By Abdu Rafiu
It is increasingly being proven that nothing reveals the nature of man than the pursuit of power, position, money and influence. For the modern man, the veritable vehicle thereto in our clime is no other than politics. For a majority of politicians, the end justifies the means. Politics in most African countries is warfare, authenticating Chairman Mao Tsetung’s characterization of politics. In his words, “Politics is war without bloodshed.” And true to the nature of all battles, it is ‘do or die.’ What fuels the warfare more is poverty with its concomitant ills and the peccadilloes they invite. Consider the other driving factor that is lack of contentment. The man immeasurably endowed in the material sense yearns in his sofa, a three-seater and asks himself in what direction he can deploy his enormous financial muscle — not to serve, not to build but to wield power, to seek public acknowledgement and court influence. Lacking in knowledge about life, he gives thought to no other thing than power and money. Not for him to contemplate the purpose and richness of life. The right knowledge and the right attitude that will deliver the scorched land.
Hardly does a day pass that there are no sordid and ugly developments within the parties that make concerned citizens to wonder whether we are making progress or retrogressing. Of course, individuals constitute parties.
Perhaps Ibrahim Babangida was right after all when in 1989 he foisted two parties on the country what he called grassroots political parties: One a little to the right and the other a little to the left— the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) respectively even though the thin line got blurred if the socio-economic standing of the emergent flagbearers was any guide. It was believed it would self- correct itself. Moshood Abiola was an apostle of free-market economy, but indisputably generous at heart and in practice. Mr. Tofa was a businessman. In subsequent dispensations beginning from !999, it was believed that the tendencies triggered at the time would coalesce into two major political parties with time and a few fringe parties tagging behind them. As it has turned out, the expectation is a pipe-dream! The result? Opportunism and confusion galore. A man can join a party today and the next day quit in search of platforms that will meet his political aspirations. What the aspirations are could be said to be arguable. They could be altruistic and they could be opportunistic or just plain search for a talk-shop platform to offer employment in the guise of genuine service. A picture of a Federal legislator was shown this week, pleading in tears before stakeholders in his constituency in Borno State to be allowed a fifth term in the House of Representatives. He said he is from a poor background. The stakeholders are longing to have a fresh face to represent the constituency. The legislator is in his 16th year in the House. He may have been confronted with self- questioning: What does he do next if he is not returned? What skill does he have to fall back on after life as a Federal legislator?
Today, there are no pretences about party programmes. No party waves any ideological flag to woo prospective electors. Not many voters are even aware of the manifestoes of the different parties. It is each individual who appropriates the supposed manifestoes of his party, his woolly and glib promises of providing pipe-borne water, 24-hour electricity supply, affordable houses for all — which are not meant to be fulfilled. The flagbearers just throw their personal programmes before the members of the public, what ideally ought to have been discussed, digested and argued at national party caucus or at the National Working Committee meetings. In Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), specialists in certain fields and knowledgeable young men were brought in to lend their expertise in brain-storming on programmes. Today, because there is no difference between one party and the other aside from principal figures, defection thus becomes easy. There is also desperation on the part of many a politician. There is lack of cohesion, and Opposition parties in the main are riven by crisis. They are split into factions resulting from leadership bickering and struggle in the main Opposition parties: The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and the African Democratic Congress (ADC). There are cases in court. There are speculations that the crises they are grappling with are externally induced, or outsourced through moles in their ranks to weaken and put them in disarray so that in the end a one-party state becomes a fait accompli for us in the country.
Legislators are taking flight in droves from their parties making nonsense of the multiparty system in our polity. On Tuesday, three Senators defected from their parties — ADC and NNPP — and 18 discarded their erstwhile parties from the House of Representatives. Prominent senior legislators such as Enyinnaya Abaribe and Umeh were among the defectors. The 18 Reps went from ADC, with 17 settling for NDC. The other joined the All Progressives Congress (APC). With the defections, the numerical strength of the parties is as follows, first in the Senate: APC, 88; ADC 8, PDP 4; NDC 3; APGA 1 and Accord 1. Four seats are vacant. In the House of Representatives, the strength is distributed as follows: APC 260; PDP 38; Labour Party 1; NDC 17; NNPP 14; APGA 5; others 4.
Bitten by the bug of defection are Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso who, bothered by unending legal tangles in ADC, seemed not seeing any future for them in ADC. And Peter Obi is in a hurry to be President of Nigeria. He has said 2027 would be his last push for the presidency. After that he would hang his gloves. He said he had no problem with the ADC leadership. “I don’t have a problem with David Mark. I don’t have a problem with Atiku Abubakar”—pronouncements that drew arrows for him from many people who had seen him as a bright and promising star in the party. With his departure and that of Kwankwaso, a great deal of shine has been taken away from the ADC. Among those sickened by his exit is his ardent supporter, indeed, loyalist and close ally, Kenneth Okonkwo. What has irked Okonkwo, an actor and lawyer, the most is Peter Obi saying he does not like challenges. “I don’t like challenges. I don’t like ADC is going through challenges – legal and otherwise. I would like to run away to where there is peace, to where there is no trouble,” Okonkwo quoted him on television as saying and concluded in undisguised disgust that a candidate changing parties over internal crisis cannot be entrusted with the leadership of Nigeria, “a country”, according to him “faced with multiple challenges. And I now ask how can this same man ask Nigerians to entrust Nigeria in his care when Nigeria is the most challenged country in the world today?” He went on: “Nigeria is the fourth most terrorised nation on earth. Nigeria has borrowed itself to bankruptcy. In Nigeria, as I ‘m talking to you bandits tie people on the tree and put fire under them to burn them in Kwara, Kogi and Niger. How can a man who says he is running away from challenges be able to face challenges we are facing in Nigeria today? He dismissed Peter Obi as lacking in temperament and capacity and these as incompatible with requirement of the dream Nigerian leader.
Dr. Yusuf Baba Ahmed who shared Presidential ticket with Peter Obi as his running mate in the 2023 election was restrained in his reaction to Obi leaving ADC, but could not help expressing the same disappointment, how a leader like Obi could behave the way he has done.
Rabiu Kwankwaso similarly attributed the reconsideration of his membership of NNPP to “externally influenced platforms that made our stay perilous. The ADC has now been also forced into this difficulty.” He and his supporters he brought to ADC, therefore, left after exploring “the best options for protecting our democratic interest.”
Peter Obi began his political career with APGA, the platform he climbed to become the Governor of Anambra State. After he successfully governed the state with his trademark of prudence in the handling of the state’s finances, he moved to the national stage by becoming the running mate of former Vice-President Abubakar, himself known to be running from pillar to post in the ardent longing and unremitted drive to be President of Nigeria. They waved the PDP flag at the time. Continuing his quest, Peter Obi relocated to Labour Party which gave him its platform and ticket on a platter of gold in 2023. In that party, he showed promise; he proved himself to the world as a bright star and a Nigerian hope. The youths who called themselves Obidients and a great many elites rallied round him. The solidity of the support was such that even without appreciable structure anywhere he came third in the Presidential election, in which, with an urbane educationist, proprietor of a national university as deputy, he garnered six million votes and this was despite wranglings in the party.
However, after the elections, instead of sitting down to resolve the conflicts within the ranks of the party members, he was gallivanting all over the place. He eventually abandoned the party into which he pumped so much oxygen and to which he brought surprising glitters with, simply, his stature. He raised the tone of the party and he himself became a national star to watch. He went to ADC, and on seeing the depth of the acrimony there, he fled. It is his abandonment of the Labour Party that has given Dr. Ahmed the most pain, a party that catapulted them to national stage reckoning.
John Keats in his enrapturing poem, Ode to A Nightingale, says the solution to life’s problems is not escapism. You don’t solve a problem by running away from it. The Yoruba people have a more enriching and captivating form of it: “Akande, won so’pe oro yi oro e ni, o so’pe onr’oko. O baa r’odo, t’o ba de waa ba.” Roughly translated, it goes thus: Akande, they say this matter is your problem, you say you are going to the farm. You may as well go to the river. When you come back you meet it!
In the light of conflicts assailing political parties, the acrimony, the violence in most parts of the world in not-too-distant future, mankind will have no choice but to rethink the different systems of governments they have devised, formed, refined and foisted on themselves over the ages especially following the failure in the era of the Divine Rights of Kings. Are human beings supposed to be governed in acrimony, violence: in an atmosphere filled with hate, suspicion, anxiety and lovelessness? Motion governs the universe, nay the entire Creation. There can be no standstill in life. This can be seen in the intensification and acceleration of events today, with purification sweeping through the entire world. With the increased pressure of the Light, it will rise to a crescendo and man would be forced to recognise what the Will of God says to all mankind — that leaders are born, not made; they are sent, not electable. Is it inconceivable that the Most High Creator, in all His Perfection would send human beings to this vale of matter and there will be no leaders to guide them?
In the early beginnings, Created Ones incarnated in different lands and among different peoples. In the near future, mankind will need deliberately to seek out selfless leaders in their midst who will volunteer to serve. If we pay attention in all communities, in all parts of the world, we can sense them — those not yet ensnared. They will seek character and honour, ennoblement; not power, not influence nor public acknowledgement and not money. They will seek wholesomeness; they will be servants of Truth. They will be imbued with sufficient milk of human kindness running through their veins. They will draw no salaries and there will be no perks. They will pay their way.
At the appropriate time, certainly after 2027 when the combat shall have been over, the subject will be fully treated. What we may be aware of and bear in mind for now, according to higher knowledge spreading on earth today, is that in the Millenium, only the Will of the Creator will govern the earth as it is in all Spiritual Realms of Creation. As Above so must it below be! The Holy Spirit Who is the Will shall take full charge of His Father’s Realm!
The Guardian
