These are not the best of times for APC. The party is not standing pretty; and it is not looking pretty. It is impossible for the party to find a rational explanation for what it is doing to itself in the national assembly. It is merely rationalising it the best way it can to reassure the public that such arrant behaviours are not strange to politics and politicians.
And it is not the best of times of those of us who, from the birth of the party, believed in what it stands for, even if what it stands for has been more vague than concrete. We are forced to live in self-denial for the sake of our sanity and for the sake of keeping hope alive. We are asking questions like these: Is what is happening to the party in the national assembly really happening? Will it have a happy ending or will it be an axe at the roots of the party?
The most common and primitive response to it so far is that it is democracy in action. It is not. Democracy in action has become the harlot of all political arguments because of its capacity to draw red herrings across the path of serious reasoning and rational arguments. However much we try to put some spin on it to moderate our personal anxiety, the truth is that we find the behaviour of the APC politicians, in and out of the national assembly, profoundly disturbing. If the party unravels, throwing the country into avoidable chaos, would it still be democracy in action or the cynical raping of democracy?
In my eager support for the party, I never lost sight of the fact that we are not dealing with a party of angels but a party of flawed and ambitious men and women, some of whom are prepared to sell their mothers if it would help them realise their political ambitions. That is not as unfeeling as you might think. Old mothers are dispensable. I knew that the cobbling of four or five political parties together to form a new one would not necessarily cure a consuming individual ambition for power. Every political grouping, be it a political party or a faction therein, is a search for an easy route to political power by individuals and groups of persons. Like the tortoise we live with the shells fashioned for us by circumstances and the structure of our political belief.
I had no reasons to believe then and none now, that because APC promised a new kind of leadership, political opportunism would be banished to its outer reaches. Nor did I have any reasons to believe that treachery, usually a strong suite among politicians, would have no room in APC. Betrayal is often the name of the game among politicians because in the contest for political power, all politicians subscribe to the belief that the end justifies the means. If it takes opportunism as the means to reach the top of the totem pole, no problem; if it takes treachery to achieve the same purpose, no problem.
My problem is not with those who have hijacked power in the national assembly in the name of democracy in action – Saraki, Dogara and even dashed the deputy senate presidency to the rival PDP – and the rest of them. You cannot blame them for taking advantage of the opportunity created by the party for this sort of thing to happen. It dillied and it dallied and now finds itself in the embarrassing position of holding the short end of the stick.
We cannot run away from the fact that in chucking out the zoning formula, these men have destroyed the power configuration in the country and put the present and the future of our country and its democracy in jeopardy. If democracy must be in action it must take into consideration those things that make it the most preferred form of government in the world. A political party is not a mere convenient platform for gaining power. And it should never be so treated. In a country managing its democracy, as we are, a sudden blow to its solar plexus invites nightmare.
I saw it coming. In a column I wrote for Blueprint newspaper about a week before Muhammed Buhari assumed office, I argued that the decision of the party “not to use zoning to pick the principal officers of the national assembly because, (according to Chief Bisi Akande) ‘we don’t want to copy PDP,” was wrong headed.
There is nothing PDP about the zoning system. But just to make sure we did not mistake APC for PDP, Akande said if necessary, the party was willing to conduct primaries to pick the senate president. Now, they never had a chance to conduct those primaries. Now, we have men who ignored their party and picked up the crown as senate president and speaker of the house of representatives – because the APC has been laggard and opened itself to power grab and anarchic chaos.
The national chairman of the party, Chief John Oyegun, supported the zoning formula but his sane, lone voice must have been drowned by the strident voices of the members of the party who felt that the formula was analogue, not digital politics.
I argued in my piece under reference: “The decision of the APC leaders to ditch the zoning formula is patently retrogressive. The six geo-political zones were not created by PDP. It was a formula arrived at after some hard headed thinking by the likes of the late Major-General Shehu Yar’Adua on the best way to manage political power in the country. This geo-political arrangement protects the political interests of the big tribes and their smaller cousins, north and south. The six zones have been the acceptable basis for power sharing in the country since the Abacha regime adopted it.
“It has worked and been accepted as a sensible approach to a fair distribution of important political offices at the executive and the legislative branches of government at national and state levels. Its mediating capacity has helped to stabilize the polity and created a sense of belonging among us. It is unwise to ditch it now. A free for all struggle for the principal offices of the national assembly is a clear and dangerous recipe for chaos and retrogression.”
Now, the party that promised us change is dancing on the brink because a) it is unable to manage its success and redirect its focus and energy towards a determined end; b) the party of a disciplined president is swinging from the boughs of its indiscipline and c) APC has served us notice “that it is an amalgam of political forces pulling in different directions. It would be a short hop from winning the elections to turning its huge public goodwill into a deficit.”
President Buhari and the leaders of his party need to rally the troops. There is too much at stake for them and the country to behave in the face of these monumental challenges, as if there is nothing to worry about. There is; lots of it. A fractured national assembly weakens this important second pillar of the structure of a democratic government and imperils good governance.
