Adamu Adamu
13 November 2008
column
The People's Democratic Party, PDP, of Nigeria, reputedly the biggest party in Africa north, south, east or west of the Sahara, is going ten.
If they celebrate the event, then all of the credit must go to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, because the PDP that was formed in 1998 died in 1999 when he took over power from General Abdulsalami Abubakar, and within eight years, he was able to immolate, cremate and inter it. The party that we have today is his invention.
It all began with the death of General Sani Abacha in June 1998 along with his famous self-succession bid-the original tazarce. Of course, it is a moot point now to say and ask whether Nigeria would not have been better off if he had survived and actualized that bid. Whatever one might say about Abacha today, no one would disagree that he was a no-nonsense, focused, authoritarian strongman who had the entire country in his grip. And what a grip it was!
When the general was alive, all the politicians were effectively dead, very, very dead-with the sole exception of Alhaji M. D. Yusuf who, either out of raw courage or a belief in his own untouchabilty, defied and dared Abacha. M. D. Yusuf lit the light-at the end of the tunnel-for others to see and follow. But with Abacha, you could never be sure whether the light that you saw at the end of the tunnel was not the headlights of an oncoming speed train. It would not just light the way for you; it would crush you before you moved.
When nothing happened to M. D. Yusuf, others began toying with the idea of giving effective opposition to Abacha, if only for the sake of posterity. Even before Yusuf, however, General Shehu 'Yar Adua had become something of a gadfly-a very effective one at that; and after him, others did protest with a letter-the Group of 34.
After Abacha's death, the coast became clear and the G 34 along with 'Yar Adua's formidable People's Democratic Movement provided the foundation for the grandest coalition and realignment of politics and politicians and other interest groups; and a new promising political party-the People's Democratic Party, PDP-was born. With the incumbent military government's blessings and goodwill, PDP proved unbeatable at the polls.
It won the election, with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, fresh from prison, as president. Obasanjo had a reputation of sorts-as an effective executive when he took over, following the assassination of General Murtala Mohammed, as a lover of democracy when he 'willingly' handed over power to the newly elected government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, as a promoter of accountability and good governance with membership of Transparency International, and as an Eminent Person with a network of international connections that would stand Nigeria in good stead following the pariah status it had acquired under Abacha's anti-Western diplomacy.
All this might have been on his CV; but as subsequent events were to show, they were neither curriculum nor vital. His perceived effectiveness was the result of superb teamwork, coordinated by General TY Danjuma and 'Yar Adua to which he contributed little; his love of democracy as shown by the handover of power was because he failed to avoid doing so; and with regard to accountability and good governance, as they say, seeing is believing-and we saw a corrupt president at work.
With him as candidate, the PDP won the election but it lost its soul in the bargain. Its Founding Fathers had created the party it the image of an all-inclusive political party that would take the country out of the morass of corruption, and cure it of all its self-inflicted wounds. Some of them had hoped that it would be able to be and remain supreme, if not over matters of governance, then at least over party matters, in which case it will serve as a check on any over-ambitious executive.
But the first thing Obasanjo did was to take the party to pieces and recreate it in his own graceless image. He pursued every manifestation of democracy-internal, external, intra-party-and whenever and wherever it reared its head, he stifled and slaughtered it. Of all those ever to have been elected in Nigeria, he proved the most democracy-unfriendly president the country had ever seen.
Not democracy-friendly, naturally Obasanjo couldn't stand the outspoken and principled members of the founding team of the party. Very soon the very best of them were out; and many of those who remained did so only in the vain hope that they could improve matters better inside than out. And in vain they hoped and waited, because there was within the party a spirit that was antidemocratic.
They certainly didn't want to grow democracy in this party; and they still don't. Lucky them. There are so many things helping them. For one, democracy is not possible where, like in Nigeria, there is general ignorance about everything and special ignorance about what democracy is or what it is not; where there is endemic, almost irremediable, poverty which feeds on and is in turn fed by people's docility; where there is strong affinity to tribal loyalties; where there is a culture of deference to age and leadership when the two are themselves not interested in doing what is right.
And as it has been said, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph; and that which you attain too easily, you tend to esteem too lightly, and that which you bastardize the method of its search, you will almost certainly bastardize the manner of its utilization. And though it promises a lot, democracy really operates on the GIGO principle-garbage in, garbage out. You cannot employ rigging in an election and expect to harvest good governance. You cannot buy votes at the polls and expect to enthrone accountability in government. You cannot employ thuggery and intimidation in an election and expect to be able to avoid lawlessness in the electorate.
It must always hang together; because democracy is a culture and a cultural resource that must be consciously cultivated and jealously guarded. If this is true, then we must accept that the Nigeria of PDP's making is culturally illiterate. The party and its government have failed to rule this country democratically. They have failed to conduct free and fair elections; and the party has singularly failed to rein in the executive, having lost its supremacy to the various stages of power brokerage.
Strictly speaking, therefore, it can be seen that the PDP is not really a political party that is really interested in or committed to the idea of democracy or its enthronement in this country. It has refused to allow democracy to be; because, it is not interested, as has often been stated, in enthroning a one-party democracy; rather, it is determined to create a one-party dictatorship. And there is nothing difficult or impossible about this, because we all saw Obasanjo as he created and almost perfected his no-party dictatorship. After emasculating the party, he erased every trace of democracy in Nigeria. Compared to soldiers, Nigerian politicians come out a poor second.
In the move towards democratization, the leadership of the military has clearly proved more honourable and more sincere in fashioning out and faithfully managing a transition to civil rule than the so-called democrats. The one drawn up by General Murtala Mohammed and concluded, willy nilly, by Obasanjo; and the one by General Abdulsalami were more sincere and more transparently honourable than the elections conducted by President Shehu Shagari in 1983 and the one by Obasanjo in 003, painfully signifying that the country hasn't learnt anything in 20 years. The last election he conducted to usher in an administration other than his own was, by common consent, the most discreditable the country has yet witnessed.
If everywhere else politics is the science of the possible, in Nigeria, it has already reached its perfection-the perfection of its nadir; here, it is the art of the impossible. All the things that were impossible became not just possible; they indeed became inevitable. And perhaps because of the Nigerian Factor that so very absolutely corrupts everything, politics deteriorated from the highest of calling to the lowest of falling. All within a single decade.
We could, indeed, say of Nigeria's democracy as Gabor said of marriage for the Western man: 'A man is incomplete until he is married-then he is finished;' because, Nigeria will never be complete until it goes truly democratic, and then it will be finished-totally and in every sense of the word.
By emasculating every manifestation of the nation's democratic spirit, the ruling party, aided, no doubt, by the leading personalities of almost all the other so-called opposition political parties, has made a democratic solution to the problem virtually impossible. And it is not difficult to see how those who make peaceful change impossible have in fact made a violent one inevitable.
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