The fall and fall of the PDP

He who solves a problem with a problem will always find a problem waiting.  African Proverb.

By the time you read this, another twist would have been added to the drama involving the almost certain and total collapse of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). This fast-moving melodrama will continue to engage public attention for quite a while, and in the tradition of the PDP, it will involve twists and turns that are powered exclusively by the interests of its members who have occupied its highest offices or key political positions in the nation. If there are members of the party who would not have not received category ‘A’ invitations to state functions between 1999 to 2015, they will just have to hope that there are fragments of the party they can still hold on to by June this year.

 The emergence of Ali Modu Sheriff as national chairman of the party is captured in the Hausa adage involving a mad woman who goes to collect firewood. She will labour to make a bundle much too big for her to lift and carry home. Every time she fails to lift it to her head, she will untie and add more pieces of wood to the bundle. She will then try to lift the now heavier bundle. Contrary thought could see Sheriff’s appointment as an audacious move by a remnant of a local party on the run to rally the troops and organize a fight back. Those who will see it this way will need to redefine audacity to include the idea of a soldier who shoots himself in both feet, hoping the enemy will fear him for his seeming courage.

The more sophisticated elements of the party still holding on to their membership cards may be tempted to think Sheriff’s emergence at the head of a party he helped destroy is a good example of thinking outside the box. This will make sense in circles where the box has no defined space or value, and thinking around it is limited to very few with an identifiable record of interpreting the PDP’s  tailspin to ignominy. There could be a few others who will insist that Sheriff is product of a party tradition which routinely abandons merit, integrity, propriety or justice the moment money, power and influence show their faces. In a context where few PDP chieftains from the Northeast today will step out into the limelight being beamed all over by the E.F.C.C, Sheriff’s bravado will disappoint those elements in the party who believe that it's descent can be arrested.

        

    The frenzy of activities following the emergence of Sheriff as chairman of PDP should remind Nigerians that huge segments of the nation’s political elite are still holed up in a structure that has been sinking in the last three years. A zoning policy that has been its undoing owing to the failure of its powerful people to rein in their ambitions has been trusted to produce a leader for the party that could not have been foreseen by the most gifted of seers. From a region with an army of members who had wielded enormous powers, you would safely have won a bet if you had mentioned ten former governors, chairmen, ministers, legislators and any one of the many who grew fat on the party’s patronage to emerge in place of Sheriff. With muscle from the only two PDP governors in the entire north, former President Jonathan and governors from the PDP strongholds of the Southeast and South-South, Sheriff now finds himself at the head of a party that has shrunk from Post  Traumatic Defeat Disorder and odious revelations of its stewardship. The exodus from the party in the  north will now assume dimensions of a stampede, and a few loyalists may hide their passion for the party from relations and friends.

It is arguable if Sheriff will be able to lead the PDP in the ordinary sense of the word. Organs of the party will overwhelmingly reject him or split around him. Previously-powerful members of the party who were governors, ministers or legislators will shake his chair until he falls off, or they bring the entire roof down. When you see people like Femi Fani-Kayode holding their noses in Sheriff’s presence, you know you have reached the bottom in the search for noxious infamy. Yet, on merit alone, no two souls deserve each other's intimate company more than these two.  If Jonathan's ministers can take a break from lamenting the tightening noose of the E.F.C.C to denounce Sheriff and work to unseat him, it is obvious that his projected three months in the chair are unlikely to be of any value to the party. 

Less-informed observers may wonder what makes Sheriff so attractive to hostility from many of the powerful members of his party. They may find answers from those who put some store in political fidelity. Along with Attahiru Bafarawa, this is a politician who has made the full rounds of the political terrain, so much so that you will be forgiven for assuming that they wake up every morning asking which is their current political party.  What do you call a man who is comfortable marrying a woman that has been married four or five times to different men, some of them twice? 

There  will be people who will say a former two-term governor and three times senator facing charges by the E.F.C.C; one whose relationship with the roots, growth and development of Boko Haram is still a matter of intense interest; one who enjoyed and still enjoys intimate relationship with President Jonathan(who himself is walking free owing only to the slippery covers of political goodwill);and a politician whose last outing in his home state was a humiliating defeat in a contest to return to the senate, is not suited to lead the PDP even for one week. These will be people who are largely untutored in the history and philosophy of the PDP. Sheriff's emergence aptly captures the logical development and decline of the PDP, and those that will fight him will benefit only from discovering that the party may not be worth fighting for.

       

      Barring a miracle and a disastrous failure of the All Progressives Party(APC) to hold together and lead effectively, the PDP as a party is all but practically finished. It will leave a vacuum that could negatively affect the political process. Without the PDP or another party to provide a credible opposition to the APC, the latter will resemble the lone prizefighter in the ring who has to keep punching himself to test his strength and endurence. He will not know how he will fare against a real opposition. The APC has much to learn from the current misfortunes of the PDP. It will also benefit from informed vigilance over PDP's live parts in the national assembly and within the APC itself.

The needle and the plough

Leadership is action, not position.

Donald H. McGannon

When Hausa people want to caution against the possibility that resolving a small problem could invite bigger ones, they say it is important to ensure that a needle does not unearth a plough. This is the type of advise that conservatives will give to leaders who embark on radical policies. In some instances, it is sound advise, particularly if leaders do not have firm feet to stand on solid ground as they move from contemplation to action. In other instances, it represents a natural fear for change that could be benign, beneficial or bountiful. In either case, it serves the purpose of reminding us that not all plans work out.

Policy makers and analysts will find plenty to learn from the school feeding programme of Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State. Here you have an excellent initiative with the potential to achieve many results. Give primary school children a meal at school, and you will dramatically transform school attendance levels. Child nutrition will improve. Parents will be saved the cost of a meal, a genuine relief for many families. Children of the poor will enjoy direct benefits of public resources. Millions of Naira will trickle down to housewives, labourers, assistants and food suppliers. Why should there be a problem?

Plenty of reasons. Engineering larger attendance means you will have to increasingly spend more to feed additional mouths, some of which turn up only for the food. Large turn out of pupils expose limited and dilapidated classrooms. A programme centered around school children reminds teachers that they have not been paid for months, and they grumble over supervising other peoples’ children free feeding when their’s are unfed. The Islamic school children/beggars grab attention, demanding equal or better attention and investment in their lives. Opponents ring bells around many other pressing social and economic challenges, and accuse you of poor prioritization. Finances are stretched and threaten to stop a key initiative and create massive problems for the credibility of a leader. Managing a massive programme creates potential avenues for abuse and corruption. Finally, because monitoring and evaluatioin mechanisms are weak (or worse, suspect), the programme’s real impact, beyond the achievement of immediate political goals, will be difficult to establish. Opponents of the policy will stretch this list.

The faint-hearted will not embark on a school feeding programme, provision of new furniture, school uniforms and no-fee policy simultaneously, or at all. But then governance, particularly under current economic challenges, should not be for the faint-hearted. There must be quite a few governors paying very close attention to the trail-blazing role of el-Rufai, and it is safe to assume that some have already made up their minds that school feeding and other subsidies are best left among some of the many colourful promises in APC manifesto.

Millions of people who voted for 16 APC governors in the North will be praying that they do not have weak and poorly – prepared leaders lifted and deposited into governor seats by the Buhari tsunami. Even if they are discouraged and frightened away from the initial results of el-Rufai’s swashbuckling, they will need to sit up and assume some control over affairs in their states.

The 10 million almajirai Dame Patience Jonathan reportedly said northerners breed and throw away represent a crippling ulcer at the soul of the North. Add them to tens of millions of other children who attend government primary and secondary schools without getting any education or preparation for productive adult lives, and you see how the region is wasting its most valuable asset and jeopardizing its future. More than two million northerners live in I.D.P camps, and millions more live in fear of insurgents, or of inability to find any means of subsistence. The North has been virtually de-industrialized in the last three decades, and it is now more pauperized than ever. Peasants still feed its burgeoning populations, and its youth is growing on the margins of existence with bitterness and a pronounced disposition for settling all scores with violence. Drugs ravage young men and women, and elders have lost control of all levers of influence in communities.

A huge fire of expectation was lit in the north by last year’s elections. Most northerners believe President Buhari can walk on water and are willing to make many excuses for him if he doesn't. They will lower the bar for their governors, and they will punish incompetence, insensitivity and corruption. Rising frustration among millions of people who thought they voted for instant change will not be easily assuaged by comfortable elites’ arguments over declining revenues or the strength of the Naira. Few people will wait until the next elections to turn their backs on elected persons. They now know they can change leaders through elections, but many think four years is too long to wait. The future of Nigeria’s democratic process actually depends on the degree to which millions of the poor believe it can change their lives.

The lot of today’s leaders in the North is unenviable. Yet, they asked for it, and they will have to deliver. Buhari’s federal government will not come rushing to fix problems which state and local governments should fix. It is not Buhari’s style, and even if he wants to, he cannot. His own problems are overwhelming enough, and the North should not expect a favoured treatment from him. Northerners and their governors are on their own. Many governors are still counting their problems and lamenting an inheritance they expected to be less intimidating. Many are challenged by intra-party disputes and desperately weakened institutions. A few have made a habit of staying almost permanently away from the people. There are a few flashes of hope here and there. Nasir el-Rufai has beaten the starter’s gun, risking all the historic penalties of pioneers. Bindow in Adamawa is darting between political sharks, rebuilding urban roads at a rate that makes you wonder where he gets his funds from. Tambawal in Sokoto appears set to embark on a productive outing after a careful and controlled preparation. Shettima appears set to follow every bullet or bomb of Boko Haram with some relief and comfort from public funds. There may be other heroes, but in the gloom of want and the glut in expectations, it is difficult to see results.

The fundamental lesson to be gleaned from el-Rufai’s initiatives in the education sector is that it is a priority that should be tackled by all Northern governors holistically and decisively. Half measures will merely expose the magnitude of the problem. From teacher education and welfare, to rehabilitation and expansion of schools, to genuine subsides and other policies which improve attendance and quality of teaching, every step towards revolutionizing education in the North in the next decade must be addressed. Educating children of the poor does not show up immediately as a political dividend. It requires visionary leaders and concerted efforts of every level of authority and influence to achieve. The challenge for northern governors is to address the future while keeping a firm control over immediate challenges.

Old war, new enemy

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

G. K. Chesterton

Two reports in the last one week suggest a perspective that will make some sense in the manner the Buhari administration assesses the context of its challenges and opportunities. One reported the revelation by Vice President Osinbajo that many powerful elements of the Nigerian elite are discouraging the campaign against corruption. He said the administration will not be diverted from, or deterred from sustaining the fight, in spite of advice that it was taking up too much attention and energy, and dire warnings that corruption fights back dirty. The second report was a detailed crafting of an indictment of federal civil servants over their involvement in subverting the integrity of the 2016 budget proposals. The report suggested that many top civil servants may be punished for deliberately building into the budget proposals, items that will be milked by them in continuation of a tradition in the public service inherited from previous administrations.

These are of course, my summaries of the two significant reports. The observation by the Vice President that the anti-corruption war is being resisted by the elite through many devices may be interpreted as an attempt to rally more popular support in a class war that has a long history involving President Buhari at its head. Neither the attempt to cleanse the polity of corrupt public officers and their collaborators in the wider economy, nor the resistance of powerful and privilege Nigerians who live on corruption is new. The frontlines in this old war have never been clearly defined, and friends and enemies have changed sides at will on many occasions. Buhari had lost the earlier battles in his first outing when a fightback by powerful interests, cornered by his assault on rampant patronage and corruption, found an ally in a military leadership with its own narrow ambitions tucked under a liberalist posture to oust him.

The propaganda that followed Buhari’s tenure as military leader painted him as a high-handed ruler who had turned the nation into a huge prison for politicians and their allies. Ordinary folks were cast as sufferers who were forced to adopt unusual value systems and perform tasks intended to bring order and discipline into social life. The world was made to see a leader with no respect for the rule of law, democracy or economic policies that favoured international investor interests. The regime that overthrew him opened the prison gates to let out large numbers of politicians, and embarked on an adventurous journey into liberal macro-economic policies that altered the fundamentals of the Nigerian political economy.

By the time Buhari was freed, the civil-military coalition and their propaganda machine must have thought they had irretrievably destroyed his image and record. They were wrong. First, the path along which they re-launched the nation created a more conducive setting for systemic corruption and wider disparities in wealth and income between classes and regions. The nation made more money and the new leaders created more wealthy people. An emerging middle class was being severely squeezed. The size of the poor grew. The nation became more clearly polarized in economic teams. Then Nigerians began to yearn for some halt on run-away corruption and the increasing size of professional politicians who turned state power into a veritable and exclusive source of wealth.

Buhari’s re-entry into the political process gave many of Nigeria’s poor the hope that the nation could return to the era of a disciplined and honest leadership. His traducers saw writings on the wall and resisted him with all weapons at their disposal. The more he was frustrated away from leadership, the more many of the poor wanted him at the helm. An elite created and sustained on abuse of power and massive corruption failed to plan for the possibility that Buhari could return through the ballot until their nightmare was made real, courtesy of millions of voters who wanted him in power basically to settle their scores with corrupt and insensitive politicians and the privileged appendages they created.

President Buhari is a captive of an image created by his first outing and then polished by incredibly corrupt and incompetent leaders who have alienated the bulk of the poor and a disappearing middle class. His travails in the political sphere have hardened that image and today many Nigerians see his prime goal as fighting illegal wealth and privilege. That cluster which the poor believe Buhari can and must bring to its knees is much larger and more entrenched today than it was in the early to mid 1980s.

This is the elite Osinbajo warns the nation is fighting back. It is trite to mention that this is expected. Buhari has on his side his image, his promises and millions of the desperately poor and those precariously-balanced between a decent, honest living and poverty. He has state instruments to investigate and submit corrupt persons for persecution; to trace and retrieve stolen funds and plug loopholes and systemic leakages which feed corruption. Against these are a formidable army of legal luminaries versed in every art of frustrating the fight against corruption; a judiciary whose commitment to the fight against corruption is at best questionable; sections of the media that will cast doubt and aspersions on the anti-corruption war when they smell blood; and a host of other governance priorities that will beg for attention and political will to be addressed.

Not every call for a careful management of the fight against corruption needs to be treated with suspicion or classified as a resistance antic. President Buhari needs to manage expectations over the results of the fight against corruption. The nation is not about to emerge out of the gutter of corruption next year. Trillions in Naira are not likely to be retrieved or discovered and ploughed into rebuilding basic infrastructure and social welfare in the next few months. Institutional reforms that will drastically reduce abuse and inefficiencies will take a while to push through. Power and wealth will exhaust the entire gamut of the institutions available in a regime committed to rule of law to frustrate or escape from penalties. Nigerians could lose patience over failures to fix basic areas of social need, and public opinion could be engineered to blame it all on the time, attention and resources being devoted to the fight against corruption.

It is also important for the administration to decide which fights to pick and who represents the enemy. The appearance of attempts to visit the problems being highlighted in the 2016 budget proposals on civil servants is a good case in confusing friends with enemies. Clearly, there are many issues that could have been better handled in the preparations of the budget proposal. Civil servants have a major role in many stages of the preparations, but the political level has the responsibility for what is finally presented to the national assembly. If indeed there is evidence that some civil servants attempted to defraud the public through the budget proposals, they should be processed and punished by the rules of the service and laws of the land. If, however, there are grounds for reviewing the entire process and identifying lapses at all levels, this exercise should be undertaken without damaging a key institution the administration needs in its fight against corruption and waste.

Internally Displaceable Politicians (IDPs)

Divide the fire and you will soon put it out.

Greek proverb.

The Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP’s) ongoing meltdown is a rich source of lessons in the management and abuse of political power. A few weeks ago, Alhaji Sanusi Daggash jokingly told me that his status is best described as an internally displaced politician. He described this as a politician who is on his way out of the PDP, but is not sure of his destination. Between the PDP and a number of possible destinations, you will find a lot of politicians. Many would have been permanently retired  by the 2015 elections, or the stench of the reputation they have garnered in the last sixteen years. Many others will eventually find destinations, but it will take quite some time and a lot of upheavals and maneuvers to sort out who will be where. In the meantime, it will be important for the ruling APC to pay close attention to the genesis of the collapse of the PDP, its dimensions, repercussions and ultimate fate.

The near-comical disarray which has produced three PDP national chairmen and many clusters from a party that once stood like a colossus on the Nigerian political landscape is a tragedy with a trajectory that was predictable. The type of mentality that gave one of its many former national chairmen the confidence to boast that the party will govern Nigeria for sixty years was informed by more than a posture designed to intimidate the opposition. The PDP actually thought it could not be defeated. It had a firm control over state resources, an elaborate patronage system that anchored a rent-seeking economy and a huge, parasitic layer of politicians. It had a solid track record in subverting political and electoral systems and processes. Since 1999, it got fatter with every election. Its leaders thought that entitled them to get away with everything. Today it is largely a regional party whose leaders are telling on each other to EFCC.

Few milestones tell the story of the PDP better than the 2007 elections. Described as the worst election in world history by some observers, even the most charitable among those knowledgeable enough to judge would have noted that the future of Nigerian democracy was unsafe in the hands of the PDP. Tragically for the party, it read a different meaning in the farce that was the 2007 elections: it thought that no boundaries were sacrosanct in its path. In the four years between that historic low and the next elections in 2011, two major developments occurred. First, many Nigerians apparently decided that waiting for another four years to be duped again was not an option. They will create their own outcomes of the elections with fire, stones, blood and lives if need be. They waited to see if 2011 will, in their judgment, repeat past elections. The second, (related) development was the decision of General Muhammadu Buhari to run for the third time. When his fanatical followers were told he had lost again, their indignation was expressed through the most damaging electoral violence in the history of Nigeria.

The 2011 elections were another major watershed. They handed the nation’s affairs to the most incompetent and corrupt leadership in the nation's history. PDP's opposition came to the conclusion that the party will run the nation aground unless they pooled their strengths and ambitions against it. The PDP missed all the lessons in the tragic 2011 post-election developments, and dug even deeper in its traditional contempt for propriety and due process. Massive defections and damaging rancour depleted it of major assets. The opposition gained most from the PDP, as it became a victim of its own contempt and arrogance. It approached the 2015 election limping from massive internal losses, bereft of respect and support of most Nigerians and the global community and threatened by a radically-improved INEC, while facing a confident and massively-supported opposition. It raided the nation’s resources as never before, diverting money meant for arms to fight Boko Haram among others, in the campaign against an opposition that looked certain to defeat it and record a historic first.  

The nation is coming to terms with a potentially life-changing experience in its political history. As an APC administration grapples with the magnitude of mismanagement and abuse to which the PDP subjected Nigerians under its watch, the PDP’s formidable army of big men and fixers is in disarray. It is not unreasonable to assume that PDP as a party is dead, but not buried. It will haunt Nigerians for a long time to come, and its place is likely to be taken up by a number of imitations.

Any number of permutations are possible. One will involve fractions of the old PDP forming nuclei of two or three parties, all of them broadly reflecting existing clusters of grievances in the party. Another will be one major re-invention of the old PDP from what will be left of its leaders that will survive the gale of anti-corruption winds. Yet another could involve elements of the PDP and APC creating a party that answers to the limitations of the two parties. Finally, the remnants of the PDP could borrow a leaf from the APC and build alliances and coalitions into a party that could challenge APC in 2019 and 2024.

There is a powerful presence of PDP alumni in APC as well as other interests that have not entirely melted because powerful party leaders who facilitated the merger and the electoral victory are still taking up too much space. President Buhari does not appear to be intensely interested in engineering the emergence of an organic party, even one that bears his basic personal and political imprints. Ranged against politicians rich in experience and knowledge that in politics you never put away all your weapons, there are many in his party that will keep an eye on all options. Those who dismiss any talk of 2019 within APC are poorly-taught in Nigerian politics. Others who see the emergence of a genuine and strong opposition involving elements of the old PDP and some elements of the APC will be people who will make the case that much of the change in APC and the nation is limited only to President Buhari. Powerful and wealthy people held the PDP together until it could not contain their greed and contempt for their own rules anymore. Buhari is the glue holding APC together. It will be a fatal mistake for the APC to build a future on this factor alone.

PDP bigwigs will be doing two things now. One will be fighting to survive the stains and consequences of Buhari’s anti-corruption war. Many of them will not be making long term plans as free and innocent people, such being the depth and spread of the corruption and abuse which characterized PDP’s governance. The other will be searching for a lifeline to a political future. They know there is considerable asset of structures, relationships and grievances to mobilize towards building new political platforms. The period between now and 2019 is likely to witness the most far-reaching political changes the nation has had to go through.