Daily Independent (Lagos)
Dan Amor
1 December 2008
opinion
Out of a total of nineteen applicants, five political parties were adjudged to be qualified to compete in the federal and state elections of 1979. Three of the five nominees for president of the Federal Republic in 1979 were presidents of major parties during the ascent to independence: Chief Obafemi Awolowo, presidential candidate of the Unity Party of Nigeria in 1979 had been president of the Action Group; Dr. Nnamdi Azikwe, presidential candidate of Nigerian Peoples Party in 1979, had been president of the NCNC, Alhaji Aminu Kano, presidential candidate of the People's Redemption Party in 1979, had been president of the Northern Elements Progressive Party. Both Alhaji Shehu Shagari, the successful candidate in 1979 (as nominee of the National Party of Nigeria) and Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim, candidate of the Great Nigeria People's Party, were rising stars in the Northern Peoples Congress at the time of independence. The ability of these and many other politicians of pre-civil war vintage to assume political command had been a source of wonderment and distress to many members of the radical and technocratic intelligentsia. How, they wondered could these "tarnished" leaders and their viewpoints survive a fourteen year eclipse by military rulers?
Indeed, the 1979 election appeared to restore both the independence coalition of 1960 and the redoubtable official opposition of that era to their former roles. As in 1960, a conservative party (the National Party of Nigeria) with its centre of gravity in the Northern emirates formed an alliance with a party that was primarily based in the Igbo-speaking areas and led by Azikiwe. Once again, the Yoruba-speaking people of the south-west rallied to Awolowo and his philosophy of democratic socialism. Evidently, the former political parties and their leaders were truly representatives of the Nigerian society. The question then was: what specific social reality did they represent? Specifically and to some extent they represented ethnic, sectional, and linguistic communities. At a deeper level of analysis, political parties represent the social forces that shape and transform the structure of society. In multi-ethnic societies like Nigeria, they unify the agents of social change on a national basis.
It was soon to be realized that the leading parties of the independence era were controlled by constituent elements of an emergent or new and rising class. This is because class-like solidarities were basic to the nationalist, regionalist and particularist strategies of Nigerian political actors. In all countries, political parties that incorporate the interests of a society's dominant class are more likely than others to operate effectively on a nation-wide basis since dominant classes transcend the cultural divisions of society more easily than subordinate classes. Hence the NCNC and the Action Group had better capacities for national organization than the traditionalist NPC; they were better able to transcend the regional foundations of their power. While the NPC relied upon a restrictive political device-regionalism-to preserve its power, the dominant class in Nigeria as a whole did not need restrictive regionalism to nurture its natural development. Since the regionalists would not countenance trans-regional party organizations extra-constitutional conflict became inevitable.
In the political upheaval that buried Nigeria's First Republic, the Northern traditionalists lost power to modernist members of the dominant class-administrators, military officers, members of the learned professions, and businessmen - in their part of the country. This was what enhanced the cohesion of the dominant class in Nigeria as a whole. Even in the Second Republic, the National Party of Nigeria, the main political vehicle of the conservative class was by far more practicable and viable than that of the conservatives in the First Republic. It was also by far the most broadly based of the parties that had been organized for the Second Republic. The avowedly socialistic Unity Party of Nigeria and the more avowedly Marxian socialist People's Redemption Party were essentially sectional parties, as were the Nigerian People's Party and its twin, the Great Nigeria People's Party. But the NPN's success betokened the relative strength of the bourgeoisie vis-+-vis working and subordinate classes that dissipated their potential collective strength by driving their political energies among sectional parties. Yet the inordinate ambition of the NPN to rule in perpetuity prompted the second coming of the military and this signed the obituary of the party system in Nigeria
The still-born but ironically most expensive transition of the Ibrahim Babangida era was particularly not pleasing to the sense of taste. And so was the one organized by his defacto second in command and successor, General Sani Abacha. For the first time in the nation's annals, Government formed political parties and asked its apologists known as militicians to join those parties. Military governments wrote party manifestoes and drew up their programmes. And because they were all similar in form and contents, the late Bola Ige described them as the five fingers of a leprous hand. Even since the evolution of the current democratic dispensation in 1999, the ideal political parties are yet to emerge. What we have at the moment are cult groups of strange bed fellow masquerading as political parties. The biggest of all these cult groups is the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, under whose watch Nigerians are suffocating in intense heat of poverty, hunger, darkness, diseases, ignorance and gnashing of teeth. A party without a human face which, like its defunct predecessor, the NPN, has vowed to misrule forever.
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