The All Progressives Congress appears to have given its enemies a
stick to beat the party. For two weeks now, the governing party has been at war
with itself over the sharing of offices. And it’s getting messier.
In a gesture of serial defiance, the Senate not only rejected the
party’s choice of candidates for Senate president and deputy, it also rejected
the party’s list for other principal officers. The gangrene has spread to the
House.
For its part, the Peoples Democratic Party is simply beside itself
in an Fun of mockery. Its officials cannot believe their worst wishes will come
true so soon. They are quietly stoking the flames, anxious to regroup and seize
the current crisis in the APC as their resurrection launch pad.
And what better way to start than for Ike Ekweremadu to get a foot
in the door as deputy Senate president in a deal that has taken the PDP out of
the ICU?
That’s politics. Yet it is precisely in an attempt to prevent the
variety of renegade politics that beset the PDP four years ago – when Aminu
Tambuwal defied his party – that the APC has refused to sweep the current
crisis under the carpet.
There are those who have argued that the party should get over
itself and move on. It’s futile to hope that either Ekweremadu or Senate
President Bukola Saraki will step down at this point. So, why persist in a war
of attrition that is depleting the party’s goodwill and distracting it from the
urgent tasks at hand?
Those who pursue this line of argument insist that if Saraki was good enough to invest himself in APC’s election campaign, surely he cannot be unworthy of a post in the National Assembly, which he contested for and won according to the rules of the Senate.
As for his teaming up with Ekweremadu, what’s the big deal? What is
the difference between both parties, anyway? And was the APC not in clandestine
defection talks with Ekweremadu and co at some point after Buhari’s victory in
March? What’s the party mad about?
The matter is not so cut and dried. To suggest that APC and PDP are
one and the same thing is to insult voters who could no longer endure the
travesty of the latter and decided that enough was enough.
PDP was not and cannot be like any other party. The party,
especially under Jonathan, was simply incomparable in its capacity for
mischief, stealing and impunity. It is a disservice to our collective memory to
forget that so soon.
Those who insist on party discipline do so because they have seen
the misery and devastation that former President Goodluck Jonathan’s weakness
brought upon the PDP and, ultimately, the country. Also, in a country where
merit often takes the back seat, zoning has become a makeshift formula for
deciding who gets what.
Whatever threatens zoning rocks the boat. Saraki’s presumptive
strike toppled the party’s consensus on zoning and sent a mixed signal about
his company and future ambition.
That’s obviously one other reason why the party is finding it hard
to move on. The party’s arrangement, which favoured the Lawan-Akume pair for
the Senate and the Gbajabiamila-Monguno for the House, was based on the
calculation that these candidates have modest ambitions.
The party had hoped that Lawan’s emergence would kill two birds with
one stone: it would settle the feeling of marginalisation in the North East and
stave off any serious challenge for the nation’s top job in 2019.
The unspoken fear of those strongly opposed to Saraki is not only
that he still has PDP blood running in his veins, but that, perhaps more than
any other ranking senator, the Senate presidency could help him secure a bid
for the presidency in four years’ time, or position him as a rallying point for
the resurgence of the PDP at some future date.
If some of these speculations sound irrational it is because
irrationality is the currency of politics. Who would have believed, for
example, that an unknown Yusuf Lasun would become deputy speaker of the House
by surreptitiously putting himself up for the position while at the same time
voting for his party’s candidate for that position? Or that Tambuwal would be
named as backing the same rebellion that brought his former party to its knees?
The party has to move forward, not by running away from, but by
confronting its demons. And it would be foolhardy to leave the job to state
governors who barely have control of their legislators. The party leadership
is, regrettably, also diminished both by this crisis and from the allegations
of favouritism and corruption that preceded it. There is an appalling lack of
confidence and honesty to tackle the problem.
Shutting Saraki out or living in denial of his presidency will not
work. Someone must engage Saraki and tell him that he cannot defy the party one
day, claim to be remorseful the next and then turn around to insist on sharing
positions in the Senate almost exclusively on his own terms.
For example, Senator Ali Ndume’s bid for the post of leader of the
Senate is obviously a reward by the pro-Saraki group for Ndume’s rebellion. It
might seem the smart and politically expedient thing to do, but it opens
Saraki’s sincerity to question, complicates the problem in the House and
further damages the party. This is not helped by Ndume’s indictment in the
nation’s topmost security challenge at the moment for which he is still facing
prosecution.
The task of stopping the drift now falls squarely on Buhari’s
shoulders. He cannot outsource or purchase it by avoiding Saraki. He has
promised not to meddle – which is good, but I have said before that not
meddling is not the same thing as playing the ostrich. APC desperately needs
leadership.
Buhari must admit that his indifference – however well meaning – was
just as counterproductive as Saraki’s ambition. He must engage him fair and
square.
It’s been nearly 30 days in the quandary; that’s neither what
Nigerians deserve nor voted for. Buhari, as president and leader of his party,
must either use the carrot, the stick or both, to whip his party quickly into
line.
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