The All Progressives Congress appears to have given its enemies a stick to beat the party. For two weeks now, the governing party has been at war with itself over the sharing of offices. And it’s
getting messier.
In a gesture of serial defiance, the Senate not only rejected the party’s choice of candidates for Senate president and deputy, it also rejected the party’s list for other principal officers. The gangrene has spread to the House.
For its part, the Peoples Democratic Party is simply beside itself in an Fun of mockery. Its officials cannot believe their worst wishes will come true so soon. They are quietly stoking the flames, anxious to regroup and seize the current crisis in the APC as their resurrection launch pad.
And what better way to start than for Ike Ekweremadu to get a foot in the door as deputy Senate president in a deal that has taken the PDP out of the ICU?
That’s politics. Yet it is precisely in an attempt to prevent the variety of renegade politics that beset the PDP four years ago – when Aminu Tambuwal defied his party – that the APC has refused to sweep the current crisis under the carpet.
There are those who have argued that the party should get over itself and move on. It’s futile to hope that either Ekweremadu or Senate President Bukola Saraki will step down at this point. So, why persist in a war of attrition that is depleting the party’s goodwill and distracting it from the urgent tasks at hand?
Those who pursue this line of argument insist that if Saraki was good enough to invest himself in APC’s election campaign, surely he cannot be unworthy of a post in the National Assembly, which he contested for and won according to the rules of the Senate. As for his teaming up with Ekweremadu, what’s the big deal? What is the difference between both parties, anyway? And was the APC not in clandestine defection talks with Ekweremadu and co at some point after Buhari’s victory in March? What’s the party mad about?
The matter is not so cut and dried. To suggest that APC and PDP are one and the same thing is to insult voters who could no longer endure the travesty of the latter and decided that enough was enough.
PDP was not and cannot be like any other party. The party, especially under Jonathan, was simply incomparable in its capacity for mischief, stealing and impunity. It is a disservice to our collective memory to forget that so soon.
Those who insist on party discipline do so because they have seen the misery and devastation that former President Goodluck Jonathan’s weakness brought upon the PDP and, ultimately, the country. Also, in a country where merit often takes the back seat, zoning has become a makeshift formula for deciding who gets what.
Whatever threatens zoning rocks the boat. Saraki’s presumptive strike toppled the party’s consensus on zoning and sent a mixed signal about his company and future ambition.
That’s obviously one other reason why the party is finding it hard to move on. The party’s arrangement, which favoured the Lawan-Akume pair for the Senate and the Gbajabiamila-Monguno for the House, was based on the calculation that these candidates have modest ambitions.
The party had hoped that Lawan’s emergence would kill two birds with one stone: it would settle the feeling of marginalisation in the North East and stave off any serious challenge for the nation’s top job in 2019.
The unspoken fear of those strongly opposed to Saraki is not only that he still has PDP blood running in his veins, but that, perhaps more than any other ranking senator, the Senate presidency could help him secure a bid for the presidency in four years’ time, or position him as a rallying point for the resurgence of the PDP at some future date.
If some of these speculations sound irrational it is because irrationality is the currency of politics. Who would have believed, for example, that an unknown Yusuf Lasun would become deputy speaker of the House by surreptitiously putting himself up for the position while at the same time voting for his party’s candidate for that position? Or that Tambuwal would be named as backing the same rebellion that brought his former party to its knees?
The party has to move forward, not by running away from, but by confronting its demons. And it would be foolhardy to leave the job to state governors who barely have control of their legislators. The party leadership is, regrettably, also diminished both by this crisis and from the allegations of favouritism and corruption that preceded it. There is an appalling lack of confidence and honesty to tackle the problem.
Shutting Saraki out or living in denial of his presidency will not work. Someone must engage Saraki and tell him that he cannot defy the party one day, claim to be remorseful the next and then turn around to insist on sharing positions in the Senate almost exclusively on his own terms.
For example, Senator Ali Ndume’s bid for the post of leader of the Senate is obviously a reward by the pro-Saraki group for Ndume’s rebellion. It might seem the smart and politically expedient thing to do, but it opens Saraki’s sincerity to question, complicates the problem in the House and further damages the party. This is not helped by Ndume’s indictment in the nation’s topmost security challenge at the moment for which he is still facing prosecution.
The task of stopping the drift now falls squarely on Buhari’s shoulders. He cannot outsource or purchase it by avoiding Saraki. He has promised not to meddle – which is good, but I have said before that not meddling is not the same thing as playing the ostrich. APC desperately needs leadership.
Buhari must admit that his indifference – however well meaning – was just as counterproductive as Saraki’s ambition. He must engage him fair and square.
It’s been nearly 30 days in the quandary; that’s neither what Nigerians deserve nor voted for. Buhari, as president and leader of his party, must either use the carrot, the stick or both, to whip his party quickly into line.