Ochereome Nnanna
25 August 2008
opinion
LET me start this article by illustrating how politicians behave in genuine political cultures. By that, it means that we in Nigeria are being treated to the fake politics that eight years of General Ibrahim Babangida's transition programme imposed on us, whereby politicians are in the game for power and would take any short cut towards achieving it.
It does not matter what degree of injury it does to the system.
This topic is coming on the heels of the current call for an interim government by a group of political parties under the umbrella of self-styled Nigeria United for Democracy (NUD).
I am picking three countries of the third world to illustrate my point. One of them is Ghana, right here in West Africa, with which we share so much in common that a Ghanaian can pass for a Nigerian and vice versa.
In Nigeria, four heads of state - General Yakubu Gowon, General Ibrahim Babangida, General Sani Abacha and President Olusegun Obasanjo - sought, all means hooked or crooked, to extend their tenure in office but failed. But in Ghana, retired Flight Lieutenant John Jerry Raw-lings, after ruling his country for over twelve years, successfully transformed into a civilian president.
He governed for additional two terms of four years each. His political party, the National Democratic Council (NDC), was, in fact, an offshoot of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), his military parliament.
His successor, John Kuffour of the NPP, has openly rejected suggestions that he should move for tenure extension after his two terms. If it were Nigerian politicians at play, Rawlings' tenure extension would have been cited as a legitimate precedent and an excuse for Kuffour to do the same.
When Ghana was preparing for civilian rule in 1990, there were many political parties jostling for power, but three of them - NDC, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the People's National Convention (PNC) - were the most prominent.
Today, Ghana is a functional two party state, even though up to seventeen political parties are on the nominal roll. The fact that the PNDC rode on its power of incumbency to win two democratic elections under Rawlings did not, in any way, faze the main opposition, the NPP.
Rather, the latter seized upon NDC's weaknesses of foisting an expensive IMF-modelled economy on Ghana to beat the NDC after Rawlings exhausted his maximum two terms. NPP's two terms will soon expire. If Ghanaian politicians were fakes like their counterparts in Nigeria, everybody would have trooped into the NDC.
If Abacha had not died suddenly in May 1998, he would probably still be ruling through the United Nigerian Congress Party (UNCP), one of his five political parties which had taken the commanding lead in the mold of today's People's Democratic Party (PDP).
But, by resisting the temptation of joining the NDC bandwagon, Ghanaian politicians gave Ghana a vibrant political culture where there are real choices before the electorate.
The second country I want to visit is Pakistan. This is another country with a colonial background similar to ours with series of violent military dictatorships.
Emboldened by the direct support of Western powers, the military regimes of Generals Zia Ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf cracked down heavily on the civilian political class which sought to chart independent, homegrown Pakistani course of political destiny for its people.
Ul Haq hanged many civilian politicians when he took over power. One of them was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Bhutto's first child, beautiful Benazir, who was Ivy League Western educated, braved the odds of Haq's dictatorship and returned to Pakistan to set the stage for the return of democracy in her country.
When Haq died in an air crash in August 1988 Bhutto's daughter won an election to succeed her father's murderer. She thus emerged as the first elected woman leader of any Muslim country in history. She went on to get elected again in 1993, and was on course for another tenure in December 2006 when she was assassinated.
Another Pakistani politician, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was overthrown by Musharraf, boldly returned from exile in spite of intimidations and joined the democratic fray. He helped form a coalition that, on August 18th 2008, forced Musharraf to step down as President of Pakistan. Pakistani politics is replete with the uncommon courage of members of its political class.
It took courage for Musharraf to step down after consulting with his friends, allies and supporters when faced with imminent impeachment. He could have called out his tanks, not minding the consequences of forcing himself on the people.
My final port of call is Africa's own Zimbabwe. Though it also has British colonial history behind it, it has never been ruled by military dictators. Rather, a single civilian dictator in the person of Robert Mugabe has led Zimbabwe since the end of minority rule in 1980 when he was elected Prime Minister.
He transformed into President in 1987. During his 28 years in power, he effectively neutralised his closest rival, Joshua Nkomo, and thus made his Zimbabwe African National Party (Patriotic Front) ZANU-PF, the dominant party in his country.
But the initial bandwagon that led a tired Nkomo to integrate into Mugabe's political platform did not endure because a man of courage and conviction, Morgan Tsvangirai, and his colleagues rose to form an opposition party they called Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
It was an offshoot of the country's Labour movement, which transformed into a political party in 1999. It has endured Mugabe's civilian dictatorship, his brutal crackdowns and stolen elections as well as allegations of plots to overthrow Mugabe with the help of Western powers.
In June 2008, the MDC defeated Mugabe in an election which was later deferred for a run-off. Following the MDC's refusal to participate in the run-off, Mugabe "won" an election in which he was the sole candidate, but was later forced into the ongoing negotiation with Tsvangirai towards the formation of some kind of government of national unity. It is now evident that the MDC is Zimbabwe's democratic future.
In all three countries mentioned above, the single denominator is the courage and vision of opposition politicians, who were determined to stay in the game to make a difference. But, in Nigeria, we have seen a tendency for dominant parties to become stronger as time goes on while the other parties get smaller after every election.
Last Thursday, at the campaign for the rerun governorship poll of Cross River State, the National Chairman of the PDP, Dr. Vincent Ogbulafor, reiterated that PDP will be in power for, at least, fifty years.
He did not advance the reason for his prophecy, such as achievements of his party over the past nine years.
He did not reel out facts and figures to show how his party has made life more abundant for Nigerians, which will make them to continue to vote PDP for another fifty years. Rather, what we are seeing is that PDP could be in power for longer than fifty years, given the worsening incapacity of rival parties to compete for power.
The situation has become so bad that any PDP governor sent back to the polls by an election tribunal actually rejoices because his tenure is thusly granted tenure extension.
Politicians are drifting to the ruling party because of the "come-and-eat" syndrome that Babangida introduced into our body politic, whereby govern-ment own political parties, rather than vice versa.
On the other hand, political leaders who have not yet joined the ruling party are completely bereft of ideas about how to get back into contention. So, they go back to another Babangida invention: the call for an interim government. Pray, how can an interim government ever ensue in the middle of an elected civilian's term of office?
The only way an interim government can arise is through a military intervention. When political parties call for an interim government, they are actually inviting the military to seize power. They want the proverbial short cut.
And, yet, some of the political actors behind these calls have contested many elections and failed to produce one single elected individual.
Both the ruling party and the opposition factions of the Nigerian political community have failed our democracy.
The ruling party is unable to produce democratically elected and performing leaders, while the opposition is unable to capitalise on this failure to provide an alternative like in Ghana, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Instead, they want a coup.
Our political class is a fake!
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