By Rotimi Fasan
TWO phenomena are currently playing out and defining the Nigerian political space. This is the politics of defection and impeachment. Politicians are either defecting, that is changing party affiliations with the sole aim of positioning themselves, literally, for personal aggrandizement. Or they are being impeached from one position or another by erstwhile friends turned foes- also for the same selfish reasons of personal elevation.
While those already impeached or being put up for impeachment can yet be counted on the fingers of one hand, that is when we look at the real big fish among our politicians; those who have defected or are planning to have exceeded this record. Many times they are in their hundreds.
This happens when a leading politician moves to another party and either claims or actually decides to do so with his or her supporters. It is not often an easy business verifying these claims of defection in hundreds.
Nuhu Ribadu
That is even when politicians about to defect turn up at organised rallies followed by crowds claimed as supporters in an obvious attempt to dramatise their political strength and popularity. It is still not an easy task knowing how many in these crowds are true party stalwarts or rented supporters. Anyhow, the claims of defection never stop; nor are the acts of impeachment.
Murtala Nyako, the loudmouth former governor of insurgency-ravaged Adamawa State, was the last heavyweight to bite the dust in this manner. Al-Makura of Nasarawa State was able to outlive the raging inferno. A few more heads are still slated for the slab.
With regards to defections, the latest stories making the front pages of newspapers are about Nuhu Ribadu who first came into prominence as the chair of the anti-graft agency, EFCC. After much sabre-rattling and skullduggery initiated against him by the Umaru Yar’Adua administration, time during which he was forced into exile, Ribadu returned to favour after Yar’Adua passed on. Somehow, he found favour with the Jonathan administration.
He had in fact contested the presidential election of 2011 against Goodluck Jonathan on the platform of the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN. He lost amid claims that he had been sacrificed by his own party whose attitude to winning the election seemed at best casual. Even after serving the Jonathan administration, Ribadu returned to his old party that had been rechristened APC as a good party man. But there have been insinuations ever since that he might jump ship. He always denied this.
The question of Ribadu leaving his party to join the PDP again resurfaced about four months ago. Again Ribadu was emphatic in his denial, claiming such insinuations were personal insults that showed little respect for his person.
The matter seemed to die off- but just for a while. For like his own shadow that would trail him wherever he goes, the rumour mill was again agog last week. This time it was persistent and would not stop.
At least not until it was finally confirmed that what started as mere gossips many months ago has indeed been actualised, to wit, that Nuhu Ribadu has left the APC to join the PDP.
Ribadu’s decision which he said was well reasoned out, based on wide consultation and had benefitted from long reflection on his part- this decision has taken many unawares. This is in spite or, indeed, because of the many months of denial during which Ribadu had practically sworn on his honour to remain in the APC.
Perhaps the fact of Ribadu’s denial is what dulled many, including members of his former party, to the possibility of his leaving them to join hands with others in a different party.
In a way too, many, it could be inferred, subliminally didn’t see Ribadu as the typical politician who could go to bed one night as a member of the PDP and wake up the next morning as a member of the APC. His political career which came as an offshoot of his public service career is indeed short. Which could have strengthened this perception.
His role as the no-nonsense anti-graft boss also seemed to have conferred on him an aura of believability that many would be hard put to extend to a Nigerian politician. Yet now Ribadu, their Ribadu, has acted in character, that is like a Nigerian politician.
What then does this make him? An untrustworthy schemer and opportunist with his eyes set on this from his first day as the EFCC boss (for we cannot say he enlisted in the police to use it as a platform for politics)? He has indicated interest in the governorship of his state alongside others in his new party. Was this his plan all along? Did he just see an opening he felt he could exploit? Or is this a case of bad communication corrupting good manners?
Had Ribadu’s dabbling in politics after his time in the EFFCC exposed him to bad political influences? What should we make of the man’s politics? To rub palm oil on his seemingly sparkling white apparel, he is being portrayed in certain quarters as attacking some of his former comrades in the APC, a portrayal he has denied. Whatever is Ribadu’s real person or character, what does his defection say of Nigerian politics, for that is what should be of concern here?
This latest in a tradition of defections simply underlines the absence of ideological basis for much of what goes on in Nigerian politics today. There is hardly anything that separates Nigerian politicians in the different parties jostling for position. Elsewhere people make lifetime, even multi-generational, commitments to parties of their choice.
Here it has become a matter of convenience and personal gain. The parties out there are so rotten and so very much alike that nothing differentiates them ideologically, if there is anything so-called in Nigerian party politics. This was not always so. But that has been the case in the last 20 years since the military sought to create parties of identical plumes- a little to the right, a little to the left it was called. Now it is in the middle of nowhere.
There is hardly anything to blame Ribadu for. He has made what would seem to him a pragmatic decision in the circumstances before him.
He recognizes the lack of ideological mooring in the parties and has elected to join those people he believes, for now, meet or can help meet his aspirations. There are good and bad people in the parties, he said. So indeed there are. But that is not what politics should come down to. There would always be good and bad people in different parties. But Nigerians should also return to that era when we had objective ideological criteria separating political parties, one from the other.
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