By Olu Akanmu
In the
months of September and October every year in the United Kingdom, the leading
political parties, the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats usually hold
their annual policy conferences.
Attendance is usually massive from across the United Kingdom with senior
and local leaders leading major policy sessions on subjects like education,
health, transportation, foreign affairs, economy, industry, sports, home
affairs, immigration, science and technology. The calendar of the policy
conferences are usually arranged back to back such that as one political party
conference finishes, another one begins.
In the British system with opposition shadow cabinets, the leading
speakers on policy areas are usually the shadow cabinet members whose policy
speeches are usually a critique of the ruling party performance in that policy
area over the one year period.
The policy
speeches are usually well researched, with data, facts, anecdotes presented
from major ideological perspectives of the political parties. Each policy
speech will then be followed by policy debate and contribution from delegates
from across the country where they bring local and regional perspectives to
support or flesh out their party’s perspective on each policy subject. The
delegates tend to vary from rank and file members, to local councilors, elected
legislators in regional houses and the Westminster. Of course, in the typical
British style, there are usually the strong elements of British caustic
political humour where jabs are thrown at opposing political parties’
perspectives and personalities. The jabs
are usually policy-based to illustrate policy gaps and weaknesses of competing
political parties’ policies.
The press as
the modern day forum for the people to follow the parties and their policies
are not usually left out. The party conferences from beginning to end are
usually televised life on BBC Parliamentary channel. Other stations will tune
in live to major policy speeches of the Prime Minister, the Opposition leader,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Opposition Cabinet Economy spoke
person. One interesting aspect of the sequencing of the political party
conferences is that the opposition policy conferences tend to come first and
the ruling party policy conference tends to come last, ensuring that they
respond copiously to the policy critique that would have been given by the
opposition parties. Imagine an APC
Policy Conference for three days with major policy speeches and sessions on
education, health, economy, industry, employment, and infrastructure. To do this, APC will have to do its homework
properly on diverse subject areas with specific details on what it will do differently
from PDP. In a three day conference with live telecast, an APC would have had
to constitute policy teams to do thorough research which will be presented at
the conference. There will be no room to hide with vague details as the policy conference
will not be the type of typical one- hour press conference addressed by its
Publicity Secretary.
If a week
later, a PDP policy conference follows, you can be sure of policy fire for
fire, critique for critique based on ideas to move the nation forward. Policy
debates and speeches by the PDP will be led by members of the Federal Executive
Council or senior members of parliament in the subject policy portfolio. They
will have to tell us why they have a better governance idea; how they are
executing it and the result they have delivered. In such policy conferences,
there will be very little room for absolute focus on primordial issues of
ethnicity and sectionalism. If such subjects would be discussed at all, it will
be done in a policy context such as federalism, devolution of power, resource control
and impact on the quality of life of the people. The fact that such policy conferences happen
every year with or without election also means political parties are constantly
forced to keep sharpening their governance policies such that as we approach
elections, we know what they stand for or how they differ.
Today, a
critical problem of our electoral process is the lack of true plurality of
governance ideas or the little robustness of policy ideas. It is not very clear
today how the PDP and the APC are different. It is not even clear whether the
electorate know what they stand for. Elections today have thus become a debate
on personalities, character and ethnicity of the candidate with all attendant
counter-productive emotions. A political party policy conference will throw up
our bright politicians, the ones who have depth, who have schooled themselves
properly in governance, who have real ideas to improve the well-being of our
people. The lack of formal public platform for policy discussions such as this has
rather thrown up the typical Nigerian politician who is more or less a rice
distributor among the party members, hailed and carried shoulder-high because
of the naira that he doles out to his party rank and file. This typical
Nigerian politician, the narrow privileged elites are the ones who seem to have
permanently captured our political parties, reproducing themselves in
leadership successions. And this has essentially turned our elections into
choices between blue-black and black-blue candidates.
In recent
essays, we have called for electoral reforms to fix our broken and
dysfunctional electoral process that usually throws up our worst or at best our
averages for electoral offices. We also wish to call for statutorily compulsory
annual political party policy conferences.
We need to build a new polity driven by policy and great thoughts rather
than ethnicity and sectionalism. We need to have an active citizenry, a civil
society that engages the politicians on their governance ideas, its execution
and results delivered. We need to have political parties with contesting
ideological perspectives on driving the nation forward, where some will be
truly a little to right while others will be truly a little to the left. We
need to get our intelligentsia to join politics, to drive policies and great
governance ideas and philosophies. We need politicians who can write again, great
books and political thoughts such as the Voice of Reason, Thoughts on the
Nigerian Constitution and Renascent Africa. We need to build a new politics and
electoral process driven by policies, great contesting governance ideas and
philosophies among our political parties. Statutory annual policy conferences
of political parties, as part of our electoral reforms will make this happen
and raise the quality of our governance.
