Wonders shall never end. Whatever befalls Nigerians from the governing style of the ruling party APC deserves no sympathy because it was what was planned by the imposers and bargained by Nigerians. A dog was given a bad name in order to hang it.
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), rode to power in 2015 on the heroic, almost superhuman feats of its doting, fanatical supporters, and on the unprecedented seismic political and electoral shifts never before felt in these parts. Now, the seismic shifts seem fated to unravel via similar but destructive superhuman feats of its spurned and disillusioned supporters. The party achieved a miracle in 2015 barely two remarkable years after its formation; it has spent fewer dramatic months to wilt. Neither its extraordinary achievement nor its dreadful wilting, following hard after each other, complied with the normal punditry of politics.
It does in fact now seem that both its friends and enemies are alike dismayed by the unusual trajectories the party has followed since February 2013. The party’s enemies will be unsparing, as indeed they have been in the past years, despite battling their own private demons. Its friends and supporters, on the other hand, will remain sullen.
It is necessary for the APC to remind itself why its supporters fawned over the party so fanatically in the build-up to the 2015 general elections. Perhaps, then, it can profit from being generally tired of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which had then ruled for some 16 exhausting and theatrical years, the public had become suspicious of both the party’s ideology and ex-president Jonathan’s ability.
The former ruling party exaggerated its strengths and denied its weaknesses. Not only was it capable of the worst mendacities, it spoke arrogantly of ruling Nigeria for 60 years and extirpating the opposition. And those it could not hope to extirpate, it boasted it would try to compromise.
But the APC faithful spread a different gospel. They propagated the private and public morals of their candidates, particularly candidate Muhammadu Buhari, denounced Dr. Jonathan’s lethargic approach to fighting insurgency in the Northeast, railed at his seeming indifference in rescuing the 219 abducted Chibok school girls in the face of frightening stories of Boko Haram’s ill-treatment of the innocent girls, and chafed at his inability to rein in the brigades of larcenous public officers roaming the corridors of power in borrowed majesties. Convinced that the lethal combination of incompetence and treasury looting would doom the country, the APC faithful went to town assured their message would resonate powerfully in the ears of the unconvinced whose number was shrinking in direct proportion to Jonathan’s failing style and measures.
It seemed to the APC and the country that Jonathan’s government was divisive. Campaigners therefore suggested that the rainbow coalition, which the APC had instantly become, was the perfect antidote to any fear of fragmentation, political and social alienation. Their candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, a former army general and military head of state, was not perfect and had a history of dictatorship, they admitted; but his decades out of uniform and power and the mollifying attributes of age had tempered and transformed him into a benign and unifying democratic force. There was little proof of the purity of the goods they tried to sell, but the failings of the Jonathan government and poor image laundering by its media handlers amplified public hopes of a new beginning and shredded whatever doubts they had about the gangling but hesitant APC presidential standard-bearer and coterie of sycophants.
The margin and solidity of the APC victory in 2015 was beyond cavil. For the party faithful who had burnt their bridges and thrown in their lot with the lanky and taciturn former army general, there was nowhere else to return or turn to. Their metaphoric Newfoundland must willy-nilly be transformed into El-dorado. Nothing else would do. But barely a year into their ascendency (2016), the party began to face revolt within its ranks. Power sharing formulae, it turned out, had not really been agreed on before they went to war. And party ideology, if indeed party leaders and supporters knew what that was, suddenly became an Arcanum no one had a semblance of nor was willing to embrace. But their troubles were just beginning not with only the emergence of Bukola Saraki as Senate President and Yakubu Dogara as Speaker House of Representatives. Their focus and attention were on sharing formulae and who gets what not on how to consolidate power to do the needful. They were in hurry to have the source of re-equipping what they squandered to access power not bothered on how to consolidate power. They were angry with PDP for an ‘overstay’ in power and hungry and eager to loot what PDP bequeathed the new government.
In addition to its internecine battles, the now divided party became itself an agent of division. It had promised a magic wand in governance; but it soon became obvious the party was as befuddled as the nitwits they derided in the PDP. It groaned over the plummeting economy, blamed the Jonathan government for everything, and offered no concise or coherent measures to extricate the poor and unemployed from the stranglehold of disease and abject poverty not to talk of insecurity. Worse, there were seemingly no future plans for anything valuable, whether economic, social or political. Its cabinet choices, whether kitchen or general, were questioned, and no one seems clear what the party’s bona fides were any longer. Party supporters who a few years ago spoke glowingly of their party and exuberantly proclaimed the sterling attributes of their leaders began to speak in whispers, their voices enfeebled by anxiety and disappointment, their confidence shaken and in some cases eroded by the realization that the dilemmas they confront would test their resolve to the limit.
A worse nightmare however lies ahead for party supporters in all its menacing ugliness. The party has less than one year from now to the next elections. Except the Northeast where the ruling party’s militaristic measures successfully stanched the excessive flow of blood, and the Northwest which has gained tremendously from prominent federal appointments, no other part of the country seems so far willing to fall into a swoon over another APC even with Buhari as the sitting president whose credibility rating has gone too low beyond imagination. After many months of denouncing the calls for the establishment of a National Presidential Security Committee (PNSC) to provide immediate solutions to those security challenges bedeviling the country and other laudable suggestions, the party cannot suddenly turn around to sell that programme in 2023 when it is exiting with majority of Nigerians celebrating its timely exit.
Indeed, given the apparent polarization of the country into two broad antagonistic camps, it will be difficult to get a consensus among APC supporters to back party leaders in their opposition to political and structural transformation of the country.
More damagingly, since the APC assumed office, virtually all economic indicators have fallen woefully. The country is not richer, but poorer; not more democratic, but more authoritarian and dictatorial; not safer overall, but enduring a widening gyre of insecurity; not more cohesive, but more divisive.
Unlike early and middle 2015, when APC supporters were clearly excited and giddy about life and politics, and had the whole world under their foot, they are now less boisterous and more nervous, left to loiter on the corridors of power cup-in-hand begging to sustain a living without clear and assured direction. How to rekindle their confident pose and verve, and turn them into the fearsome army capable of achieving the impossible, will occupy party leaders in the coming months. Success in that endeavor will depend on how successfully the party turns the economy around and heals the wounds that have festered for years within the remaining period.
The APC is already discovering how unnerving it is for the shoe to be on the other foot. The party is in fact also assailed on all sides for its poor response to the unfavorable economic climate. Unable to summon the imagination and daring needed to repair the damage it claimed was inflicted on the country by the PDP the APC has instead succumbed to grumbling about the past as an escape route from its failure to change the narrative it claimed to had the power of changing. This approach has neither endeared the party to critics nor even to its supporters who are groaning under the harsh economic conditions and wearing the toga of impoverished and abandoned. If the party is not to be limited to only two terms in office, the worst nightmare its supporters now fear, it will have to display a more productive sense of urgency than it has shown so far, even far more than when it schemed adventurously for electoral victory in 2015. The time is late!
So far, sadly, there is nothing the party or its leaders have done to show that they still possess that urgent sense of resolve. The party seems to be heading to collapse on, before or after the 2023 elections. This is not a prophetic saying but from indicators of the polity.
To drive home the point for any doubting Thomas, APC controls the government in Plateau state since 2015. Wase local government area is one out of the 17 local governments that voted massively for the APC candidates and crowned their efforts with victory, and repeated same voting pattern in 2019 while hoping against hope for good governance and representation. Till date, it is the least developed in all facets of development in Nigeria since 2015 without a single state government executed project sited anywhere within the local government for reference. It has been a wasted seven-year effort to the people who ventured into the gamble.
A visit to the area in question confirms the absence of reliable portable clean water to majority of the populace, mal-functional public health facilities, non-existent road network, absence of flourishing economic activities tailored to self-reliance and electricity supply amongst others. Even fertilizers, if not for the timely intervention of the State House of Assembly member representing the area in the State House of Assembly, Yahaya Adamu Mavo, and other farming inputs have not been in supply to the largely agrarian community. The people are those abandoned to fate while battling to survive in the midst of persistent banditry attacks.
Wase, as the local government headquarters wears the status of a glorified village inhabited by the most wretched on planet earth forced to succumb to their artificially created ugly situation by lack of pragmatic and robust political leadership for their basic needs.
Instead, they are systematically and unconsciously co-opted into the obnoxious trade of sycophancy, bootlicking and crude begging for crumbs to mend body and soul till the next campaign period to be enticed with few currency notes from questionable source, motorcycles from those disbursed by federal governments’ social intervention programme so as to be used as foot soldiers for electoral malpractices by the usual merchants mischievously eyeing higher political offices while occupying the lower office changed nothing but only catapulted the occupant to the class of certified looters.
APC’s concluded ward and local government congresses have shown clearly that the party is not democratic in value for any trust but a rainbow collection of power mongers, merchants and dictators deceiving and cartooning themselves on the political turf.
The usual known contest for any position was absent. Instead, it was endorsement by self-appointed merchants and their cohorts under the guise of consensus that added no value to true and genuine democracy.
2023 is definitely the most ideal time for the desired real change from top to bottom for the good of Nigeria. I Come in Peace for the Sustenance of Genuine Democracy and the Good of Nigeria!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues
