Paying the cost of sit-tight leadership
Ever since the awful performance of the CPC in the presidential, governorship and House of Assembly elections, the moral authority of this clique has been severely weakened. Whenever they call a meeting for reconciliation or other reasons, members of the party’s chapters across the country hardly respond to the invitation. Can the CPC leaders be […]
Ever since the awful performance of the CPC in the presidential, governorship and House of Assembly elections, the moral authority of this clique has been severely weakened. Whenever they call a meeting for reconciliation or other reasons, members of the party’s chapters across the country hardly respond to the invitation. Can the CPC leaders be preaching democracy when their own conduct or the manner they run the party breaches basic democratic practices? Throwing light on the undemocratic power structure in the CPC national leadership, the Party’s Senatorial candidate in the April elections in Kano State, Alhaji Usman Alhaji, said there is no way the CPC can move forward with this clique clinging to power. According to him, of the 63 parties we have in Nigeria, their national executive committees consist of state chairmen of the respective parties. But in the CPC, he regretted, the state chairmen of the party are not NEC members.
He therefore, recommended that for the CPC to look forward to the future with hope, the national leadership of the party must be dissolved and replaced by caretaker committees, representing the 36 states of the country. The CPC senatorial candidate also advised that the party’s constitution should be reviewed because it currently gives power only to 20 persons to decide the fate of the party across the country. The despotic style in which the party is run has created a disturbing alienation between the leadership and the party chapters across the country.
When leaders are entrusted with power and responsibility, they should not abuse such privilege by imposing their candidates at the expense of those who were duly and democratically elected by the people. In Kano State for example, the CPC conducted direct primaries but strangely the national leadership of the party took away the results and refused to announce the winners for forty days to enable them manipulate the outcome to favour their own anointed candidates.
As the results were kept close to their chest, the atmosphere became heavy with suspicion that the national leadership of the party was up to some chicanery. Why should the results of the primaries be kept a secret for so long if the party leadership was sincere and believed in its own message of transparency? What the national leadership of the CPC had failed to recognize is that it is impossible to fool the people for so long without their motives coming to light as it eventually did.
The whole idea of withholding the results of the primaries was designed to create a fait accompli for those to be substituted with the candidates of the national leaders. They were determined to impose their own candidates whether they won the primaries or not. In fact, nobody knew the party’s official candidates until few days to the election, by which time it might be too late for cheated candidates to legally challenge their substitution with those who lost the primaries.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be one of the dumbest political decisions any party could ever have made to handle the consequences of imposition and substitution of candidates. In the case of Kano State, INEC initially refused to accept the name of Colonel Lawal Ja’afaru Isa because it was a witness to the election of Mohammed Abacha at the party’s gubernatorial primaries. He won 144,000 votes to defeat Col. Isa who came a distant second with 78,000 votes. Curiously, the CPC national leadership submitted Isa’s name to INEC, insisting that they had the prerogative to choose candidates. If that is the case, why should the party leaders waste the voters’ time by asking them to come out to exercise their franchise and then treat their freedom of choice with open and arrogant contempt?
The Professor Jega-led INEC did its best to ensure internal democracy was respected by the CPC leadership but they refused to see reason. They ignored the fact that those substituted have massive popular support and their followers felt righteously angered. In fact, only men living in the moon can run modern democracy with command mentality. No wise party leaders should take the feelings of the voters for granted or else they may receive a backlash beyond their imagination? Self-righteousness opens the path to folly and costly mistakes.
Aggrieved members of the party and supporters have rejected the current reconciliation efforts by the national leadership of the CPC, mainly because of their conviction that the leaders are responsible for the party’s avoidable losses at the elections. Strangely, instead of having the honour to resign for mismanaging the good will of the party, the national leaders are still chasing shadows and punishing the wrong people for their own costly mistakes or miscalculation.
This clique is the major problem of the party and it should, therefore, no longer claim any right to remain in office or punish anyone else for your own misjudgment that cost your party dearly. Such is the moral challenge facing the clique currently holding the CPC by the jugular vein because they seem to have effectively cast a spell on General Buhari who appears rendered powerless to save the party from their ineptitude.
As the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Spiritual leader said, “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” Obsessed with a myth of indispensability, this clique is still systematically destroying the CPC by refusing to give way, despite a clear and unmistakable message that they have lost the trust and respect of the larger membership of the party across the country. General Buhari now has a choice between keeping this clique in power, despite the disaster they brought upon the party and charting a better future for the once formidably promising party. A leader must take tough decisions, including, if necessary, dispensing with his own trusted friends, when they turned to be a drag on the CPC. It remains to be seen whether General Buhari will ultimately take the bull by the horns to save the CPC from a clique that holds the party hostage to its whims and caprices.
Shehu wrote from 19, Monrovia Crescent, Wuse II, Abuja. [email protected]