Grudgingly, President Buhari, following pressure by leading Nigerians and from significant foreign sources and threats by civil society groups to embark on civil disobedience, decided to sign off the electoral amendment bill into law last week.
This follows a week after the ruling APC, following its decision to postpone its scheduled February 26 convention, had done a volte-face and fixed it for March 25, 2022. In order to deflect valid accusation of confusion and lack of a sense of direction within its ranks, the APC put out an elaborate statement about its allocation of offices by zones in the country. The zones are expected to harmonise and produce persons that will fill in these positions before or during the scheduled convention next month.
But everyone knows that this is a charade. The deeply embedded contradictions inherent in the APC cannot be resolved by the mere palliatives of office sharing. Indeed the APC has not demonstrated convincingly how the mutually exclusive interests of the five aforementioned groups within the party and government could be resolved.
The best we can say is that for the moment the party has merely bought itself a doubtful temporary stay of execution which will surely manifest at the rescheduled convention next month.
The same or worse can be said of the opposition PDP. For all practical purposes what prevents the PDP from imploding now is the predatory expectation of the ruling APC imploding under the weight of its contradictions.
But the PDP does not look like having what it takes to even take advantage of the APC’s problems. And its contradictions are even worse than that of the APC. Incendiary rhetoric from some of its members against the APC apart, the PDP is a mortally wounded party with its top members at daggers drawn mode ready to plunge into one another at the slightest opportunity.
Like the APC, its members are sharply divided on the various positions on offer within the party. Most of all, the party has the herculean task of deciding how to zone its presidential ticket. Should the party zone the position exclusively to the South? And which of the three southern zones should it zone the position to?
The party cannot possibly zone it to the South West because its numbers are not up to scratch there. It cannot zone it to the South South too despite the undisguised craving for it by Governor Wike of Rivers State for the obvious reason that the last president under the party came from this zone. And the obvious option is to zone it to the South East but that will amount to political suicide because I daresay it will not fly with the voters in the entire North and South West.
The strategic option for the PDP, if it wants to return to the power it lost in 2015, is probably to choose its presidential candidate from the North in the hope that an imploding APC will present an opportunity of a possibly imploding APC for such a candidate to woo the massive northern voters to the party. But this prospect is not certain because significant members of the party, especially from the South, will not welcome a northern presidential candidate and will likely work against it right up to the 2023 elections.
With all the glaring irreconcilable contradictions within both parties, do we need any further convincing that chaos lie ahead in the polity as we approach the 2023 circle of elections?
In many ways, it is a self-fulfilling development in our political history for our political class to embark on this political trajectory. It happened after our independence in 1960 and led to the tragic events of 1966 and on to the civil war from 1967 to 1970. With the return to civilian democratic dispensation in 1979 similar acts of political misdemeanours by the political elite of the time coursed through the polity leading to the military takeover yet again in 1983.
Since the commencement of the present democratic dispensation in 1999, nothing radically different has occurred to indicate convincingly that our political class has learnt to do things positively different from what they have been used to doing all these years. Indeed coming up to the present time, our politics have been characterised by the same issues that have dogged our past and it should worry us that as we approach the next circle of elections in 2023 the unmistakable signs are there that we are heading once again to the political abyss.
And it should worry us the more that despite assurances and postures to the contrary, our political class does not seem to have the capacity or the inclination to pull us away from the brink. Indeed it is disappointing to observe that they are currently basking in the rather dubious aura of political self-assuredness oblivious to the potential dangers to themselves and us, of their lack of political introspection and enlightened interest.
I daresay that the issue is structural and attitudinal. Structural because of the nature of the Nigerian state with its component parts at different stages of development often mutually exclusive. Attitudinal because out of these structural contradictions of the Nigerian state arises an attitude that emphasises sectional and group interest to the detriment of the national interest. Thus our political class has little or no inclination at all to work collectively towards developing and instituting a national ethos of positive ideas and programmes which all Nigerians will subscribe to in the effort to build the nation.
The options to stave off the impending political chaos that will be created inevitably by our political class are getting fewer and fewer it must be said. And as politics is too important to be left to politicians alone it is becoming clear and imperative that Nigerians should begin to contemplate alternative platforms of political action to save the country from yet another episode of political uncertainty which in the likely event of it happening this time around will be too devastating to behold.
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