Professor Richard A. Joseph (1987) ‘Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’, Professor Alkasum Abba’s (2007) ‘The Northern Elements Progressive Union and the Politics of Radical Nationalism in Nigeria’ and John Ayoade and Adeoye Akinsanya’s (2013) edited collection ‘Nigeria’s Critical Election 2011’ are just a few of them. Aliyu’s ‘Party Constitutions’ has joined the list.
The seven-chapter book provides a comprehensive account of the contemporary politics in Nigeria, focusing on political parties, their evolution and development, their prospects and problems. “Unlike many countries where their processes of democratisation were relatively stable and continuous, the experience in Nigeria was until 1999 defined by series of breakdowns occasioned by incessant political instability,” he writes. “As a result, the evolution and development of political parties and party politics were substantially affected, causing their development to become retarded and tying them to the successes and failures of the various democratisation attempts”.
Chapter one details the historical development of party politics in Nigeria, offering background information on the parties and the systems under which they operated during the first, second and third republics – to prepare grounds for the current situation. “The development of party politics and party system in Nigeria passed through at least four evolutionary phases from the period of the First Republic to 1998 when (former Head of States General Sani) Abacha’s death led to a new political programme that culminated into the Fourth Republic,” it states.
Chapter two focuses on the Fourth Republic political parties, highlighting five of them, which were considered strong before the 2014 merger that transformed the country’s political landscape. They were the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). This was prior to the merger of the then opposition parties (ACN, ANPP, CPC and APGA faction) which produced the All Progressives Congress (APC) that eventually becomes the ruling party. The book has not captured the electoral misfortune of the PDP as the research was completed prior to it. A new edition would be needed to provide this update. It does, however, identify the common ills afflicting the parties, which seem to equally affect even the new parties that emerge after its publication. It says: “Besides their dramatically short and seasonal life span, most of the parties that operated in the Fourth Republic suffered from problems associated with elite defections, internal crises, and poor financial bases.”
Chapter three deals with the legal, constitutional and financial matters. Aspects of party laws, party formation and registration and de-registration as well as convention and congresses are all discussed. Relevant provisions of the 1999 Constitution and the 2010 Electoral Act are well analysed. The chapter also touches on the aims and objectives of parties, merger of parties and symbols of parties. But it also points to a yawning gap between words and deeds. “For instance, many among the parties that registered in the Fourth Republic, although parading a national leadership whose composition had met the constitutional requirement of national character principle, in reality these had little structures, if any at all, in other areas beside those of their founders,” it explains. “In most cases, these parties were moribund that only showed signs of life during elections and once elections were over become inactive.”
Chapter four dwells on party constitutions and challenges in the Fourth Republic.
Key features of the constitutions of the main parties are looked at – and so are aspects of character and ethics, mission and vision, membership, governance and policymaking, and relations between party and its elected members. Selections of candidates, zoning policy and campaign issues are also discussed in this chapter. It argues that the parties have similarities and differences in their constitutional designs, areas of priority and approaches. The differences, though, it contends, are “less acute and less clear-cut” than expected in a plural democracy. “In many respects, these parties were factions that stemmed from the same prebendal mentality that defined Nigerian politics for the most part of its statehood,” it says. “Differences between parties were mostly superficial that bordered on approach, but certainly not on the nature of their ideology or contents of their programmes.” Their main concern, it alleges, is winning elections, for which they are willing to subordinate everything, including their principles and ideologies.
Chapter five analyses the role of party constitutions in relation to internal adjustments, ideology, legitimacy of party decisions, and intra-party conflicts.
The then ruling PDP was identified as the party with “the highest cases of internal crises and conflicts among its members. It recorded the highest number of top-level defections, factionalisation, and court cases than any other party”. This prompted the author to raise a question of whether being in power is correlated with high cases of intra-party conflicts. The internal crisis and defections witnessed by the current ruling party APC have probably answered the question, strengthening a case for a second edition of the book.
The way political parties used their constitutions to handle external challenges is the central focus of chapter six. It details two of such challenges. “One, parties deal with the challenge of abiding by extant laws regulating their activities. These laws require them to adopt constitutions as part of the preconditions for their registration as parties by INEC. Two, parties respond to competition from other parties as a common feature of multi-party democracies.” But political parties’ reliance on their constitutions or even Nigerian Constitution and legal system as a whole to handle inter-party rivalries has limitations. Here, too, the desperation for power pushes parties to employ extra-legal means to outwit their rivals. “They relied on primordial attachments for their success in electoral competition,” the book notes, as their experience indicates that “ethnic sentiments, fraud, intimidation, and ability to commit physical violence win elections”. This is the main factor stifling the country’s democratic development, the author argues.
The key conclusions of the book and suggestions for further research are contained in the last chapter, which also offers a summary of the whole work. One of the damning conclusions is that the parties of the Fourth Republic have not shown “any signs of institutionalisation and maturity” in their approaches and behaviours. “In fact, parties in the previous republics showed signs of greater autonomy, institutionalisation, ideological differentiation, discipline, and membership emotional attachment and loyalty,” it states. But the book does not blame the Fourth Republic parties for this failure; it attributes it to the frequent interruptions in the country’s democratic experience, which deny the parties the benefit of “uninterrupted evolution”.
There are some typographical and factual errors that need to be addressed in the second edition, such as this typo “All Nigeria People’s Congress (APC)” in the first paragraph of the Preface and a passage suggesting that the promulgation of Clifford Constitution in 1922 and emergence of Herbert Macaulay’s NNDP “coincided with the end of the Second World War”. They didn’t; the Second World War ended in 1945, more than two decades after those events. And the First ended in 1918, four years before the promulgation of the Clifford Constitution.
But these are mistakes you inadvertently make when you write 227 pages containing massive data, numerous sources and extensive analyses. It is the diligence of the author and copy editor(s) that has kept them to barest minimum. And the result is this excellent book, compulsory reading for anyone interested in Nigerian politics. The clarity of language and thoughts is quite remarkable. The book is also well structured and well illustrated with interesting tables and maps. It reads particularly well. And it certainly enriches our understanding of party politics in Nigeria.