The imperatives of stability in the political parties

You may or may not find what is happening in PDP and APC disappointing, exasperating or risqué. The two parties are the largest among the 70 or so registered political parties. PDP was in power from 1999 to 2015 when its sun set, yielding the morning after to APC, the new patch work of political interests anointed as a political party that seized the imagination of a country fatigued by mutual recriminations arising from the lack of internal democracy in PDP.

APC has been in the driving seat for some six years now but it is already engulfed in internal crises that might either seal its fate and remove its hands from the levers of power or retain itself in power through the manipulation of the powers and the reach of its incumbency. We gotta watch, laugh or let the tears cascade down our not-sorosy cheeks.

Whatever may be your take on it, the tragedy is that the crises in the two parties are indicative of the deeper malaise that has afflicted party politics in our country for as long as old codgers like yours sincerely can remember. It is largely responsible for the inability of our political leaders and their minions to build, sustain and expand the frontiers of their political parties as the recognised organs of national progress and focused development as opposed to the patchy-patchy system of misplaced priories that pass for development anchored on the whims and caprices of the fortunate actors on the political stage.

None of us should find it funny that 21 years of happily uninterrupted democracy have not moved us closer to the ideals of democracy in any shape or form. It should worry us. The political parties are the visible faces of what we make or fail to make of our democracy. The rest of the world are not entertained by what is happening to our democracy in the hands of political moguls given more to power than leadership.

The crises are fuelled by lack of internal democracy. Dictatorship and imposition are anathema to both the letter and the spirit of democracy. Still, the political godfathers, cocooned in their power, continue to deny members of their parties the rudiments of political rights within the party system. The mass movement of the ambitious and the disaffected from one political party to another at regular intervals of the election season is, to say, the least, sickening. It is poison in the system.

No one who watches the politicians dancing with or without clothes in the market place would be impressed by the drummers and the dancers. We have since lost hope that ours could be like democracies in other countries where political parties offer their people alternative ideological philosophies of governance in the management of human and material resources for national development. This is a helpless acceptance of what cannot be changed. The party moguls have the right to do their thing but they do not have the right to put democracy on a sick bed because they choose to be power drunk. Someone should say that loudly.

Former President Goodluck Jonathan once said that democracy was work in progress. The import of his statement was to offer a caveat, to wit, our wobbly democracy must be excused on the grounds that democracy being a work in progress, it is a learning process. We must factor in this and accept that its progress would not be absent of mistakes and failures common to human beings and their institutions.

Democracy is a flexible form of governance in that it permits nations to determine how best to use democracy for the greater good of the larger number of their citizens. But the various doors through which people walk into power in a democracy lead to the same objective and the same end: a government of the people in which the people decide how they are governed in a system that obliges the rulers to be accountable to the people for what they do and what they choose not to do.

Democracy may be a work in progress in the sense that nature denies human beings the right to attain perfection but it is worked that has progressed and stabilised in countries known as settled democracies. A human institution is both strengthened and weakened by the nature of the system that undergirds it. Democracy is a beautiful system like no other. But it is still a social system not immune to human ambitions, manipulations and shenanigans mainly because of its capacity to bond the leaders and the led in forging common social and economic goals.

There is no disputing this: democracy, warts and all, is a settled system of government complete with its principles and ethos handed down from the ancient Roman and Greek world. These principles are a) a political pluralism which permits more than one political party in order to foster plurality of choices and associations b) the right of the people to participate in their governance by instituting a government of their choice with political leaders of their choice through an electoral process that births free, fair and credible elections c) that the people be entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of association, be it political, religious or social, the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and respect for the rule of law.

These are the immutable principles of democracy. The problem is that they are often violated by those who are supposed to be the keepers of the flames of democracy, hence the bickering in the political parties; and hence the instability in them reflected on both government and governance in our country. These crises are the direct results of continuing attempts by the party moguls to cynically violate or manipulate these principles to gain certain advantages to the detriments of the good of the nation and its people.

We cannot say this too often: instability in the political parties affects the stability of the governments instituted through them. It is common sense, really, that when a government of the people morphs into a dictatorship of the few ostensibly for the many, there is a problem. As a smart Alek once said, politics is too serious to be left to the politicians. It is in the interest of our national political stability for the rest of us to encourage our political leaders to abide by the rules of party politics, admit of internal democracy, settle their niggling differences, and open the political space so that the people can make a rational choice of their potential leaders. And pull the nation back from the brink.

To have a stable political system, we must have a stable party system to drive our national development. To have elections that are free, fair and credible, we must have internal democracy in the political parties that recognises and respects the rights of all its members to pursue their legitimate political ambitions in an open system. To cure our flawed leadership recruitment process, the political leaders must cure themselves of greed for both power and money and enthrone a transparent system that respects the content of the brain and the content of the heart much more than the content of the bulging pockets. The party leaders cannot continue to foist on the people weak, mediocre and indifferent leadership and expect this potentially great country to do better than remain potentially great and watch other third world nations that have got their acts together, make the leap into the rarefied world of developed nations.

It is our collective call.