On May 29, 2015, the Jonathan
administration will hand over to the Buhari administration and the APC
will replace the PDP as the ruling party. As everyone knows, this will
be a historic occasion in our country’s political history because it
will mark the very first time that a ruling party at the centre of power
in Abuja would have been replaced, not by a military coup but through
relatively free and credible elections. There were profound doubts that
this could ever happen in Nigeria but all things being equal, it will
literally come to pass on the 29th of May.
For a long time, this column has been
asserting vigorously that an eventual replacement of the PDP by the APC
through an electoral victory would be a replacement of the party, the
government in power but not of the class in power, the ruling
class. I lent my support to this eventuality by relentlessly calling for
the defeat of the PDP, but in a decidedly critical spirit. This is
because history abundantly teaches us that when a ruling class throws
out a ruling party and replaces it with another ruling party, there will
be changes which may or may not be significant but which will not lead
to a fundamental reordering and redistribution of power and resources
between the rulers and the ruled, the haves and the have-nots. With this
historic caveat in mind, I offer the following FIVE points as things to
keep in mind as we move with euphoria and hope towards May 29, 2015. As
a final prefatory note to these five points, let me add that the first
TWO will substantially move us away from the worst and most
nation-wrecking aspects of the PDP era while the last THREE points will,
in all probability, prove to be very daunting and perhaps even
insuperable challenges to the APC as Nigeria’s new ruling party.
One:
We can expect and will probably get a
great reduction in the levels of corruption, waste and squandermania of
the PDP era, especially at its terminal point in the Jonathan
administration. Nigerians expect it and the whole world waits for it;
our country’s notoriety as one of the most corrupt nations on the planet
has in the last three decades been truly global in scale. Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala infamously asserted that corruption in Nigeria is so deep
and wide, so endemic that it could be reduced by no more than 4%. Expect
Buhari and the APC to do much better than that! Expect a reduction in
the fleet of the presidential jets. Expect a massive reduction in the
size of the entourage that used to accompany Jonathan and the other PDP
presidents to international meetings. Even expect the wasteful
sponsorship of private citizens to pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem by
state and federal governments to be discontinued, not gradually but
“with immediate effect”.
Do not expect, but don’t be surprised if
Buhari moves to slash the astronomical salaries, allowances and
emoluments paid to our law-makers, these being the highest in the world.
Finally, don’t expect but do not be surprised if Buhari also moves to
substantially reduce the recurrent expenditures of the state and federal
governments while concomitantly increasing capital expenditures for
development projects. Expect these changes in the scale of the culture
of corruption and waste of the PDP era because these are the “easy”
challenges that corruption poses to us as a people. Don’t expect that
Buhari and the APC will take on, and if they do, will be able to
successfully engage the structural aspects of corruption at the
present time. For that, compatriots, you must wait for a future stage
in the emergence and evolution of the APC as a new and truly progressive ruling party in our country – if that ever happens.
Two
Expect a noticeable change in the style
and culture of governance in a post-PDP Nigeria. We are rid, hopefully
forever, of the thugs, the nonentities and the glorified “area boys” who
more or less represented the expressive face of power and sovereignty
in the PDP era. The Fayoses, the Fani-Kayodes, the Obanikoros, the
Orubebes, the Ubahs and the Okupes will go into the night and vanish
from the seat of power in Abuja after May 29 and it is highly improbable
that APC will promote its own large corps of thugs into the same kind
of eminence that they had in the PDP era. It is highly unlikely that
Aisha Buhari will be anything like Patience Jonathan, since in fact no
Nigerian “First Lady” ever remotely approached the level of uncouth and
maniacal love and display of power of by the infamous author of “dia ris
god o”.
The new rulers are no saints; indeed,
many of them decamped from the moral sinkholes of the PDP only at the
very last moment and so they carry with them the miasmic scent of the
ordure within which they wallowed for so long in the defeated ruling
party. But don’t expect the level of barefaced, cynical lying and
deceitfulness of Jonathan himself, the chieftains of the PDP and the
official and unofficial spokesmen of the party and the government. We
will not get from the APC ringing declarations that millions of jobs are
being created while, in fact, scores of millions of our youths are
jobless. Hopefully too, we will not get from Buhari and the APC the
level of impunity with which the PDP responded to the revelations of the
Ekiti-Gate scandal, an impunity which I converted to the phrase, “wetin
una fit do?” from Nigerian Pidgin. We are unlikely to get true
bourgeois or even traditional African civility with the coming into
power of the new ruling party, but at least we will not have a new breed
of neo-fascist megalomaniacs in Aso Rock.
Three
The
change in the relationship between the incumbent president and the
presidency as an institution will not change much if at all in the
months and years after May 29. This is because the APC does not present
us with a meaningful departure from the degeneration that has completely
overwhelmed political parties and the party system in Nigeria in the
last three or four decades. Perhaps the most consequential effect of
this decay is the fact that incumbent presidents in our country since
the end of military dictatorships in 1999 have all had far greater power
and authority than both the ruling party and the presidency as an
institution. This highly personalized and patrimonial structure of
governance, this extreme concentration of power, authority and patronage
in one man will not change significantly under the APC, unless of
course the party undergoes a profound transformation from its origins
and antecedents. I may be wrong, but nothing that the APC has said and
done so far convinces me that this will happen. The only slightly
hopeful portent that we have is the fact that there are a few genuinely
bright and humanistic thinkers and visionaries in the party. But their
ranks within the party are too thin, their critical mass too
insubstantial.
Perchance Buhari will smile more often
than he did as a military dictator; perchance he will listen more to his
advisers and be more accountable to the populace than he was when he
governed as an unelected, absolutist ruler. But such hopes rest
dangerously on the unspoken and unacknowledged acceptance of the
supremacy of the president over the presidency and the ruling party.
This is more or less a feudal, pseudo-bourgeois conception and practice
of democracy. The big question here is: will Nigerian democracy move
into the modern bourgeois or post-bourgeois age under the APC?
There is also the feeling that with
Buhari’s victory, power has returned, so to speak, to the North having
stayed in the South for more than a decade since the return to formal
civilian democracy in 1999. Coupled with this is the fact that one of
the three historic power blocs in the country, the Southeast, is largely
absent from the electoral plurality that enabled the political victory
of the APC over the PDP. If the party system remains unreformed, if the
president remains supreme over the ruling party and the presidency, and
if the presidency itself remains unreconstructed, these two particular
issues will prove extremely fraught for the peaceful, united and
equitable functioning of democracy in the post-PDP period.
Four
Ultimately, everything
comes down to genuine and far-reaching economic and social reforms in
the post-PDP era. The most apparent and urgent site of these reforms
pertains to the complete overhaul of our infrastructures, with special
regard for the generation and distribution of power and the construction
and maintenance of good, motorable roads across the length and breadth
of the country. Don’t we all dream of the day when modernity would have
finally taken root in our country and power would be reliably and
affordably available to all our peoples?
Beyond such fond dreams, infrastructural
transformation in the power and transportation sectors of the economy
can act as the ultimate guarantor of job, food and health security for
the vast majority of our peoples beyond the narrow circles of the
economic and political elites. In other words, beyond the inherent and
incalculable benefits of complete and effective electrification of all
our towns and cities, all our villages and hamlets, cheap and available
power can and should act as the engine of growth and development for the
entire West Africa region.
The great obstacles to this potential
are the relentless looting and the squandermania through which “legal”
and illegal massive transfers of the bulk of our national or collective
wealth are made to the private coffers of the few at the expense of the
vast majority of our peoples. The classic economic term for this is
primitive accumulation. Can the APC as a ruling party historically take
Nigeria and its economy outside and beyond primitive accumulation? This
question is not as abstract as it seems. Posed differently and
concretely, the question asks us to wonder when the day will come when
the vast majority of our men and women of great wealth will make their
fortunes from genuine and productive entrepreneurial activities and not
from legal and illegal handouts from government. No policy statement, no
vision of economic growth and development that I have personally read
of or heard about from the policy wonks and spokesmen of new ruling
party indicates that the APC recognizes that the ‘legal”, structural forms of corruption are just as harmful and condemnable as the illegal, sleazy and much talked about forms.
Five
Nigeria in
the post-PDP era will command respectful and beneficial attention from
the oil conglomerates working in our extractive industries and the world
of global capitalism in general if and when our oil resources are
converted into engines of growth and development in our country and in
our region of the African continent. In the short run, the inanities of
the PDP era will perhaps be overcome and both our trading partners and
the world at large will stop taking advantage of our self-inflicted
weaknesses while staring in mocking unbelief at the scale of our rulers’
corruptibility and mediocrity. But at this point in time, it is a
debatable proposition whether under our new ruling party we will become
one of the national economic powerhouses in Africa and the developing
world, one of the truly just and egalitarian bourgeois or post-bourgeois
democracies on the planet.
In the weeks and months ahead, this
column will return in greater detail to each of these five points.
Meanwhile, let us hope that May 29 will at least lead to the eradication
of the worst features of the long misrule of the PDP at the centre of
power in our country
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