Weak party, dead party = wahala
President Obasanjo made a magisterial pronouncement on the health of the two political parties last week. He said: “APC is weak; PDP is dead.” It perked up my interest because the health of the two parties matters more to us and the country than most people probably think. The parties are the governments in the land. Without them, there would be no governments, warts and all. Let’s discount the former president’s propensity for hyperbole and mischief for a second and look at his statement with, well, an empty mind. Is APC weak? Is PDP dying or dead?
Obasanjo’s diagnosis of the health of the two parties should invite us to undertake an honest interrogation of the state of our democracy and its future in the hands of the two parties. One thing sticks out like a sore thumb, if you would pardon a hackneyed expression. Both parties have failed, quite remarkably, to transform themselves into political parties with the right ideological bells and whistles.
PDP, the older of the two parties, was for 16 years our unshakeable political behemoth; the largest political party in Africa, on which, like the British Empire, the likelihood of the sun ever setting on its enormous powers were pretty remote. It was set to rule for 60 years in the first instance. I think the gods were not quite in agreement on that one. They brought in General Muhammadu Buhari last year to force the sun to set on the party. Some empire; some behemoth.
Both parties owed their birth to exigencies, and, therefore, had unremarkable births as political parties. For instance, the late Chief Solomon Lar’s group of 18 and later 36 made up of former politicians began the delicate process of making a political party out of their common interests to persuade General Abacha not to succeed himself. They had the patriotic objective of putting the officers and men of our armed forces back in the barracks and locking the gates. Their approach to politics and power at that stage was pure pragmatism.
Those illustrious men were not concerned with the niceties of party politics, such as a party’s ideology and philosophy and what it stands for in the context of its objectives of power and its concept of the imperatives of social and economic development. The correct political wisdom was, drive out the local colonisers first and all other things were bound to be added unto us.
In this circumstance, as a registered political party, PDP, under General Abdulsalami Abubakar, inevitably attracted a motley crowd of men and women with a mutuality of primitive interests: to grab power and use and misuse power democratically. I do not think anyone is surprised that the party is still bereft of ideological underpinning. We still do not know what it stands for in terms of articulated principles. People join political parties because they find their ideology and philosophy attractive and wish to subscribe to them. The absence of a philosophical or ideological underpinning ensures that the party is committed to nothing and offers us nothing as a political party.
APC came into being in almost similar circumstances. It is a remarkable collection of other parties willing to submit themselves to a larger group to achieve their singular objective of stopping the PDP bulldozer in its tract.
As it is, my take is that in the classic definition of a political party, the claim by each party as a political party is tenuous at best and false in its entirety. Democracy is political party-driven. How much do the parties drive our democracy along the desired narrow path of political salvation? The parties cannot properly drive our democracy unless and until they recognise the urgent need to transform themselves from a mere gathering of people who need one another to smoothen their path to power into formidable institutions of democracy.