2015, the PDP and the rest of us

The caption of this piece is not original, as many things in the world are not. It is a play on words from a book by the pan-Africanist, Chinweizu, and entitled, The West and the Rest of us. Yours truly recommends that you will gain much from reading it. That point made, the jury is out today on the subject of political parties, their value, differentiation, ideological content or lack of it and overall contribution to the Nigerian state today and the march of development of our people and nation. Indeed, are political parties really useful in Nigeria today? To address this point, we need to get to the roots of the matter and properly situate what political parties are and what they do. Wikipedia for example outlines that ‘a political party is an organization of people which seeks to achieve goals common to its members through the acquisition and exercise of political power.’ Central to the definition and categorization of a political party then is the assumption that it must be organised around a set of coordinate principles or ideals. Typically also, while there is general consensus that the rights of citizens may be better protected under a multi-party regime, pragmatically however, even within this framework, there is sometimes a natural shift to having one of the existing parties rising up to assume a dominant party status. Says Wikipedia of this tendency: ‘In dominant-party systems, opposition parties are allowed, and there may be even a deeply established democratic tradition, but other parties are widely considered to have no real chance of gaining power. Sometimes, political, social and economic circumstances, and public opinion are the reason for others parties' failure. Sometimes, typically in countries with less of an established democratic tradition, it is possible the dominant party will remain in power by using patronage and sometimes by voting fraud….’ Bringing it home, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, Nigeria’s leading political party has been the dominant player on the national scene now in the last seventeen years, a period that also approximates the length of time that our current republic has existed. But it is also one party that this writer would not consider joining in a hurry on account of the basic fact that it has been unable to match presence with purpose. To be sure, the emergence of the PDP in 1998 was not in itself a bad thing. The nation was in a political bind on account of the crisis that had begun with the former military President, Ibrahim Babangida’s ‘crafted democracy’ arrangement which culminated in the annulment of the results of the June 12, 1993 elections, the introduction of the short-lived Interim National Government and its subsequent supplanting by the Sani Abacha junta and later by the transitional Abdulsalami Abubakar administration. It was within this vortex of events that several leaders of the political class convened to establish the G-34 which after a while was to form the rump of the PDP. As the manifestation of a tradition of big, strong, pan-Nigerian parties, it has had its uses and still does. In the First Republic, this strand was seen in the NPC-NCNC alliance. During the Second Republic, it was expressed in the National Party with its tell-all catchphrase, One Nation, One Destiny, One God.’ And to prove that this inclination towards sustaining a big national party was not only a right-leaning expression as it was with the First and Second republics, in the short-lived Third Republic, the triumphant big, national party, the Social Democratic Party, SDP, was the vehicle through which the billionaire mogul, MKO Abiola, finally contested that election. Now it is the turn of the PDP even as the nation has returned to the era of right-leaning big, national parties in control of the dominant lever of power at the centre. It is also this position that the APC is vying to fill, and without adding much that can be said to be different in terms of grand ideas of, and commitment to change; which in part explains its Ekiti debacle. In all therefore, the big national parties basically worked within the framework of keeping the nation together, sustaining national unity and mediating geo-political intra-elite conflicts and tensions with very little being added to the grand vision of Nigeria, post-Independence. However, the challenge of today signals that the PDP needs to go beyond these. The crises of unemployment, industrialisation, Ebola, Boko Haram, declining educational standards, etc in the land today point to the critical need for a political party that would put strong and solid principles of development on the political table. After the generation of the independence crusaders and the leaders of the self-governing regions in the last years of colonial rule, we last saw something like that in the Murtala Muhammed and Buhari-Idiagbon eras, warts and all. Indeed, this is arguable, but with the benefit of hindsight and without any intention of any sort to vote for the possibility of its re-emergence, it would indeed seem that some of our most visionary developmental moments as a nation have for example been achieved during one or more of our unfortunate military interregnums. The Murtala Muhammed ‘Africa has come of Age’ era which decidedly struck the last blow at colonial rule all over the continent is in the view of this writer one such sterling moment. Since the PDP has then become for all intents and purposes our very practical one dominant-party champion, it must next give itself the task of bringing us the leader that would deliver on the promise of development. That is missing today. And that it must fix if it will be useful to all of us, failing which, like the proverbial people of Abame in Chinua Achebe’s things fall Apart, it puts itself at risk of ultimately being rejected by the very people whose interests and aspirations it had failed to properly represent.