by Ehichioya Ezomon (Group Political Editor)
EVEN as the dust is yet to settle on the tsunami of a political defection in Nigeria’s history on Tuesday, watchers of the polity are worried about internal democracy in the “all new” opposition All Progressives Congress (APC).
Their fears are hinged on the character and persona of the leading members of the platform, particularly former Lagos State governor, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and former Head of State and presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari (Retd).
Both politicians are not only strong-willed in the administration of men and materials, but they also exhibit tendencies that are odd to democratic tenets and practices.
Thus, APC members are apprehensive, while the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which is counting its losses with a brave face, is anticipatory that internal democracy will be the Achilles heel that will stultify the growth of the APC in the long run that is not so far away.
The next round of general elections is 2015, and the APC has been claiming that year with aplomb. Now that its rank is swelling, the problem, though, is how to ensure internal democracy that appears to be alien to many a politician of the Nigerian genre.
Despite its shortcomings, the PDP over the years, especially since the return of democracy in 1999, has always conducted primaries and/or conventions to pick its candidates for elective offices.
The processes, and the outcomes might not have met the people’s expectations, but the party had been viewed and seen as putting to practice democratic principles that ensure the participation of the majority.
But the reverse had been noticed, and demonstrated in the opposition parties, which were individually funded and driven. Will the same scenarios repeat themselves in the APC as it looks ahead to 2015?
To allay or strengthen the worries about internal democracy in the party, it’s expedient to look at the political antecedents of Tinubu and Buhari, and their stand in the issue at hand.
Tinubu
FOR the first course, Tinubu can beat his chest and proclaim that he is a democrat — an advocate of democracy (in American politics, a person associated with centrist to left-thinking course of action.)
In truth, he is one of Nigeria’s leading contemporary campaigners of democracy, which is widely defined as a form of government in which all eligible citizens participate equally — either directly or through elected representatives.
Tinubu came to political limelight during the struggle to validate the June 12, 1993 presidential election, won by business tycoon-turned politician, Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, but who was denied the seat by the military regime of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, and the succeeding military juntas.
Because of their activities to ensure the restoration of democracy, Tinubu and other agitators earned the sobriquet ‘pro-democracy activists’.
Already elected a senator, he and some of his colleagues in the National Assembly were to meet, and passed a motion for the Gen. Sani Abacha government to hand over power to Abiola.
Pronto, they were clamped into detention, and upon release, Tinubu’s continued struggle for June 12 angered the military regime, which reportedly marked him for elimination.
He subsequently fled into exile, and only returned to the country during the transition to democratic rule.
He participated in the programme on the platform of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), vying for and winning the governorship election in Lagos in 1999. He served two terms of four years, leaving office in 2007.
During that period, Tinubu tried to advance democratic governance to the grassroots, by creating additional 37 local government councils in the state.
However, the Olusegun Obasanjo government at the centre, composed by a different platform, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), frustrated the takeoff of the councils by seizing allocations to the existing 20 local government areas in the state.
Although the Tinubu government got judgment from the Supreme Court, which declared the withholding of Lagos councils’ allocations as unconstitutional, the Obasanjo administration refused to budge.
The Lagos government afterward designated the 37 new councils as “development areas,” which they are till this day even when the government of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua released the seized funds to the state.
These said, many people, especially his critics even within the same political fold, would testify that Chief Tinubu is not a democrat, but “a dictator, an autocrat,” who does not brook opposition.
This comes from his alleged flagrant disregard of the rules, to “impose” candidates on members of his political party — from the AD to Action Congress (AC), and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), which joined other opposition parties to form the APC.
Reports fly about of how he single-handedly picked candidates for any elective offices first in Lagos and then in other states where his platform controls the governments.
Specifically, critics refer to Tinubu’s springing of Mr. Babtunde Raji Fashola, his Chief of Staff, on members of the Lagos AC/ACN as the governorship candidate of the party in the 2007 elections.
Fashola, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), was never in the reckoning, at least from the point of view of the party big wigs, who had toiled night and day in the field to ensure victories for the party over the years.
They thought — and rightly, too — that they should have a say in who flew the party flag, and that one of them should be the candidate.
But they were mistaken, as the old adage, “he who pays the piper dictates the tune” won the day. Tinubu had both his say and way because of his deep war chest, which he had deployed to expand his political suzerainty.
Nonetheless, the former governor, dubbed “the last man standing” on account of his political calculations that thwarted the Obasanjo PDP from “capturing” Lagos along with the other five states of the Southwest in the 2003 elections; has not always gained in his quest to impose candidates on the party.
A case in point is the last governorship election in Ondo State. The former president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Chief Oluwarotimi Akeredolu (SAN), literally came from the sky, to become the candidate of the defunct ACN.
Tinubu ignored entreaties by other aspirants, spread all over the council areas of the state, and admonition of elders of the party for open primaries for the aspirants.
And the result of that recalcitrance was a disastrous outing by the ACN, which had looked promising prior to the election.
There’s no doubt that Tinubu had a hold on the ACN going into the merger that resulted in the APC. But the new platform is a different terrain where old things and “habits” are supposed to go away, especially as he is likely to meet his match in Gen. Buhari, “a latter day convert” to democracy.
Buhari
PRIOR to 1999, nobody would have thought that Buhari would join politics, form a political party and for that matter contested the presidential election three times. He has declared his readiness to join the race again in 2015.
Recall that the Katsina-born general it was that collaborated with other military officers to abort the democratically elected Second Republic government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari on December 31, 1983.
Backed by a no-nonsense and unsmiling Brigadier-General Tunde Idiagbon, the junta instituted an iron-fist regime, clamping hundreds of politicians into detention, while many of them that the government accused of corruption were given prison terms in the three digits.
Several of them never survived the jailing; even those who endured kicked the bucket soon after due to the effect of their incarceration.
Surprisingly 20 years after, something changed in Gen. Buhari: the once Nemesis of politicians saw the beauty of democracy and embraced it.
He had not only contested the presidential elections in 2003 and 2007 under the obsolete All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), but he also formed his own platform — Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) — on which he participated in the 2011 presidential contest.
Buhari has consistently gone to the tribunals to challenge the outcome of those elections that didn’t favour him. The court judgments, too, had not gone his way. Yet, he soldiers on.
Notwithstanding, the “obey the last command” syndrome of the military hasn’t left Buhari, or so it seems.
Reports said his word was law in the CPC, where he allegedly imposed candidates for the governorship to the House of Assembly elections across the country in 2011.
Knowledgeable sources in the dead party attributed this to the failure of the CPC to gain inroads in the Kano State governorship poll in particular, winning only Nasarawa State out of the 36 states of the federation.
The recent tribunal judgments and upturning of judgments involving the CPC lawmakers in Katsina State are traceable to the hand of Buhari in the process of the elections in 2011.
But here he is today, along with Tinubu in the APC, which had just bolstered its fold with four governors from the ruling PDP, which, despite its shortcomings, has always conducted primaries and/or conventions to pick its candidates for elective offices.
Will Buhari and Tinubu shelve their tendency to “impose” candidates and allow the general party members decide those to represent them at elections?
This is the worry by members of the APC even as they savour the increase in their platform from 11 states to 15 states, in the least vide the decamping of some PDP governors to the party on Tuesday.
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