ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN FROM PUNCH
Against the background of ongoing defections to the All Progressives Congress by politicians from the so-called opposition parties, we still harbour the fear of a one-party state as an imminent reality. The truth is, what we run is already tantamount to a one-party system, a short historical distance away from the military era, where the head of state, who creates political parties, also hands political parties their respective defining ideologies. The multi-party democratic system, planked as it is on the distinctiveness of ideas and ideologies between parties, and requires the independence of political agents.
Contenders must have equal chances to sell their moral vision to the people, contest for power, and maintain their stance even when they have not been voted to power. Also, the institutions must be autonomous enough to regulate the activities of political actors across the board. These are all features that have been seriously lacking in Nigerian politics.
Properly speaking, Nigeria does not even have political parties. What we have are platforms on which any candidate who can commandeer money and influence runs an election. The closest to an ideology that anyone will find in Nigeria’s present political arrangement is the desperation to seize power and, if that fails, to get as close to it as possible. Once upon a time, the PDP called itself the most formidable political party and boasted it would sustain power for the next 60 or even 100 years. They hardly survived one election cycle out of presidential power. Their party members virtually emptied themselves into the winning party even before the 2015 electoral losers had fully understood what had befallen them.
In any case, it does not quite matter which side wins an election because we will ultimately be governed by the same cross-carpeting agents. Our politics mostly lacks a distinguishing philosophy. Take, for instance, the APC. Does anyone have any examples of the progressive causes they have pursued since their founding? I even doubt anyone in the APC ever wonders if they are staying true to their “progressive” appellation. One can say the same for the PDP, whether as the “Peoples Democratic Party” or as “Power to the People.” One of the most laughable comments I read about the Labour Party during the 2023 elections was that it platformed a candidate whose antecedents did not match the “labour” ideology. There was an implicit assumption that the Nigerian “Labour Party” had an ideological affinity with the “Labour Party” of, say, the UK and Australia (which are typically peopled by social democrats) and should therefore act according to character. But there is nothing like that in Nigeria. Whatever name a political party calls itself is, at best, aspirational. It has little to do with what they can be trusted to always stand for. What matters is the control of federal power and mobilising resources for electoral victory.
Our politics has always been more of an aggregation of personalities managing their self-interests rather than an espousal of a governing vision. If you ever watch parliamentary debates in Nigeria, you would have noted that it never happens that lawmakers disagree with their peers based on any philosophy of how government should be structured. They all agree and disagree on the same thing; they collectively sign off the padded national budgets, and like serfs, they jump to their feet to chorus “on your mandate, we shall stand” when Bola Tinubu appears in their hollowed chamber. Without any internal differences, does it truly matter whether we have one party or a dozen?
