The decline of PDP is how APC too dies [OPINION]

By Abimbola Adelakun

From its once boastful conglomeration of the most powerful politicians in Nigeria, the house of the Peoples Democratic Party has become desecrated. From 31 governors at their peak, they have whittled down to one, plus a minority in the National Assembly. If only former PDP chair Vincent Ogbulafor were still alive to watch the party, he once boasted, it would lead Nigeria for 60 years in ruins! But knowing Nigerian politicians, if Ogbulafor were alive, he might have defected to the All Progressives Congress. It is not a far-fetched speculation; our political parties are nothing more than “special purpose vehicles” contrived to win elections. We call our system of political practice “democracy”, and that is perhaps because we have no other name for this monstrous baby we have created and forced to nurture. A system where virtually everyone must hibernate under a single political party just to escape the vindictiveness of an overbearing power is hardly democratic.

The PDP began its rapid disintegration the moment it lost the 2015 presidential election. The new president had not even been sworn in when the PDP began to empty its innards into the APC. They could not survive even a year without presidential power, and that tells us what this politics is about. Under different circumstances, former President Goodluck Jonathan would have spent his time out of power working to rebuild the party, but he was too embittered by his astounding loss and its aftermath. Also, we cannot fully blame him; you can only set yourself to that task when you have partners who believe in something and are willing to risk themselves to see their vision realised. Nigerian politics has no such nobility at its core. Our politics is a loose assembly mostly consisting of the hungry, the desperate, and the morally vacuous, all of whom converge around incumbent political power for no other reason than survival.

In a country where the main source of economic life is extractive, all power belongs to the president, who is deified by his control over the means of resource allocation. Within this crooked arrangement, political parties cannot establish distinguishing qualities between themselves and others. Even if they do, they cannot afford to maintain those virtues. Political parties are kept loose on purpose; their fluidity allows politicians to scurry around and take cover under the umbrella of the incumbent. Hardly any of them is interested in building anything that will last, let alone outlast them. It is all about instant gratification, the opportunity to steal as much as possible for yourself and for your children. They hardly ever think of creating lasting structures that can ensure political stability, order, and prosperity. That is why, as soon as they achieved the two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, the first thought that came to their small mind was a third-term agenda. Not national prosperity. Not even power generation. Just self-perpetuation.

When the Lagos APC spokesman, Seye Oladejo, recently mocked the PDP for having been whittled down to the point that Governor Seyi Makinde now stands on the brink of emerging as the de facto chairman of a ‘one-man PDP Governors’ Forum,’ what I also saw was how the obituary of the APC, too, will be written. Contained in the rise and fall of the PDP is also the paradigm for how the APC eventually dies. This is neither prophetic nor a malevolent wish; it is just that the APC today is exactly what the PDP was yesterday—corrupt, powerful, and yet highly ineffective. By the time Nigeria has gone through the full gamut of “16 years of PDP” and “16 years of APC”, the APC will become vulnerable to disintegration. What will emerge will not be the push-and-pull forces of ideologically differentiated politics where one party trumps the other. Instead, changing from one political party to another in Nigeria will be due to cycles of inflation and subsequent proneness to deflation. In other words, the end of the APC will come the same way the PDP did: not because they will be defeated by a political party that offers Nigerians a preferred political vision or superior organizing, but more because they would have become over-inflated to the point that they become susceptible to the prickly politics of the tribally disaffected that will be energised to gang up against them.

Everything Oladejo said of the PDP is true for the APC, except for one minor detail: their internal cohesion is built around Bola Tinubu and the immense resources he controlled in Lagos and superintends now as president. Take him out of the picture, and everything called APC will fall apart instantly. A political party in which everyone must stand and sing “on your mandate we shall stand”, and no one dares assert an individual character is a mere cult of personality, not a sustainable model for political organising. The APC’s coming decline will perhaps be worse than the PDP’s because of their preoccupation with seducing critics and converting them to Tinubu’s lickspittles. It is those sorts of contradictions that will facilitate their imminent implosion because future opposition will build a reputation on resisting the allure of joining the APC cult. That is why Oladejo’s mockery is the hollow laughter of a man running around the village asking for whom the bell tolls, not because he is curious, but to quieten the obvious answer raging inside of him.

The question of how soon the APC will eventually combust is simply a countdown to how long Tinubu can maintain his grip on the party, every lever of democracy, and over the country itself. Knowing Tinubu and his tendency to commandeer everything to himself, he will try to retain the country in his pocket for as long as possible and even build the constitutional structure to achieve this. He has the means to do that. He may not pursue a third term, but if he wants to gift himself a fraction of Nigeria as a parting gift—akin to the way he arranged a hefty lifetime pension for himself in Lagos—there is virtually nothing that stops him. But the thing with every political era is that its sun eventually sets. Dictators and strongman politicians may defy political revolutions and even capture the whole of their country’s democratic apparatus to the point they are undefeatable in any election, but they still do not last forever. Biology eventually intervenes where the human capacity to push against their overwhelming political power falls short. In this case, the so-called internal cohesion and ideology holding the APC together is already in his 70s. I am sure some of the members of his internal cabinet are looking at his physical frailty and already doing some mental arithmetic. It is only a matter of time before the treachery that characterises succession politics begins to unsettle the party. Without Tinubu, they will go the way of the PDP.

The optimist in me wants to end this by saying that the end of the Tinubu era will also mark the decline of the way we do politics, one in which a “chief-thief” steals everything only to redistribute it among cronies and the conquered masses. That godfather figure is, in some ways, a holdover from the strongman persona that dominated our politics for decades during the days of military rule. When their generation finally expires, the vacuum their exit will create might eventually lead us to a point where men and women contest through ideas and coherent programmes of social development. The pessimist in me looks around at the Nigerian political landscape and worries that the lack of a viable pipeline for developing leaders, which has been the bane of Nigerian politics for so long, will keep us in the doldrums for a long time.

Culled from The Punch