No party supremacy when reliance on executive is high – Don

Professor of Political Science, Kayode Esuola, in a chat with our correspondent said the supremacy of the party cannot be asserted where the political party is at the beck and call of the executive which calls the shots at the federal and state levels.   There seems to be so much influence on the party’s […]

Professor of Political Science, Kayode Esuola, in a chat with our correspondent said the supremacy of the party cannot be asserted where the political party is at the beck and call of the executive which calls the shots at the federal and state levels.

 

There seems to be so much influence on the party’s leadership as the APC holds its national convention where the current set of leaders would be ratified. What is your view?

In principle, the party should be supreme, so supreme that it can even dictate to and destabilise the president of a republic.

That’s the principle. So if that principle is there, and that party does not command the armed forces, economic and material resources, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for that structure to implement whatever idea that it has. And that is what is playing out in Nigeria.

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When you play politics in the Third World, where public goods are absolutely in shortage, where the state does not have structure to take care of individuals, everybody then depends on the executive. And once you depend, you understand the full meaning of that dependency, it is the person you are dependent upon who dictates everything. And that is what is exactly playing out in the case of Nigeria.

 

Is this in tandem with democratic principles?

Whether it is in tandem with democratic principles or not, it will be judgemental. What democracy says, unfortunately so, as I always emphasise, is that the collective will decide. But what informs the decision of the collective? Democracy is not interested in that.

So if the collective, as individuals, takes money, and they use the influence of that money to make decisions, we cannot query it, because we are still the collective. There we say, this is what we want as a people, and there is no way you can dislodge that. And that is why I have always insisted that in Africa, the system is not mature for the Western kind of democracy that we are playing.

Because once the society still depends on the executive to breathe, to eat, to drink, to send the children to school, without independent structures of the state, they will always support what the executive says.

And as it is now, the president is the head of the executive, and on his mandate, all of them will stand. You see what is playing on at the Senate and the House of Representatives? What the president says to them because he is the commander-in-chief who determines everybody’s resources and all those things.

All of them, even when they don’t agree ideologically, all of them will promise that they want to stand on his mandate. And that is again what is playing out in the party convention and every other structure of the country. Will this then be a peculiar situation in African democratic politics?

I think that is what we should begin to theorise, rather than saying these are the ideal principles of democracy. Those ideals came from somewhere, and they operated within certain structures of the economy and the political system. They cannot work in Africa.

They have not been able to work in Africa. The reason they cannot and will not be able to work in Africa, I have just stated to you. And so, this must be the African ideal, as it were.

If we now compare and contrast and see the one that is much better than the other, we can then begin to recommend the other for Africa. That’s the way I see it.

 

We’ve had three APC national chairmen under the current administration? What does that portend?

There are two ways of looking at it. If you go and look at what they put on paper, the reason for changing the chairman, you want to start your objective explanation from there. Is it age? Is it corruption? Is it lack of discipline? Is it a lack of administrative competence? At any point when anybody is removed from office, in this particular case, we’re talking about the chairmanship of APC, there must be a reason. So if you go by these reasons, I’m sure you’ll be compelled to take agree  on the reasons they put on paper.

Maybe corruption, maybe lack of competence, maybe lack of loyalty. You will agree with them that that situation warrants and indeed demands the removal or replacement of that person. But then, the other dimension to it is that we all know why decisions like this are taken in Nigeria.

It has to do with the loyalty to the president, with the loyalty to the powers that be within the presidency, rather than that of the party ideologically because the party does not even have any ideology in the first place.

But when they are removing, they will not put those reasons as the reasons. And so when you are analysing, you are only analysing based on speculation.

If you look at the reasons they give on paper, you will agree with them or be tempted to agree with them. But if you look at the inherent systemic reason, which is never put on paper anyway, I don’t think President Tinubu that you know will remove a chairman of a party and say it is because he is not loyal to him. No way. That will never come on paper. But we can read to it as political observers and political analysts based on antecedents of these people. And that’s the situation we’ve found ourselves in. Again, this is likely to be a peculiar thing to African politics.

And that is why we are saying African politics is different from the kind of politics we have seen in other parts of the world. Because history, situations, and circumstances of politics are completely different. And of course, we shall continue to operate it until we get it much better than it is now.

 

What are your expectations?

Except for the reason of analysis, I will boldly tell you that I personally do not have any expectations. Because the system is not running the way we expect it to run. So the expectation is nothing but whatever the President of the republic desires.

And this is what is likely to come up at this level. And as you mentioned, because Nigeria cannot pragmatically say that we have a credible opposition at this point, maybe we have in terms of mind. But in terms of structure, there is not likely to be any opposition. Because as you mentioned, almost all the governors in the 36 states of the Nigerian Federation have decided to pledge loyalty to the APC and stand upon the mandate of Mr. President.

But sometimes politics is not mathematics. I do not think that the fact that somebody in Rivers or in Bayelsa defects to APC is enough for the person to work for APC in 2027. Remember they are also politicians and strategizing.

If they see a situation in which if they do not join this bandwagon and defect to APC, ‘I will find myself in the net of EFCC either for the right or wrong reasons’. Nobody would know that the activist ex-governor engaged in so much corruption until they had problems with the ruling class and they decided to send EFCC to him. So if you watch that pattern in Nigeria, you probably will understand why many of these governors would not want to be left behind sitting in PDP or in any other party when they know. The ruling party is not hiding that, that once you join their party, you automatically become a saint. So you need to look like a saint to be able to win an election in the next dispensation. That is what is moving.

You need to look like a saint for you not to be interrupted by the instrumentalities of the state. That is one of the reasons. But I think politically, this tide can change, especially when ideology does not cohere at a particular point.

So in summary, I don’t have any expectations. My only expectation is what I think people will do based on what the president decides.

The interesting thing about social affairs is that you cannot predict how it will boomerang. It is extremely artificial for a country of 250 million people to tilt towards one political party.

For whatever reason, it is absolutely artificial. So that artificiality is also telling you that the idea that all of them are in APC may also be artificial to the extent that it does not promise anybody any reality at the end of the day. There could be surprises and those surprises will be part of my expectation.