Just read the postscript by Mr. Waziri Adio at the back of today’s Thisday, February 2, 2025. First, it is quite commendable that Mr. Adio is able to establish the connection between the initiative to organise the Conference with the theme Strengthening Nigeria’s Democracy: Pathways to Good Governance and Political Integrity and permutations for 2027. Perhaps, on account of the strong participation of many leading opposition and displaced politicians at the conference, there are wrong perceptions about who the true organisers are. As a privileged member of both the opposition and displaced politicians, one can say very clearly that the conference was purely the initiatives of the civil society groups led by the Centre LSD and their partners. What we only did was to take full advantage of the platform of the conference to advocate for political reforms in the country. Once we are fortunate to have the information about the conference, we took every necessary step to mobilise ourselves and take full advantages of the conference to begin to influence public debates and national conversations to advocate for political reforms in the country.
In doing that, two issues were considered fundamental. These were electoral and political parties’ reforms. Both in terms of the interventions by many leading politicians and the resolutions of the conference, this was achieved. The sad reality is that the APC, instead of engaging the issues, both as a party and government in power became contemptuous. This further exposes the reactionary and authoritarian orientation of the APC. In fact, the mere fact that the APC and many officials of the government were invited but failed to honour the invitations is indicative that the APC is no longer the envisioned progressive party, which Nigerians rally behind in 2015 to get the PDP out of power. Being a party and a government that is completely alienated, just like the PDP in 2015, it despises initiatives that seeks to mobilise Nigerians to address national challenges.
If the truth must be told, the APC is in fact frightened by such initiatives, which is why their spokespersons at all levels made venomous public statements, almost as if we are in military governments. Many statements issued by both Mr. Bayo Onanuga and Mr. Felix Morka were sad reminders of the kind of statements by our late Comrade Uche Chukwumereji during the General Babangida era. Messrs. Onanuga and Morka’s statements in recent times are almost like plagiarised statements of Comrade Chukwumereji who was the spokesperson of the government of Gen. Babangida.
Coming back to the conference on Strengthening Democracy in Nigeria and the issues raised by Mr. Adio, somehow, Mr. Adio also made the fundamental mistake of engaging the issues with the prism of an average Nigerian politician. When, for instance, he reduced the issues based on the question of whether opposition politicians can unite to produce a candidate who can defeat the APC, he unfortunately misses the fundamental issue, which is the need to change our current political framework to ensure that at the minimum we have a functional political party that can at least guarantee political competition in the country. The functionality of the party must translate to being able to set the right rules and enforce them through competitive negotiations and contracting the appropriate agreements. A major political travesty is that we have a so-called democracy that is adversary to political competition.
In the last one year, or so, I have had the privilege of engaging virtually all leading opposition and displaced politicians. The discomforting reality is that while all opposition and displaced politicians agree on the need to work together to defeat the APC and President Tinubu, many want to do so on the conditions that they will emerge as the successors to President Tinubu. The question of building a functional party that can have the capacity of subordinating them is never part of their consideration. Instead, the same issues about North/South permutations, which Mr. Adio highlighted are the focus. Across the North/South divide, many of the leading politicians, especially those with ambitions, both expressed and implied, use the issue of where the most likely candidate will come from as the primary consideration.
The worrying reality is that many of these opposition and displaced politicians with ambitions are highly complicit and have little or no evidential credentials of emerging as better political leaders. Based on laypersons legal knowledge, many of these politicians would be adjudged to being accessories, whether before or after, to our current political travesty. Given their records of service, they are most likely to be worse than former Presidents Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari and now President Tinubu. Based on their records, they exhibit intolerant dispositions and poor relationships on accounts of which they have mismanaged their transitions and are today hardly in control of political structures in their states. Some of them, on account of their influential roles in past administrations and the failures of those administrations should be humble enough to take a backseat in effort to build a strong coalition to strengthen Nigerian politics. Instead, it is more like a case of unrepentant show of shame.
It is quite troubling that politics in Nigeria is being reduced to discussing personalities at the expense of critical political institutions that should regulate the conducts of elected leaders. Even when assumed popular leaders such as former President Buhari and President Tinubu shortchanged citizens and the nation, we overlooked the fundamental issues that undermines the capacity of these leaders to meet the expectations of Nigerians, which is about building a veritable and functional political party, whose absence is responsible with why we end up with leaders who are emperors.
Once that remains the case, it should be clear to all that even when opposition and displaced politicians unite to defeat APC and President Tinubu in 2027, the country may end up with another bad, if not worse, leader. Given that in terms of guaranteeing political competition, the situation we are confronting as a nation today is worse than what we had in 2015, we must summon the courage to go beyond the sentiment of just defeating APC and President Tinubu in 2027. In many respects, I am in full agreement with Mr. Peter Obi when he addressed the press after the opening session of the conference that he will not support any coalition of opposition to APC if it is just for power grab.
Any analysis of permutations for 2027 must therefore address the big challenge of what must be done to ensure that anybody who succeeds President Tinubu in 2027 must work to meet the expectations of citizens. Even in the context of power shift, of what use is power shift to any region if in the end citizens of the same region where the President comes from are shortchanged? What has South-West got to show for the tenure of former President Olusegun Obasanjo? What has South-South got to show for the tenure former President Jonathan? The same could be asked in relation to the North and the tenure of both former Presidents Umaru Yar’Adua and Buhari.
What will be different if another President emerged whether from the North or South in 2027 to succeed President Tinubu? Many of us are engaging these issues with the objective of changing the reality of our democracy. Of course, we must also acknowledge that many leading opposition and displaced politicians are engaging the issues with the old mindset of power grab. So long as that is the case, we may succeed in producing a new party and end up with a dysfunctional party, which will be reduced to being a platform for aspiring candidates. The first indicator will be that the new party will be handed to preferred aspirants who will proceed to appoint leaders of the party and emerge as candidates for 2027. Already, one of the tendencies among the displaced politicians, which is closely associated with former President Buhari is working to impose itself as the leaders of the new opposition party. That tendency is already syndicating media reports about the new party. Painfully, the tendency lacks the needed humility to have the required self-appreciation and recognition of its poor electoral prospects. Some of the opposition and displaced leaders are also similarly restlessly positioning themselves to control any emerging party that could be the platform for the contest against APC and President Tinubu without humbly recognising their poor electoral prospects.
I wish Mr. Adio’s assessment of permutations for 2027 has gone beyond the superficial realm of potential North/South debate. We must avoid indulging Nigerian politicians, whether North or South, opposition or displaced, whatever, on their flimsy narrow ambitions without relating it with their capacity to develop the right relationship, which is required to guarantee electoral prospects. To what extent could any prospective coalition produce a political shift in the right direction towards building a functional party, which have the capacity to regulate the conduct of elected representatives to meet the expectations of citizens?
Some of the restless opposition and displaced leaders can only emerge as candidates through imposition because they are incapable of developing strong relations. Many of them are not interested in developing the needed relationship with their peers on account of which they can win primary elections. So long as the emergence of candidates for 2027 in the new opposition party is based on imposition, then the potential of producing a President who will be different from former President Buhari and President Tinubu will be weak and therefore the prospect of producing a worse President will be very high.
The challenge is to begin to produce a new reality. Producing a new reality is about focusing on producing a new party that will be oriented to produce its leadership through competitive practices. Two important preconditions are necessary. These are that all opposition and displaced politicians must subordinate their ambitions to the bigger task of party building. On no account must anyone of them seek to entrench themselves in the new party based on strategy of imposing leaders of the party at any level in order to gain advantage and emerge as the candidates of the party. Anyone who violate this condition should be disqualified from contesting party primary.
The second condition is that the orientation of the new party must be rule based. The organs of the party and its leadership must not be subordinated to elected representatives. For this to happen, it simply means that the funding challenge of the new party must be clearly defined. The party must have its independent sources of funding. For this to happen will require that the new party produce credibly respected leaders who are not surrogates of elected representatives who will reduce the party to a parastatal of government. For this to happen would require that some of the leaders with the ambition to emerge as Presidential candidates for 2027 elections drop their ambitions and become leaders of the party. This is the big test of the commitment of many of these leaders to strengthening Nigerian democracy. So long as the commitment of politicians is only straightjacketed in their personal ambitions to emerge as candidates for general elections, it simply highlights weak or absence of commitment to democracy. This highlights the point made by His Excellency, Dr. Mahamudu BAWUMIA, former Vice President of Republic of Ghana, in his Keynote Address to the Conference when argued that the ambitions of politicians to the country superseding their personal ambitions.
How many opposition or displaced politicians will make the sacrifice to substitute their ambitions to emerge as candidates for 2027 with being leaders of the party. How many opposition and displaced Nigerian politicians can truly say that their ambition to develop or strengthen Nigerian democracy is superior to their personal ambition to contest elections? Inability to make sacrifices reduces many political leaders in Nigeria to the status of former President Buhari and President Tinubu. It is not by accident that neither former President Buhari nor President Tinubu consider it important to lead the APC in 2015 and subordinated the party to only serving their ambitions to become Presidents of the Federal Republic. Now that they have achieved their ambitions, they have exhibited their true undemocratic credentials and have taken the APC to its political grave. The big challenge is whether the funeral rites of APC in 2027 will be reduced to celebration of new leaders with similar credentials.
As Nigerians, we must stand up to Nigerian politicians, especially opposition and displaced politicians and tell them enough is enough. Notwithstanding the fact that, thanks to the civil society organisations that organised last week’s conference, there are renewed public agitations towards strengthening Nigerian democracy to ensure it meets the expectations of citizens, we must not allow Nigerians to be hoodwinked by the narrow ambitions of politicians to grab power and use it to advance personal ambitions. To achieve that is to push the frontiers of public debate about challenges facing Nigerian democracy beyond the narrow prism of political ambitions of opposition and displaced politicians. Now that the consensus about uniting opposition and displaced politicians has been achieved, we must insist that the negotiations to produce a new political reality should require them to substitute their ambition to emerge as candidates with becoming leaders of the new party.
Just imagine Alh. Atiku Abubakar, or Mr. Peter Obi, or Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, or or Dr. Kayode Fayemi, or Sen. Aminu Waziri Tambuwal or Mal. Nasir El-Rufai, or other opposition and displaced leaders with ambitions to contest becoming leaders of the new party. Imagine all these people decide that in order to lay a solid foundation for the emergence of strong party, all of them or majority of them will instead aspire to become part of the leaders of the new party. Certainly, if that happens, the new party can guarantee collegiate leadership similar to what we had in second republic political parties especially the NPN. Failure to have that could simply mean that the new party risked being oriented in old ways with political culture of imposition becoming dominant.
Part of what must be acknowledged is that Nigerians are tired of new parties emerging and seeking to assume power based on the vulnerability the ruling party. This much was acknowledged my Mr. Adio. To go beyond that is not to indulge the political ambitions of politicians the way Mr. Adio did. The task is to produce a functional party which set the required rules and has the capacity of enforcement. Whether the Presidential candidate of the party should come from South or North, it must be arrived at as internal decision of the party based on capacity to actualise it.
Both with respect to PDP in 1998 and APC in 2023, Nigeria’s political history show that it is possible for the struggle to enforce the choice of Presidential candidate to come from a particular section of the country based on recognition of the need for inclusivity and balanced political considerations. Once these debates are taken outside the structures of the party and are driven by primordial sentiments, the prospects of betrayal and internal sabotage are high as was demonstrated in PDP. The flip side is also that we can achieve power shift and so-called balancing that ends up eroding the welfare and living conditions of citizens including the section of the country where the President comes from, which is what the case of APC and President Tinubu represent.
Being someone who has had the privilege of engaging virtually all opposition and displaced leaders in the last one year, one of the question I tried to pose to all of them is whether they want to replicate the realities which drove the aspirations of former President Buhari and President Tinubu by imposing their personal ambitions and ensuring that they achieve it even if in the end it destroy their political credentials as selfless people committed to national development. Or do they want to cut a new trajectory of taking the path of honour and providing new political leadership to the country. The new desirable political leadership required is that of selflessness, which can unite both politicians and citizens in the country in a new direction. The new direction if it has any potential to strengthening Nigerian democracy should promote political competition both internally within the new party and nationally.
As it is, the mindset of most opposition and displaced political leaders is more inclined towards blocking political competition in the country. The truth is that any political leader who is prioritising the debate about power shift over and above building a strong political party, which can set the rules and enforce it, may only be hiding behind such arguments to impose himself/herself and perhaps invariably continue the political practice of emperors and dictators. Everything must be done to depart from that and create new political reality in the country. If APC is a failure, we must not allow the ambitions of politicians to hold us captive. 2027 present us with the opportunity to re-orient Nigerian democracy and return it to the path of producing political leaders through competition. I am confident that, just like Nigerian are able to stand up the military and win the struggle for democracy, we can stand up to politicians and win the struggle for competitive political contest in the country and defeat the culture of imposition, which has destroyed both the PDP and APC.
