|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Watch Nigerian news, it’s ‘killed’, ‘stolen’, ‘missing’ and now, ‘defected’. Noteworthy is, no vice enters Nigeria’s stream and fades away, rather, it’s entrenched. Nigeria was pleasant until Anini introduced arms into robbery in the 70s, now robbers dispossess passengers, lie them on the highway and ask trailers to run over them. Kidnapping grew out of Niger Delta militancy. Then it was against expatriates of oil companies in return for some concessions to the communities. Now cousins kidnap cousins, nephews uncles and indeed, some kidnap themselves and ask their parents/wealthy relations to pay. Until 3 years ago, terrorism was one word nobody knew its meaning. To some, it was another name for some Middleeast and Asian countries. Now, we are part. It’s about blood. Like the others, it may metamorphose into things more grievous. We hardly found a solution to any.
Today, it’s defection. It started in 1962 in the Western House as cross-carpeting. It’s peak was a civil war. Then it was ethnically based, now, it’s free-for-all. Look deep into why political players are defecting, it’s got nothing to do with Nigeria and its people though lip-deceit choruses, ‘the people, the masses’. It’s about position and recognition to up one’s political career, about contract/other personal interests where one was shortchanged, about intrigue to down someone, ethnic hatred or even women. These interests mix and because the players are authoritative, they’re calibrated to party ‘worries’. Before long, subgroups form to threaten mainstream leadership with ultimatums veiled as ‘conditions’ and failure of which there is tumbling. Then on, it’s instability. At first, it’s entertaining but the danger lurking can’t be imagined. First party discipline: there could hardly be any unless you play the game of the subgroups even when they’re wrong. The alternative is, they pull the carpet under the leadership and move on. Challenging them internally is direct invitation to fresh rumbling. It’s like hostage-taking. Precisely, we’re moving into perennial party instability as precursor to political instability. The extended implication of political instability is a military putsch or sectional inter-fighting. Defections are dynamic; if they begin in one, they continue to the next because defectors preserve their structures, take them along to propel their ambitions. Watch them, their first demand is the control of party structures. That enables them plant their foot-soldiers strategically for unforeseen challenges. Refusing them is party death, acquiescing is party weakness. But the control of party structure has a rebound. There were rabbits in the ground before they came, they may give way for a while but more sooner than later, they’ll point to the limits because, only they know the boundaries. That throws up the stage for struggle and in the process of alignments and realignments, foes emerge to dismember the new home. So while we get entertained, there’s another side.
Because, defectors can move any moment, they’re at ease to block any legislation against defection. But without such legislative provisions, it’s jungle. No matter how you turn it, we’re about to enter into an era of political turmoil. They call it ‘project save Nigeria’. But do you save by confusion? The reason for all these is, people just play politics without safeguards. Running a political party without mechanisms to handle conflicts is similar to driving a car without breaks. It will crash.
You ask again, do defectors consider their disloyalty to the electorate that voted them in? Not really. If yes, it’s the electorate that should tell the party, ‘if you don’t address this, we’ll authorize our mandate to take a prescribed step; after all they have the power of recall. This isn’t the case; they simply hop about, run home to explain, take some gullible electorate along, dump the rest and move, just the way predatory hirelings do. But back there at the grassroots, there’s alienation and loss of faith in the political process. Regrettably, when politics fails, violence takes over; precisely, when in the coming months violence erupts, the hirelings are responsible. They’ve begun by attempting to shut down government; that shows exactly their destination and goes to confirm these fears.
If credible opinion polls were to be held on salient issues, such moves alone are enough to showcase these people as grudge-boxes from where no good can come. Rather than beef up their party, it’d dent it as pernicious. More disgusting is when a party issues destructive instructions to its legislators only to be rebuffed by some. Question is, what good does it serve to destroy the same nation you want to build just for power? But let’s be clear: these things will fail.
The present challenge is to stop this latest vice on the polity. Maybe the judiciary has the answer. It’ll be one problem solved for posterity. Coming clear, political rascality can destroy faster than corruption.
By: Onyebuchi Onyegbule
