A couple of weeks ago, I noted on the blog thatAtiku Abubakar was mulling a return to the Peoples Democratic Party. His intent (and the intent of the Big Men in the PDP who are inviting him back) is to take up the presidential nomination for the 2011 Presidential "polls" (if you can call them polls) in place of President Umaru Yar'Adua who will definitely not be running.
This being Nigeria, and the rotation system being what it is, the 2011-2015 presidential term will be held by a candidate from north of the Niger-Benue line. The vice-president will come from from "below" the southern borders of Kwara, Kogi, Benue and Taraba.
The Big Men of the PDP are not interested in a General Mohammedu Buhari (rtd) presidency, or in resurrecting the political career of General Ibrahim Babangida (rtd), which leaves the PDP with the option of either selecting a sitting or former state governor (and if they pick one from the horde, the rest will rebel) or selecting former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, a man whom many of them owe political favours (never mind that they sold him out under when Obasanjo used Ribadu to blackmail and threaten Atiku backers).
The PDP presidential candidate is guaranteed to "win" next year's presidential election. It isn't really an election ... and Nigeria isn't really democratic. So, it is not really surprising that Atiku did in fact return to the PDP, as also noted on the blog. After all of Obasanjo's "do or die" politics of 2007, it looks like he only delyaed Atiku's presidential ambitions by four years. Basically the former vice-president is the odds-on favourite to replace Acting President Jonathan Goodluck after next year's formalities.
But wait one minute ....
Former diarchy regime leader and Head of State General Ibrahim Babangida (rtd) has thrown his hat into the ring, saying to newsmen at the airport in Asaba, "On the speculation by Nigerians of my 2011 presidential ambition I must say “the speculation is correct”."
Babangida intends to contest for the presidency on the PDP platform, which means Atiku Abubakar might not get a free ride to the PDP presidential nomination. We will see which of the two men has the more influential concentric networks of patron-client relationships. In fact, the contest between these men for the PDP nomination will probably be more important in determining the future of the Nigerian presidency than the so-called "elections" .... or even the supposed electoral reforms.
How many constitutions and "electoral reforms" have we been through since 1960? Look, I love football, but I am not good enough to be a professional football player. If you put me in a 4-4-2 formation, I will not be good enough to be a professional footballer. If you put me in a 3-5-2 formation, I will not be good enough to be a professional footballer. If you put me in 4-5-1, 4-3-3, 3-4-3, 4-2-3-1, 4-3-2-1 .... it does not matter what formation you use, I will still not be good enough to be a professional footballer.
Nigeria's problem is not the combination of words in a piece of paper called "constitution", nor is our problem the presence or absence of open ballot, secret ballot or option A-4, nor does changing the name from FEDECO to NEC to NECON to INEC address in any way our core problem.
There is a fundamental, practical truth and reality about the practice of politics in Nigeria ... and until we address that fundamental truth, everything else is just window-dressing.
Speaking of which, Pat Utomi one of the founders of the Lagos Business School (which has since metamorphosed into the Pan-African University), and a 2007 Presidential candidate on the platform of the African Democratic Congress, has announced the formation of the Social Democratic Movement Party. Utomi says the party "will be an entrepreneurial party focused on market economy", which isn't surprising considering he co-founded the Lagos Business School and is a classic economic liberal ... but interestingly, Olawale Okunniyi, secretary of the Harmonisation Team for the Mega Party project, says the SDMP will be built around support from organized labour, as well as alliances with various "opposition" political parties and factions (most of which are, frankly, anti-labour if the actual past practices -- as opposed to empty rhetoric -- of the leaders of these "opposition" parties is anything to go by).
If that seems to be a contradiction, note that the Social Democratic Movement Party is supposed to to be the culmination of years of efforts by opposition parties and by the "Conference of Nigerian Political Parties", to create what they call a "Mega Party" to compete with the dominant Peoples Democratic Party.
The SDMP is supposed to be the Mega Party, but in recent months, as the consolidation process approached completion ... the major planks of the proposed party began splitting away. For one thing, many opposition figures have moved to join or rejoin the PDP, including Atiku Abubakar, previously a supporter of the Mega Party project (Atiku desperately wants to be president by any means necessary, and when he couldn't beat the Big Men of the PDP, he was all for a Mega Party; now that the Big Men of the PDP want to make him their candidate, Atiku has ditched the Mega Party).
General Mohammedu Buhari was another name mentioned in connection with the Mega Party, but no one every explained how they were going to persuade Buhari or Atiku to step down for the other man. Not known for wasting time with such ajasco dancing, Buhari decided to pursue his continuing presidential ambitions on the platform of the Congress for Progressive Change, having realized that his previous party, the All Nigerian Peoples Party, has become the PDP's Division Two feeder team. Most anyone who is anyone in the ANPP is only there because they couldn't get a nomination in the PDP, and (like Atiku) will join or rejoin the PDP in due course of time (or will stay in the ANPP and run PDP-esque state governments). Buhari has thus cut himself free from the Mega Party project.
Then you have Bola Ahmed Tinubu's sole proprietorship, the Action Congress, which was supposed to be the nucleus around which the Mega Party would be built. But Tinubu is pursuing a separate, Lagos-and-Southwest-focused agenda to turn his Action Congress into the new Action Group (the First Republic ethno-regionalist party built by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo). In fact, to paraphrase another giant figure from First Republic politics, Tinubu would rather be the capo-da-tutti-capi of Lagos State than be President of Nigeria (an office he more or less has no chance of ever occupying). Oddly enough, Atiku Abubakar was the Action Congress' 2007 presidential candidate, and he has left the AC to rejoin PDP (which says a lot about a lot of things, both related to Atiku and related to the AC).
The Action Congress and the Congress for Progressive Change both refused to merge into the proposed Mega Party, and even Balarabe Musa of the CNPP says he will work with the SDMP while maintaining his leadership of the Peoples Redemption Party, another sole proprietorship, albeit one pretending to continue the legacy of the late Mallam Aminu Kano.
Beyond all of this pointless politicking, the only thing that Social Democrtic Movement Party members will have in common is their shared desire to replace the Peoples Democratic Party as the dominant group of allied Big Men. There is no ideological similarity or compatibility, no commonality of thought, desire or approach .... nothing at all binding these people other than their weakness in the face of the PDP. It is not surprising that they cannot come to agreement on anything of substance, because they respective worldviews and (more importantly) their respective ambitions are contradictory.
Recall I said earlier in this blog post that the All Nigerian Peoples Party (and for that matter the Progressive Peoples Alliance as well) consist of people who could not win (more like buy, extort or "negotiate") nominations and candidacies in the PDP. In Nigeria, nobody accepts the reality of losing an intra-party primary (or rig-ary) to choose candidates, and I suppose you can't really blame them because most of the primaries are in fact rig-aries and the losing candidates do not perceive themselves to have really lost per se. So what happens is people who can't get a PDP nomination either create a brand new sole proprietorship political party, that exists for no reason other than to facilitate their candidacy (i.e. giving themselves a 110% guarantee that they will be the candidate) or they join an existing micro-party which exists to rent out candidacies to aspiring candidates, or (because certain smaller parties like the idea of having structures in every state, even if their party is thin on members and resources) they take over their state's branch of a small party (as Andy Uba did when he paradoxically ran as candidate for Anambra Governor under the Labour Party banner).
The so-called Mega Party Movement that (supposedly) gave rise to the Social Democratic Movement Party is comprised of too many people who want to be president at all costs ... people who would withdraw from the "movement" the moment they either believed it would not endorse them as "consensus" presidential candidate (i.e. candidate by acclamation and negotiated agreement, without need for primary) or that their chances to be president would be better elsewhere (e.g. Atiku Abubakar).
Pat Utomi, the "Pro-tem National Chairman" of the SDLM already has a website up for his 2011 Presidential campaign (really a continuation of his 2007 campaign). For the record, Utomi is one of the more thoughtful Nigerian politicians (though, like the rest of them, he tends to speak in generalities with nothing specific you can analyze to see if it is possible, probable, unlikely or flat out wrong), but even Utomi is not immune to the "briefcase party" phenomenon; his candidature on the platform of the African Democratic Congress had nothing to do with the ideology (if it has any) of the ADC, and everything to do with the ADC's willingness to make him their "consensus" presidential candidate.
Bola Tinubu, who is trying to make himself the "president" of the Southwest, covets the independent identity of the Action Congress because it would be more difficult to convince voters in the Southwestern states that his party is the successor of the AG, UPN and AD if his party is actually "national" in orientation as the "Mega Party" is meant to be.
[The media often talk about ex-Governor of Sokoto State, Attahiru Baffarawa, as though he were one of the big names on the Mega Party sheet .... but to be honest, he and his sole proprietorship party, the Democratic Peoples Party DPP, are barely relevant in Sokoto, much less anywhere else.]
All things considered, the People's Democratic Party look set to "engineer" an official win for themselves next year, with little in the way of formal or informal opposition.
The "Social Democratic Movement Party" is neither a party, nor a "movement".
EDIT 11-04-10: The Guardian reports former Governor (1999-2007) of Cross River State, Donald Duke, will announce that he will be a candidate for next year's presidential "election. The Guardian did not provide any quote or confirmation from Duke himself (or from anyone with an iota of crediblity to speak for Duke), so I suspect this is just a bit of sensationalism from a newspaper that is usually one of the more reliable and the least driven to sensationalistic-but-wholly-without-evidence stories (and on this note I must say that for a moment there I thought NEXT was going to revolutionize the Nigerian media industry .... but then they too started publishing unproven, sensationalistic headlines). Besides, why in heck would a Nigerian presidential candidate launch his campaign in a five-city tour of the USA? That makes no sense at all, particularly from a candidate who, if our elections were truly free and fair, would realize that his biggest challenge was his lack of any kind of profile (or more importantly, any kind of political machine) in the majority of Nigerian states.
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