While I was away (1): Atiku’s latest defection

After three years of writing this column, I rested it last December. I apologise for its sudden disappearance without a forewarning, and thank loyal readers, such as Engr Edwin Ajagbe, who emailed me to say how much they had missed the column. I am glad to be back, and hope I can continue to make modest contributions to public discourse on the future direction of Nigeria, a nation of unfulfilled greatness, badly let down by a succession of mediocre leaders. And, yes, by a complicit and culpable citizenry! A subject for another day!
For now, allow me to catch up on some developments during the absence of this column. Over the next two or three weeks, I will write a series of articles titled “While I was away …” These may seem like “old stories”, but are significant, and will influence the trajectory of politics in the run-up to next year’s elections. So, I want to give my take on them.
My focus this week is on the defection of Atiku Abubakar, former vice president, from the All Progressives Congress (APC) to his old party, People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Since Atiku’s defection last December, there has been a wave of other defections, prompting BusinessDay Sunday to ask recently:“Defections unlimited: in whose interest?” But Atiku is a serial defector. From PDP, under which he was vice president for eight years, he defected to the then Action Congress in 2006, returned to PDP in 2007, only to defect to APC in 2014, and back again to PDP in 2017. He is, therefore, a perfect case study on the flakiness and fluidity of party loyalty in Nigeria!
“I Atiku Abubakar hereby tender my resignation from the All Progressives Congress”, the former vice president declared in a statement last December.This provoked a huge hoopla in social media, so intense you would think the defection was unexpected. Except that it was not. I saw it coming as long ago as2015. In an article titled “APC faces uncertain future. It must unite or die”, I wrote: “There are rumblings in the northern faction of the alliance, with the possibility that some disgruntled and ambitious former PDP leaders may leave the APC and return to the PDP”. Atiku was on my radar.
Politics, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott said, is as much about temperament as it is about belief. Well, Atiku’s political nomadism is more temperamental than principled. He said he joined the APC, “with the assurance that the vision other founding fathers and I had for the PDP would be actualised through the APC”. But what is this “vision” and why is it so restless that it can’t reside in one party and has to take Atiku, as if a political mendicant, from party to party: from PDP to AC, back to PDP, then to APC and, now, back again to PDP?
Of course, in a democracy, party affiliations can’t be locked in a fixed structure. Politicians must put nation before party, and some will inevitably switch sides. In Britain, in the 19th century, Gladstone famously moved from the Tory to the Whig, and, in the early 20th century, Winston Churchill went from Conservative to Liberal and back again. But these shifts in allegiances were presaged by major ideological or policy differences. For instance, Gladstone left the Tory to align with like-minded people in the Whig because the Tory party did not share his liberal ideas about free trade and laissez-faire economic policies.
But in Nigeria personal ambitions, rather than high principles, drive party allegiances. It is like a practice in international litigation known as “forum shopping”,where a party shops around for a jurisdiction likely to give it a favourable judgment. That is what Atiku and most party defectors in Nigeria are doing. They shop around for platforms to achieve their personal political goals. But politicians should not treat political parties with the same self-interested calculations that litigants treat courts when forum shopping. Parties should not just be a vehicle for actualising personal ambitions, but primarily a repository of coherent values, ideas, beliefs and a constellation of peoplewith shared normative dispositions.
What’s interesting about Atiku’s case is that he actually had justifiable reasons to leave APC. Over the past two years, he has been saying the right things about the political restructuring of Nigeria. He has taken shots at his fellow Northern leaders, needling them to embrace political restructuring. He has also been saying, rightly, that Nigeria’s economic model is flawed and needs a radical change. These are principled grounds for Atiku to leave APC, which has been pussyfooting on political restructuring and has failed to produce a coherent and radical economic policy. If Atiku had left APC on these grounds and had formed a new party to articulate and mobilise support for his ideas, he would have gained credibility for conviction politics. But, alas, neither of these happened.
Truth is, Atiku left APC not because he disagreed with its policies, but because the party had lost its allure as a vehicle for achieving his presidential ambitions. In his resignation statement, he complained repeatedly about how he and his fellow former PDP members were being treated in the APC. Thus, it was not ideological or policy differences that drove Atiku out of APC, but the realisation that he and his faction had lost out in the power game. With President Buhari likely to seek re-election in 2019, or at least being egged on by fawning APC governors, Atiku, whose presidential ambitions remain undimmed, saw the handwriting on the wall and decided, self-interestedly, to “forum shop” – yet again!
And where to? Well, he returned to the PDP for the umpteenth time. Is PDP, which Atiku left twice, now such a reformed and credible party for the actualisation of what he described as “the vision other founding fathers and I had for the PDP”? Surely, this is not about the fulfilment of some nebulous vision; it’s about the actualisation of a longstanding presidential ambitions, which, leaving aside the unprincipled way he is trying to achieve them, are perfectly legitimate ambitions.
But, to be fair to Atiku, he is not the only one putting self-interest before high principles. Take Buhari. Didn’t he too compromise his principles to become president? Of course, he did. As one British writer said, “Being a member of a political party involves working out who is the most dreadful person you are prepared to put up with”. But, in 2015, Buhari decided to put up with the “very dreadful” former PDP leaders; people that, as a military dictator in 1984, he would have sent to jail for alleged corruption! But after three failed attempts, Buhari wanted to become president and was happy to take support from wherever it came – the end justified the means!
The truth is that without the PDP defectors there would have been no APC as we know it, and states won by or through former PDP leaders like Atiku and Bukola Saraki contributed significantly to Buhari’s victory. But having gained power with the help of the “hideous” former PDP leaders, Buhari suddenly realised how repulsive they are, and decided to marginalise them, as Atiku complained in his statement. It’s sheer opportunism.
But political opportunism, exemplified by Atiku’s serial defections and Buhari’s unprincipled alliances, undermine politics. Nigerians must be vigilant. Attitudes matter in politics. As 2019 approaches, they should understand why those jostling for political offices behave as they do. They should beware politicians who are “forum-shopping” or who will sell their soul to the “devil” – just to win!
I conclude with an apt Easter message for Nigerian politicians: Like the life of Jesus, politics must be about personal sacrifices, not selfish gains!
Happy Easter everyone!

Olu Fasan