PDP: the weaknesses of power

“A pot that can no longer boil water should be discarded.” 

Sudanese Proverb

 

The intense quarrels which broke out among PDP big-wigs long before President Jonathan presented the 2013 budget proposals to the National Assembly do not  appear to be abating. They are, in all probability, likely to worsen if the disputes over the 2012 budget implementation continue to be sources of friction. The ruling party is living up to its reputation as a working contraption which feeds off the weaknesses of our political system, and delivers less and less to the quality of governance. A stranger to this tendency for the PDP to tear itself up every once in a while, and still find a way to stay on its feet will be thoroughly baffled. But Nigerians familiar with the disconnect between political power and the capacity to win elections and deliver service will most likely just note this particular round of fights within the PDP. Younger Nigerians will wonder if our democracy will ever change their lives.

At the current stage of this latest fight, the leaders of the National Assembly are taking on the aides of President Jonathan who publicly upbraided them for their comments and reactions to the administration’s performance in the budgetary process. The aides will not back down either, and the national assembly members will rally behind their leadership. The yawning gaps between the claims of the executive arm on its budget execution achievement, and those of the legislature may never be empirically verified. Both sides realize that budget implementation is a major yardstick by which to measure the impact of governments, so it is not surprising that the quarrels are heated and messy.

In democracies where different parties control large blocks of the legislature, disputes over the budget are central to electoral fortunes of parties, and citizens pay very close attention to them. Governments collapse routinely over budget issues all over the world. So serious is the issue of a faithful implementation of budgets that our own constitution makes failure to implement the budget by the executive an impeachable offence. The problem has always been that the executive had insisted on its own definition of faithful implementation; and at any one time, it can call a whole host of reasons, including unnecessary interference from the legislature, for its inability to achieve its targets. Threats to impeach Presidents over budget performance is nothing new; and the nation hardly pays any attention to them.

Which is a great tragedy, considering the importance of budgets as principal instruments of governance. The only tragedy bigger than the routinization of these quarrels is the failure of the political process to give them more substance. The Nigerian situation is such that only the PDP opposes itself; and this opposition is predictably and routinely settled as a family affair. The national assembly, in which the PDP has a huge majority, flexes its muscles; huffs and puffs and then rolls over at the end of the fiscal year. You then hear the same quarrels next year, and they are repeated with uncanny similarity: late and shoddy prepations; disputed assumptions and projections; late passage of the Act; inclusion of “contraband” (constituency) projects; late and inadequate releases; bogus or shabby execution and false claims over execution rates among many other reasons. The executive does not seem to take these quarrels seriously either. Even when it “prepares” the budget early, as it appears to have done this year, it does this at the expense of requirements for critical inputs from spending and implementing agencies. Budget philosophy, frameworks and basic assumptions are presented as non-negotiable, largely because the executive treats legislators with thinly-veiled contempt as people who will hardly understand them, or pay any attention to them, particularly if certain “interests” are taken into consideration.

So a fair question to ask is why a political party that has virtual control of key decision-making powers at federal and state levels proves spectacularly unable to perform basic functions such as budget management and the maintenance of security, law and order; still continues to exert such decisive and negative influence in a nation where citizens have a choice? The answer to this question is complex, but it cannot continue to be ignored. It is important to ask what makes the Nigerian political system so weak and vulnerable to manipulation that a party like the PDP can survive and expand. If its key functionaries such as the President, leaders of the legislature and the party can accuse each other of incompetence, subversion and dangerous grandstanding, and threaten impeachment and disciplinary action against each other, there must be something wrong with a democratic system that just looks on and waits for the next quarrel, not the next election. There must be something fundamentally wrong with a party which cannot stop damaging fights between its President and governors over major policy instruments such as Excess Crude Account (or Sovereign Wealth Fund); over revenue-sharing formula; over privatization of assets; or any one of scores of major issues. But when neither the opposition nor the PDP itself is able to transform these routine quarrels that progressively sap the vitality and substance from our democratic system from internal matters to major political issues, then it is time to ask whether the our democracy is worth anything at all.

To be fair, it is not enough to blame the PDP for running our democracy aground through its established standards of incompetence, insensitivity and total disregard for public opinion which can only be explained by its confidence that it will retain power by any means necessary. The culpability of the opposition in the abuse of the democratic process is greater than its total disrespect by the PDP. An opposition that briefly comes to life during elections, plays the game the way it sees the PDP play it, but does it worse; and then disappears behind ethnic barriers, or gets swallowed up by the rarified air of Abuja politics is a bigger liability on the Nigerian people than the PDP.

It should surprise no one that the PDP is watching all the current excitement over prospects of mergers and alliances among opposition parties with a comforting amusement. It has seen it all before, and there is nothing on the ground to suggest that anything that will threaten it will come out of them. The PDP knows that the opposition is barely distinguishable from it in many critical aspects: big parties are centred around very few people or individuals whose words are final on any matter. Alliances or mergers are therefore attempted collaboration between personal egos and ambitions, and they fall flat on their faces because party leaders cannot yield ground to interests bigger than them. So the PDP continues to laugh all the way to elective offices because its conclave of the few rich and powerful plays the game better than parties who make pretenses at populist ideologies, and who have neither the resources nor muscle to buy off the entire electoral machinery, as well as a substantial rump of the opposition.

The flashes of defiance and hopes for the assertion of some element of autonomy and integrity which the House of Representatives in particular is showing give hope that his time around, the legislature will challenge President Jonathan to do better. It may also exercise the mandate of the people of Nigeria in such a manner as to dent the arrogance and confidence of a ruling party which should really be called the ruining party. The opposition has a great opportunity to do more than wish that the PDP will implode. It can work towards 2015, but it needs to work now to reduce the damage which the administration is visiting on the nation. It has to work hard, because it is, itself, severely limited by one of the major shortcomings of the PDP: the basic assumption that politics is relevant only during elections. If they wait for elections to show Nigerians the liability which the PDP is, they will lose again. Because though the PDP may not be good at anything, but it is better than all the opposition combined in being returned as winner in elections.