By Samuel Ibeh
The Labour Party lost the elections last week in the UK and they will continue to lose until they adjust their post Brexit policies and incorporate a vision of the United Kingdom that is strong , vibrant and competitive outside of Europe.
The success the UK had in handling the pandemic makes the case of the Labour Party weak, untenable and inconsistent with the current National Pride prevalent in the United Kingdom, hence the poor performance of the party in the elections.
The Labour Party will continue to struggle until they come to terms with the fact that the rest of the UK has moved on with respect to Brexit.
Smart politics will require you to adjust your policies and ideologies on the matter, after all politics is essentially to serve the people.
The Party will continue to fail in the polls until they embrace the idea that the UK will be a global power again outside of the EU. It’s a mental decoupling from the EU that’s the matter and unless that is done they may go extinct because the people as the polls show is not with them.
Increasingly it appears that the Labour Party are pushing agendas that are no longer relevant to their constituents or are no longer front burner issues to majority of UK voters.
The bigger issue in the UK going forward will be how the UK subsists in a post Brexit world and Labour Party appears to have lost the debate before it started.
A political party must seat back and align with the people, not doing that would be postponing the obituary of the party.
Like the Labour Party, Like APC !
The issues in 2015 were corruption , insecurity and economy but it appears that the conversation has moved and shifted to how the Southern and Middle parts of Nigeria will like to be cohabiting with the Fulani/Hausa population of the Northwest and Northeast going forward and the parameters for that cohabitation. Beyond that is how the egregiously failing security architecture can be reshaped, restructure and remodelled to reflect the extant challenges of the time.
The debate for 2023 is enormously and exceedingly different and the APC will be behaving like the proverbial ostrich by burying its head in the sand ,refusing to see that the nature and dynamics of the conversation has changed. It’s no longer about infrastructure or social intervention programs but how to demobilize armed non-state actors and deconstructing the ecosystem of terror ravaging Nigeria at the same time.
The current crises in the country is driving conversations along three distinct paradigms while a sizeable section of the country wants the extant status quo to remain unchanged , a group whose secession agitation was at best tangential seem to have garnered mainstream support in the south eastern parts of the country and dormant cries of restructuring has gained traction in the south west.
In the years ahead the conversation will be about restructuring , secession and the modus operandi of maintaining the current structure. Any deviation from the above will be akin to prescribing the right drugs for the wrong disease condition thereby ultimately shipwrecking the Nigerian super-structure.
As the Labour Party unpacks and unbundles the reasons that have made them uncompetitive in the United Kingdom , it is time the ruling APC in Nigeria moves quickly to shape the conversation around current national issues because any attempt to stymie the issues will be met with resistance by the Nigerian voting public.
Indeed the survival of the Nigerian state is hanging in the balance and constitutional solutions that has widespread appeal and broad based representations appears to be the only path forward. The challenge before the ruling party will be to create a propinquity with the people , champion the mainstream causes in the public space and resist the urge to pursue anachronistic and expired ideas that is currently crippling the nation.
To do otherwise is to mimic the error of the UK Labour Party but this will come with devastating consequences. Unlike the Labour Party what’s at stake in Nigeria is the existential certitude of the Nigerian State.
Samuel Ibeh is a Political and Strategy Analyst. He tweets via @ibehsamuel/twitter.com and can be reached via Ibehsamuel@yahoo.co.uk
