I honestly wish I would stay away from saying anything more about our political parties. I have written enough. I worried enough. I cried hoarse enough. But I still fail to see the politicians who take themselves seriously enough and are committed enough to the best practices in the political party as agents of national development in a democracy.
They still dance in the market place, cheered on by the applause of their paid hirelings. They still see themselves as the lords of the manor with the divine right of political leaders to do as they wish with our fate and the fate of our dear country. They still define national progress as the accumulation and the naked exercise of assumed individual powers as pocket dictators.
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But I have to admit that keeping my lips under lock and key is hardly an option for me and fellow citizens who want to see the progressive emergence of a new country from the heaps of ashes of our acts of omission and commission all these years, hence this piece. The political parties are constitutionally empowered to decide the fate of our country and its citizens. Whatever they do or fail to do affects all of us as individuals and as citizens. Under our form of government, the people institute their governments through the instrumentality of the political parties. No man, at whatever level or tier of government, no matter how rich or powerful, can purport to be the oga at the top without being a member of a political party. This, clearly, underlines the importance of the political parties to our democracy and our national development.
It should worry us and worry us stiff, that the politicians continue to demonstrate their lack of will and capacity to run political parties whose ideologies, borrowed or forged, form the philosophical foundation of the path of our national development. In every democratic country or even those with pretensions to this difficult but beloved form of government, the political parties through government elected on their platform, set and police the agenda for national development. It would be correct to say that our politicians have never diverted their minds to the moral and constitutional responsibilities of their political parties. They merely see the parties as the means of capturing and retaining power at the three tiers of government. This is taking the country nowhere in its ambition to be a developed, democratic, modern state.
PDP and APC are our main political parties. PDP held power for some 16 years and APC, the ruling party, for six years now. Between them there is a crying deficit of ideological underpinning that should drive their concept of governance and service delivery. None of them offers a clear path to the present and the future development of our dear country. We rely on the pronouncements of their servants in the executive branch of government for us to know where we are and where we are going. They are unable to institute and drive national conversations towards our economic, political and social development. In this arid climate, the nation is not guided by any system that would turn its ideological deficit to pragmatic development paradigm. It all blows in the wind.
Each of the two political parties is torn by quarrels over the contest that has always mattered to our politicians – power, naked, primitive power for the sake of power, not for purposes of service to the nation and its citizens. None of them has a national leadership. Instead, they have centres of leadership, all of which are pulling in different directions. Intra-party crises may be inevitable but they are detrimental to the health of political parties.
As we watch the leaders and the leading members of the two parties dance naked without shame in the market place, we must be truly worried at the short distance we have covered all these years in committing to our country living the true meaning of its democratic ideals and earn the right to sit among nations with demonstrable similar commitments. Nothing has dramatically changed. It is easy to see that they are toying with the fate of our nation and its democracy. The path to our national development is cluttered with what the dancers and the drummers left behind each time they performed to the grinning and the chuckling of the rest of the world.
We need to wake up. The wag, as I have had occasion to point out in this column, once said that politics is too serious to be left entirely to politicians. It should be possible for the rest of us to encourage the party leaders to take their responsibilities seriously and far beyond constituting themselves into a group of power sharers and work towards pulling up our country from its economic and social difficulties and use its incredible endowments in human and material resources to make Nigeria a nation we would be proud to call our nation.
The political leaders must redefine the mission of their respective political parties in terms of democratic ideals, best practices in democracy and service delivery as governments and agents of development. One of the obstacles to the good health of our political parties is the helpless acceptance of carpet-crossing as a constitutional right of association guaranteed all Nigerians. There is no contest here. But we can see that it destroyed PDP in 2014 and cost it the 2015 general elections, including the presidency because the majority of its founding and leading members who had benefited from it in different ways, ditched it for APC. When a political party is simply an assemblage of individuals in search of opportunities to capture power at the two tiers of government, it is impossible to turn it into a development agency in the service of the nation.
To move forward, the parties themselves must take the following steps:
a) They must either outlaw or make carpet crossing impossible by committing to internal democracy in which every member has a chance not only to vote but to be voted for in a legitimate quest for political power
b) The president and the state governors must cease to be the leaders of the political parties at national and sub-national levels, allowing the executives of each political party to manage the affairs of the party. The president and the governors are servants of the party and cannot at the same time be leaders of the party. Servants do not leaders; only leaders do. We clearly saw the beauty of this in the second republic. The party executives were empowered by each political party to supervise the implementation of the party manifesto by its servants in the executive and the legislative branches of government. The parties do not have manifestoes anymore but that should not invalidate the tested wisdom of giving the party executives the power to manage their parties in a manner consistent with their concept of governance and service delivery.
I have repeatedly said in this column that if we do not get our political party system right, it would be a long shot in getting our democratic governance right. If we isolate the ball in the court of the political parties, we run the risk of abdicating our legitimate right to have a say in how we are ruled as well as how our country cuts a path through the thicket of underdevelopment to the pinnacle of development.
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