The Tribune last Sunday quoted an unidentified APC official as saying in respect of the political fate of Admiral Nyako (rtd) and Alhaji Al – Makura in Adamawa and Nasarawa states respectively, “we cannot afford to lie low with the PDP. The plot is to paint the impeachment moves as coming from Jonathan and that way secure public sympathy in favour of our party”. That seems to be an “A” plan, which was to be executed simultaneously with “B” plan in which, according to the same source, “the party’s strategic leaders” were being asked to reach out to PDP leaders and plead with them not to heat up the polity and allow the governors stay”.
Yet another APC chieftain was quoted as threatening that if the PDP continued to “impeach our governors, Ayo Fayose will not last one day in Ekiti State”. The speaker did not stop there; he went further to say that Senator Iyiola Omisore would be given the impeachment pill should he win the August a poll in Osun State. What kind of country is Nigeria? It would appear that we are subjecting events in Adamawa and Nasarawa unnecessarily to emotions. If plan “B” as stated above makes sense, not so plan “A” involving threats and serious blackmail against President Goodluck Jonathan who in his characteristic aloofness certainly has no hand in the impeachment scenarios playing out in the two states.
Certainly Nigeria is in dire need of a functional, virile opposition party. But not just one to give the ruling PDP a run for its money, but essentially to keep the government on its toes and ensures that they do not take the electorate for granted. Yet given the way the APC has carried on all this while, many people are beginning to doubt if it can efficiently fill that vacuum. Even though it habours some of the finest and most enterprising and idealistic politicians in Nigeria today, the group has not been able to do what is needed in order to establish a well organized, compact and effective opposition platform capable of alternative government and promising real change based on a vision made explicit in a suitable manifesto and an ideology that should endear it to the electorate. Instead of doing this, the APC apparently in a hurry to take over power in 2015 has run into a number of mistakes having simply duplicated the PDP’s objectionable manifesto and handed out same to Nigerians, thus indicating that what we have in the country is nothing but one and the same old coin with two faces.
In this way in spite of the euphoria and fanfare that greeted its berthing in 2013 and in spite of its unique and distinctive title, the party has gone about membership drive indiscriminately, thus keeping its doors ajar for birds of various plumes. This was the first major blunder, the second being the tendency to depend on the destabilization of other parties, the PDP in particular, and overdependence on the resultant defections for growth. The third mistake the party made was to have handed over party structures to new comers like the former PDP governors who were expected to come with huge warchests, unmindful of the fact that some of those governors did not have the clout to defect together with members of their state houses of assembly. So all the problems besetting the APC today had been long foretold because we saw them coming. If anything, they are therefore self-inflicted because as the saying goes birds of different plumes cannot flock together.
President Jonathan obviously has no hand in the APC woes and it would amount to shear escapism and cheap blackmail for the party’s spokesmen to continue to think and tell the world otherwise. In fact, Jonathan is so preoccupied with tackling the country’s unprecedented security problems that he has no time today to spare for sideshows and distractions which impeachment at the state level represents. In any case, without holding brief for the President I believe he won’t waste his precious time and the kind of money being bandied about by the APC just to impeach a politician who given his thoughtless exit from the PDP no longer stands to sway the dynamics of politics in Adamawa state.
This notwithstanding, my honest advice for the two major parties is that they should approach politics with open mind. Do or die should be out of it. For the fledgling mega opposition platform particularly, my advice is that it should take a cue from the British Labour Party. It should also take a cue from the Action Group and the Unity Party of Nigeria, the precursors of opposition politics in this part of West Africa. The British Labour Party came to being in 1906 but only came to power for the first time in 1923 and lasted only eight months in power; coming up briefly again in 1929. Is this what APC wishes itself and the country? The Labour Party could not achieve a comfortable majority in parliament to ensure a stable government until 1945 under the leadership of Clement Attlee, who armed with a powerful manifesto that took more than forty years to prepare, effected unprecedented reforms which made Britian the enviable welfare state which it is today. APC can replicate the same here with patient planning.
Labour Party believed that Rome was not built in a day and so took time to plan properly and launch out with that historic manifesto. Dilto for the Action Group which, armed with a well thought out manifesto which had taken Chief Awolowo and the founders of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa years to prepare, launched the Western Region on the industrial map of Africa. The APC on its part is barely two years old and yet to proffer an ideological blue print for the transformation of Nigeria — a country plagued by problems some of which have been there since the 1914.
Those are no simple problems that can be solved overnight by any political party, especially one that has just come into a hasty existence. If I were in the shoes of the APC leaders, I would therefore avoid all these controversies that tend to distract and give the party a bad image. The immediate task should be how to build the party into a formidable force and ensure rancor-free and well-greased structures at all levels.
There is no way the existing structures will not continue to generate crippling problems that will continue to slow the party’s movement in the right direction. Meanwhile the party should look elsewhere for the source of the headache it faces. In 1982 when Governor Balarabe Musa was impeached in Kaduna State, neither the UPN nor PRP blamed President Shehu Shagari for it, although the NPN was in power. Come to think of it, if Jonathan was interested in removing Nyako from office why wait till now? Why didn’t he do it through emergency rule? Remember that in declaring the state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states, he had left the democratic structures intact.
Why didn’t he remove Nyako then? Even the ordeal of Governor Al-Makura in Nasarawa state is being also blamed on Jonathan. Why? If he would not remove the APC governors in Yobe and Borno using the subterfuge of emergency rule, why would he go after Al-Makura, a minority governor in Nasarawa? The president should be wary of this clear blackmail and continue to look at issues dispassionately, not minding whose ox is gored.
Benjamen Tolulope
