Nigeria is a one-party state. The party is the political class

The party conference season has just ended in Britain. This is the period of the year when the UK’s major political parties hold their annual conferences. The Liberal Democrats kicked the season off with their conference in Brighton from 15-18 September, followed by the Labour Party in Liverpool from 23-26 September. Last week, from 30 September to 3 October, the Conservative Party closed the season with their conference in Birmingham. The conferences were a spectacle of value-laden and conviction politics, the kind of which Nigeria is acutely bereft.

As you would imagine, the dominant issue at the conferences was Brexit, a shorthand for the decision of the UK to leave the European Union, which has really caused deep divisions between and,even more so, within the parties. Like war, Brexit is a matter of conscience for British politicians, who see it as existential national issue that transcends party interests. And the Brexit divisions were played out at each of the party conferences.

However, once you take out the Brexit issue, the party conferences were the usual tribal gatherings, with deep party loyalty and primordial affinity on display. Any member of the Liberal Democrats would be deeply offended to be called a Conservative or Labour, just as any Conservative politician would feel insulted if referred to as Lib-Dem or Labour. Ah, don’t provoke a Labour Party member by daring to call him or her a Tory or Lib-Dem. Now, none of this mutual exclusivity is due to personal hatreds or animosities. Not at all. It’s just that these politicians have strong political values, which they believe the party they belong to predominantly embodies and the other parties don’t.

For instance, broadly speaking, you are Lib-Dem because you believe in liberal values and the reform of traditional institutions; you are Conservative (or Republican in the US) because you are pro-business, pro-markets and pro-aspiration and individual achievement;and you are Labour (or Democrat in the US) because you believe in greater state intervention, social justice and workers’ rights.

Although political parties often have the same agenda, i.e. to reduce poverty, improve the economy and fight corruption, they differ in their preferred solutions to them. After all, if parties have the same solutions to the same problems, why are they not one? Different parties exist, or should exist, because they offer alternative solutions to the same problems. It is such philosophical differences, such alternative approaches that make politics competitive, contestable and valuable. In many electoral democracies, citizens make an intelligent choice of a party or a candidate based on differences in orientations and programmes. A multi-party system does not enrich politics or enhance democracy unless it is based on alternative visions, philosophies and ideas, and gives the citizens real choice.

So, what do we have in Nigeria? Well, let’s start with a brief historical overview. In the pre-independent and immediate post-independent periods, there was a clear distinction between the forces of conservatism and forces of progressivism in Nigeria. Ahmadu Bello’s Northern People’s Congress (NPC) was in the conservative, feudalist camp, while Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group, Nnamdi Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) and Aminu Kano’s Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) belonged to different strands of progressivism. The pattern was replicated in the early 1980s, with Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), Azikiwe’s Nigerian People’s Party (NPP), Ibrahim Waziri’s Great Nigerian People’s Party (GNPP) and Aminu Kano’s People Redemption Party (PRP), again with different colourations, congregating in the progressive camp, while the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), a reincarnation of the old NPC, was aconservative party, although the NPC/NPN conservatism was not of tax cuts, free markets or small state, but of entrenched privilege, feudalism and a static social order, as is today’s progressivism!

In the early 1990s, the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida, a strong advocate of the two-party system,decided that Nigeria should have two parties with alternative or different ideological orientations. So, the regime established the National Republican Convention (NRC), described as “a little to the right”, and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), dubbed “a little to the left”. Babangida decreed that anyone interested in politics must join either of the two parties, and, of course, the politicians, being without scruples, rushed into the parties. Only few perceptive politicians, such as Bola Ige, saw through the chicanery and decided not to be part of the charade. MKO Abiola, a staunch NPN member and leader, suddenly became a centre-left politician and joined the supposedly centre-left SDP, which gave him a platform to run for president.

But if the politics of convenience and opportunism was birthed, or first reared its head prominently, under Babangida’s crude, self-serving political contrivance, which ended in tears with the annulment of the presidential election of June 12, 1993, it has now become commonplace, the defining feature of Nigeria’s political system.

Nigeria is an ostensibly multi-party state, but not a genuine one; rather it has all the features of a one-party state. Think of it, in a one-party state, you may change personalities but approaches to politics do not change. But election in a multi-party state means a real choice between parties and policies. As Denis and Ian Derbyshire point out in their book Political Systems of the World, “The opportunity of voting for a complete change of policy, and even philosophy, is a vital element in a democratic political system”, adding that “without it genuine choice is limited”.

But where is the real or genuine choice in Nigerian politics today? What is the difference between the All Progressive Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), for instance? The politicians use both parties interchangeably as a vehicle for political power. So, when Nigerians vote for APC or PDP, they do so not because of what the party stands for because it is a vehicle being used by the politician they support. And when that politician joins another party, they vote for that new party.

Of course, when parties are not anonymous, i.e. based on overriding values and rules that trump the cult of personalities, anything is possible. Recently, Remi Sonaiya, presidential candidate of KOWA, tweeted the following words: “Big-Party politics in Nigeria: No ethics, no morality, no honour, no principles, no truth, no decency, no respect, no integrity, no honesty. Just a wild, mercantile, calculating, opportunistic, shameless charade”. Can anyone really disagree with these horrid but accurate descriptions of the state of the Nigerian politics?

Take one high-level example: the recent presidential primaries in the APC. President Buhari is his party’s sole candidate for next year’s presidential election. But why did he need to go through a primary? Well, because, like one-party states do, he wanted to demonstrate popular support for himself and legitimise the behind-the-scenes decisions already taken within the party machine. But the results of the primaries, which showed millions of APC ‘members’in some states purportedly voting for Buhari, with 1.9m in Lagos and 2.9m in Kano, for instance, robbed the whole exercise of any credibility. Yet, this did not stop Buhari’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, from gloating that “It is significant that President Buhari has won a major victory, fair and square, through direct nationwide primary, a system that seeks to break the mould”.

Breaking the mould is, of course, the key mantra of Buhari’s supporters. But the truth is that no mould has been broken. I mean, you haven’t broken the mould when the party machine prevents any serious candidate from standing against you in a presidential primary. You haven’t broken the mould when a faceless and unaccountable group purportedly paid N45m to buy a nomination paper for you because you are supposedly indigent. And, of course, you haven’t broken the mould when, as a president fighting corruption, you openly welcome to your party defectors, who have publicly been accused of corruption by the state anti-corruption agency. Indeed, you haven’t broken the mould when you sent your party’s leaders and governors to do a deal with someone that even your party accused of corruption and other criminal charges in order to overturn a state election that your party lost. Few politicians in Nigeria have been so hounded, besmirched and ostracised than Iyiola Omisore on a myriad of accusations, including the alleged killing of Chief Bola Ige. Yet, all those did not matter to Buhari’s party when the choice was between losing Osun State or doing a deal with Omisore.

But the truth is that this game of amorality and end-justifies-the-means is played by all the parties. After all, PDP tried to do a deal with Omisore and was only outsmarted by the APC, using its power of incumbency.

So, the Nigerian politics is dysfunctional. It is monolithic and devoid of values and principles. Although, in theory, Nigeria is a multi-party state, in practice, it is a one-party state. There is no real choice between the parties and what they stand for. But Nigerian politics and democracy will continue to fail the people unless the personalised style of politics and party formation in Nigeria is replaced by a genuine multi-party system that is based on values, principles and ideas. Nigeria is current a one-party state dominated a monolithic and self-serving political class. That must end in the national interest!

Olu Fasan