So, When will the Focus Be on Issues?

As it was in 2014, so it is in 2018. This is not a cheery observation to make given the Nigerian condition. Few months to the 2015 elections there was a political ferment that even a casual observer of the Nigerian scene would not fail to notice.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) had emerged in February 2013 as a fusion of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and a significant slice of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The opposition APC was hurriedly packaged to engage the PDP, which had been in power for 16 years, in a war of attrition.

Hence, there was a frenetic jostle for power. Different actors put their ambitions prominently on display. Some elements, which are today at daggers drawn, were in alignment with the sole purpose of defeating President Jonathan Goodluck in the bitterly fought presidential election.

Now the mood in some quarters is that of realignment.

However, what was sorely lacking in the burst of political activities four years ago was principle. Today, the same principle is also conspicuously absent in the unfolding drama. The Indian sage, Mahatma Gandhi, is often quoted as saying that one of the seven social sins is playing “politics without principle.” But, in the 2014 politics, issues were not made the focus of attention. No principle was enunciated. The focus was on power. Yet the issues were as enormous as they are today – security, mass poverty, joblessness, corruption etc. In fact, based on the intervention of former National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki, the elections were postponed for some weeks in 2015 in order to ensure a measure of security in the northeast. The nation was virtually adrift in the sea of the problems.

The incumbent PDP in 2014 could not defend its record convincingly on all the issues. Neither could the opposing APC offer a coherent alternative strategy of development to combat the burgeoning socio-economic and political problems. That is why President Muhammadu Buhari could not launch his economic plan until he was two years in office after waiting for six months to appoint a cabinet. The APC had “true federalism” as one of the party’s campaign slogans. After two years in power, the party had to set up committee party to define its concept of federalism when the momentum for restructuring could no longer be ignored. You would expect that the party should have sorted that out strategically. This lack of focus on issues while jostling for power could explain the lack strategic responses to many issues.

Just like the APC failed to provide alternative vision in 2014, the PDP’s focus today is not on the issues. The attention of the major opposition party and those aligning or realigning with it is not on issues. The passion is about grabbing power and not about generating ideas to solve the mounting problems on the ground. The nation is being cynically entertained in a grand political drama; there is no coherent debate going on the issues on ground.

Elsewhere parties merge on the basis of programmes and not on “big names” alone. Politicians break ranks because of divergence of principles. The other day, Boris Johnson resigned as the British Foreign Minister. The whole world knows it is because he wants “hard Brexit” which is not the idea of Prime Minister Theresa May, who still cares about Britain’s place in Europe after Brexit. Johnson may be ambitious, but the maverick of a politician is at least associated with a set of conservative ideas about how Britain should be run.

Not so here, since 1999 every administration only came with a programme or a semblance of it only after winning elections. Elections ought to have been won on the basis of strategies and the programmes to achieve such in the first place.

In this respect, the Buhari’s administration has been following in the footsteps of the earlier administrations in this dispensation of increasingly declining politics.

Unlike the Second-Republic, the political parties of this dispensation promised the people nothing in strategic and programmatic terms. That is why the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo administration only began to put the National Empowerment and Economic Development (NEEDS) together after four years that the President had been in power. Matters even became ridiculous when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that produced Obasanjo in the first place was even listed merely as one of the “stakeholders” to be “consulted” while the “technocrats” drafted the agenda. Little surprise then that some of the reforms initiated by President Olusegun Obasanjo could not be consummated during his tenure as they arrived almost at the twilight of his administration. Obasanjo’s successor, President Umaru Yar’Adua enunciated his “Seven-Point Agenda” in his inaugural address. His party, the PDP, never coherently articulated the famous agenda during the campaign for his election. The trend of politics without ideas continued when President Goodluck Jonathan could only give the first hint of his “transformation agenda” also in his inaugural address on May 29, 2011. This is because the PDP never sold such an agenda coherently while presenting Jonathan to the electorate for the election.

Today, the story is hardly different. Political parties are supposed to lead debates on the issues

THISDAY Newspapers Limited. confronting the nation. Neither the party in power nor any of those jostling to displace it is offering an alternative vision for the future. So it is fairly predictable that the campaign season would again be replete with hate speeches, lies, insults and curses as it was in 2014. After all, it is easier to abuse or curse Buhari than come up with a policy- alternative to the failed privatisation in the power sector, which the PDP launched 13 years ago with an Act of Parliament and the APC has continued with the same doctrinal commitment despite the less than satisfactory outcomes.

The place of issues is not visible in the political drama engulfing the land.

Take a sample. Recent developments could have been more relevant to the people if, for instance, those parting ways with Buhari are doing so because they have a superior idea on how tackle the crippling insecurity as an alternative to the obvious failure of the Buhari’s security management. Killings take place almost on daily basis in parts of the country while the fight for power without programmes continue. For example, only on Sunday some persons including policemen and soldiers were reportedly killed on the Abuja-Kaduna road. If such killings take place so close to the seat of power, you could imagine how helpless the situation could be in remote villages of Benue, Taraba, Edo or Zamfara. Like other roads in the country, the Abuja-Kaduna has become a den of killers. None of the “big names” from all sides in this political drama could travel on this road without beefed up armed escorts. But the people who are bound to use this dangerous road have no such privileges. Yet the government has responsibility for their security. The security system doesn’t seem to have come to terms with the true profile, motives and modes of operation of the killers in various locations of the country. The profile of killings of thousands in Zamfara state doesn’t appear to be the same as the one in Borno just as the profile of the killings in Benue might be differently compared to the one in Yobe. Yet instead of a serious discussion of the failure of the security system to stop the bloodshed politicians only lead public discussions with ethnic and religious labels The political quarrels could have been meaningful if it is based on the alternative security strategies of the opposing parties to that of the APC.

To overcome this political underdevelopment, the political parties should be distinguishable on the basis of divergent ideas informing their proposed strategies of development. In other words, the parties should be ideological. There should ideological contents to their programmes around which to mobilise the people so that the polity could be weaned from debilitating effects of religious and ethnic manipulations during elections.

Beneath all this is the worsening lack of capacity of the people to even nurse expectations of those seeking power. The people seem to expect nothing. At the end World War II, the phrase “a revolution of rising expectations,” was used in the public sphere in the West to refer to the belief of the people that with freedom and prosperity they could actually improve their conditions. This conviction propelled the people to seek political changes so that social opportunities could be expanded.

The reverse seems to be happening in the Nigeria of 2018 with what could be roughly described as the crisis of declining expectations with all the cynicisms it engenders in the public space.

The antidote could be the insistence by the people that those who seek power should focus on the issues of the Nigerian condition.