By Olu Akanmu
If President Jonathan contests election against himself,
without an opposition, essentially a national referendum on his performance, it
is doubtful given his approval rating that he would win more than 50% of the
votes. Public confidence in the
government has been eroded by the perception of a weak commitment to fight
corruption occasioned by series of corruption allegations and scandals.
Whatever is left of public confidence in the administration was further damaged
by Chibok, the view that is held by many Nigerians that the administration
failed to rise above politics at critical times to provide decisive, rallying
and confident-building leadership in the war against terror. Positive
directional policy reforms of government in agriculture and the economy have
been obliterated by corruption and Chibok. Social contract of the state with the citizen,
that the Nigerian state would guarantee security of life and property for its
citizens in exchange for their submission to the state, has virtually collapsed
under the current administration. Nigeria is now officially rated the 15th
most failed state in the world, in the same peer group with Yemen, Afghanistan,
South Sudan and Somalia. It is not a
descent that we would have imagined ten years back. Watching Afghanistan and Iraq and their
bombings on CNN a decade ago used to look so remote, so far away until the
bombing of St Theresa’s Church in Abuja on Christmas day, 2011. Whatever
political issues are around Boko Haram, the buck stops with the President as the
leader of the country to fix them with the right combination of toughness and
political dexterity, ensuring that no Nigerian citizen would be murdered in
cold blood or kidnapped from fulfilling their life dream.
As we ascended on the failed state index to fifteenth position, we continued to descend to the
bottom among the least transparent and most corrupt countries in the world.
Nigeria was 37th from bottom among about 180 countries in the
Transparency International Index in 2011, 35th from bottom 2012 and
33rd from bottom 2013. At the current non-linear growth rate of
corruption in Nigeria, it will only take us some few more years to sit firmly
among the top ten most corrupt countries in the world. The twin combination of corruption and the
failure of the state to guarantee security of life and property for citizens
could further accelerate the descent of the Nigerian state into a de-facto failed
state like Somali or South-Sudan. While this may sound alarming, we only need
to ponder whether we could have imagined this current state of the nation some
years back. Anything is possible if the citizens do nothing about it or if they
are constrained by the weakness of our political institutions from doing
nothing about the current situation.
Given that currently, President Jonathan is not likely to
win more than 50% approval for his
Presidency in a national referendum if he was contesting against himself, (
assuming that there is full and high voter turn-out, for such referendum), one would have expected that the opposition would
be guaranteed a victory at the next Presidential elections. This is not so
especially with the state of the opposition.
While there is a significant and large disenchantment with the current
administration, the opposition is failing to harness this disenchantment into a
rallying movement beyond its members and its traditional loyal base. A key feature evolving in the next Presidential
election is the emergence of a clear large independent swing political voting
base, disenchanted with the ruling party but unconvinced by the opposition that
it is any different from the ruling party by policy and character to win its
votes. This is the base depending on how it votes or its apathy to the election
that will swing the Presidential elections assuming the elections next year are
truly free and fair.
The opposition seem to be suffering from two major critical
problems that stand between it and electoral victory. First is the lack of a
rallying clear and articulated governance value that stands clearly above any
perception of politics of political exigency and opportunism. While it is true, that there is no permanent
friend in politics but permanent interests, it is also true that those who take
this political principle too far cannot stand for any political value, as their
politics become a cocktail of political self-interests and exigencies. How come
those who were in the vanguard of NADECO in the days of Abacha, with the
highest of democratic values are in the same boat with those who will lay a red
carpet to welcome from prison those who tormented and maimed members of the
same NADECO democratic opposition as
field commanders of the Abacha junta? How frightful it is that those who lay
this red carpet are even contemplating picking up the opposition’s Presidential
ticket and will expect the old NADECO base to vote for it? The second problem
of the opposition is the critical fault-line in its party between the Conservative
North and its South Western wing. The Northern Conservative wing of the
opposition seem to be in the politics of political exigency of returning power
to the North by any convenient political
alliance after learning in three election failures that the North is no longer
politically homogenous. Its conservative
governance and right wing values seem to be anathema to the centre-left
political origin and the values of its South Western wing. These two related
internal contradictions seem to be the bane of the opposition, affecting its
homogeneity and delaying the emergence of a rallying Presidential ticket to challenge
the ruling party. How the opposition resolves
these internal contradictions will largely determine the outcome of the
Presidential elections next year assuming that it will be free and fair.
There are two scenarios that could play out in the political
opposition. They are the emergence of sectionally popular but nationally
unelectable Presidential ticket, or the emergence of nationally electable
Presidential ticket but with the widening and probable cracks in the
fault-lines between its conservative North and South West wing which works to
weaken its nationally electable Presidential ticket. In the first scenario, the
independent swing voters feeling disenchanted and seeing no real alternative to
the PDP may be apathetic towards the election. A Presidential victory on a narrow
electoral base, below 50% of registered voting base becomes a possibility,
assuming a free and fair election. In
the real sense, such victory will be unpopular and genuinely undemocratic as
the large majority that became apathetic to the elections would be really
expressing a clear lack of choice among the Presidential candidates. The
institutional weakness of our electoral system with regards to party financing
and its capture by a narrow elite, and weak internal party democracy would have
conspired not to offer real choices to the people. With regards to the two
scenarios, a potential opposition victory is possible only if its internal
democracy is strong enough to resolve its internal contradictions
democratically and heal its fault lines.
In the absence of this, the kind of fault-lines that has emerged in its
Ogun and Oyo state wings and how it could be potentially exploited by the
ruling party at the centre might play out. History beckons.
The challenge of nation building that we face today with
regards to national security, healing our ethnic fault lines and building a
strong economy that creates wider prosperity for the majority of our people
demands a strong and credible President that can rally the nation
together. The emerging scenarios however
seem to be leading us to the opposite of this. We seem to be approaching a
lame-duck Presidential scenario in which the critical problems of our nation
building will become even more magnified to our own embarrassment and that of
the international community. The institutional
weakness of our electoral system that does not throw our best men and women
forward for national leadership has never been this obvious. Beyond the Presidential elections, civil
society must push for serious and urgent reforms of internal party democracy
that ensures stronger and more democratic political parties that reflect the
broader will of its members rather than the will of a narrow elite that has
captured these critical democratic institutions. Stronger and more democratic political parties
will also attract wider citizen participation as the people begin to see
political parties as true institutional mechanisms to influence society and put
their democratic aspirations forward.
It will not matter
whether we have a pluralist democracy of many political parties. As long as all
these parties lack internal democracy, our democracy will be tantamount to a
farce, a government of a narrow elite (that have captured our political parties)
for the narrow elite by a narrow elite. What we have today is a near optical
illusion of the real democratic aspirations of our people. We have a selectoracy
rather than a real democracy. Yet we must not give up on our democratic
aspirations. Civil society must push actively for electoral reforms, an agenda
that transcends the coming Presidential elections. We must push without
compromise for the adoption of the Uwais electoral reform report for laws and
regulations that ensure internal party democracy with heavy sanctions for
breach of those regulations. Truly, democracy
is a journey but we have today in our emerging presidential elections context shows
that we are very far from our democratic destination.
Olu Akanmu publishes a blog on Strategy and
Public Policy on http://olusfile.blogspot.com
