Governor of Borno State and former lecturer, University of Maiduguri, Dr. Kashim Shettima, delivered this paper as the? keynote speaker at the 2012 Leadership Annual Conference/Awards organised by LEADERSHIP Newspapers Group yesterday in Abuja
All through the history of our country, the Nigerian media has played a leading role in helping to fashion out solutions at critical points of national development. The Nigerian people, especially the political elite, owe a lot to the Nigerian media. The LEADERSHIP NEWSPAPERS GROUP has no doubt proved to be true to an old tradition of the media’s Social Responsibility.
The theme of our gathering today is a big question: Is the opposition a serious alternative? I belong to an opposition party, the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and, naturally, will like us to have power at the centre, but I am also a realist and do like to explore the possibilities, because since our return to democracy in 1999, Nigerians have always been faced with doubts and despair, so they are very right to ask: ‘is the opposition a serious alternative in Nigeria?’
Those of us saddled with the responsibility of governance owe a lot to our country and our people. But the fact that we have gathered to explore the prospects of the opposition as an alternative platform of governance and development in our country offers an interesting dialectic: on the one hand, it shows, with reservation though, some consistency in the development of the process of democracy, while on the other, there is advanced political consciousness and voting power targetted against the ruling party because it has not satisfied the deepest yearnings of the Nigerian people.? This is the case not only at the centre, but indeed across the 36 states and 774 local government areas.
In ideal competitive multi-party democracies, the elected party in power seeks to transform the polity in tune with its vision as enshrined in its manifesto on the basis of which it was supposedly elected.? Political parties in a democracy recognize and respect the authority of an elected government even when they lose elections. This is in the belief that the system is open, transparent and may eventually lead to the emergence of the opposition into government someday. However, in Nigeria, as in many other developing countries, the ruling party will, willy-nilly, stay in power by all means, and the opposition will do anything to get to power; this ultimately endangers democracy. This is the unfortunate story of our dear country both at the national and state levels. Our politics is Machiavellian, where, to borrow from Claude Ake, efficiency norms take precedence over legitimacy norms.
Most of the issues around the opposition today in Nigeria centre around the operational characteristics of the political parties out of power. How organized are they? How good is their internal democracy? What are the core values they subscribe to? Are they organized in a principled manner or are they just vehicles for power and therefore subsumed in opportunism? Do members feel a commitment to keeping these parties alive? What is the vision they have for our national development and for democratic consolidation? Do Nigerians even trust these parties? Can ordinary Nigerians give their personal resources to support them? These are not idle questions. We must ask them to be able to answer the central question which brought all of us together today. Nigerians are asking these questions in various ways, and if we must pitch for power as members of the opposition, we have to confront these questions as much as we have to honestly and honourably face our records of service to the Nigerian people since 1999.
In the run-up to our country’s independence, we had parties like the National Congress of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), Action Group (AG), Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and smaller, but equally notable, parties like the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC) and the Borno Youth Movement (BYM). These parties were very much in tune with the general motif of the age. They subscribed to grand visions of national development in their various ways, but were affected by the political currents of the turbulent 20th Century, which was underscored by the ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the ending of the pro-Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe ended that phase of world history. The capitalist world proclaimed victory in the ideological struggle and Western-style democracy became the order of the day around the world.
In Nigeria, we also ended a very long period of military dictatorship with the 1999 transition to civil rule on the back of parties that were hurriedly put together by members of the nation’s political elite. The original three were the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the All Peoples Party (APP) and the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and these have taken all kinds of twists and turns in the past 13 years. And as crisis situations built up, some of these parties bred factions, while newer parties also emerged. What marks these parties is the incredible similarity, not only in their programs, but the manner in which members move through a revolving door from one to the other. There are no ideological issues held dear by them; inner party democracy hardly exist; the parties are generally just vehicles of access to power. And because they do not have very grand visions, they have not been able to galvanize the Nigerian people in a grand narrative of development and patriotic exertion. The fact that members of the political elite seemed to have regularly behaved in the same manner, especially in their excesses, meant that there was often little to choose between the political parties.
Internal democracy is no doubt a yardstick for measuring the sincerity of a party’s public ideology and where a party falls short of it or it is perceived to have fallen short, anyone will be right to ask fundamental questions. In the build-up to the 2007 and 2011 elections, virtually all the key political parties were guilty of failures on internal democracy. My party, the ANPP, was accused of either imposing or wrongly substituting candidates, with the result being a long pre-election and post-election litigation on the governorship tickets of Yobe, Kaduna, Kano, etc. The Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) which is about 2 or 3 years old was accused of wrongly substituting governorship candidates in Kano, Katsina, Bauchi and Taraba; the ACN was also accused of imposing candidates especially in the southwestern states and the PDP, as the biggest party, was accused of committing the most crime against party internal democracy by allegedly imposing or wrongly substituting governorship candidates in Rivers, Taraba, Bauchi, Anambra and a host of others. These crimes were known because they involved governorship seats on which those affected ran to the media. One can therefore imagine those that may have been silenced not by persuation and political negotiation but by the instrumentality of power.
Though all the parties seem to be guilty at different degrees, most of the feelings of discontent brewing in the country have, largely and rightly, I must say, been directed at the ruling PDP at the centre, largely because of the size of the party, the number of seats it controls in parliament as well as the number of states under its control for the obvious reasons that there is lethal hunger, brutal insecurity, fatal unemployment, crippled education, substandard healthcare and so on. The list is long and successive leaders share the blame. Our winner-takes-all system has contributed to this depth of frustration that we are talking about. Since 1999, therefore, the nation’s democratic process has largely been a tale of unfulfilled hopes and the increasing exasperation of the majority of the Nigerian people manifesting in all manners including, as we have seen in Borno, Yobe, Kano, Kogi and Kaduna, the Boko Haram insurgency, which is one of the most tragic examples of disconnect between we as political elite and the majority of our young population today.
There are two related dangers which we must deal with in the country: one is the build-up of anger against the ruling party at the centre since 1999; and related is the danger of rejection of the entire political process and democratic project. These dangers are so palpable and inter-related that it is in the interest of the nation’s entire political elite to find ways to salvage its reputation through a better record of politicking and governance.
In my view, this is the reason why an effort is being made at various levels to build a new platform of the opposition parties in preparation for the 2015 elections, even though it is my considered opinion that we should channel our energy towards addressing the security situation so that the electorate can be alive up to 2015. The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and CPC are said to be in talks, All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), maybe that of Anambra alone for now, seems to have adopted the PDP already, while ANPP is also exploring alliance talks. But in truth, is the opposition able to provide an alternative platform to convey the feelings and hope of the Nigerian people for improved service delivery, consolidate democracy and reduce the corruption in the political system? Can the opposition do things in a better way than what has been the case since 1999? What is the nature of the vision which drives the efforts at mergers between the opposition parties? Will they be any better than the vehicle of power that parties have been since 1999? What will they do that will be new, original and progressive? The questions are almost endless! But then, there is one big question we must ask separately: Will the ruling PDP create a level playing ground to allow the opposition to become a serious alternative? While we are free to answer ourselves. Let me introduce a familiar enemy and, in this case, a threat to opposition democracy, far bigger than the resources, fire power and machinery of government at the disposal of the ruling party – this is the all mighty, darkloom, stinker called poverty.
Poverty is the number one threat to any opposition becoming a serious challenger, because it replaces ideologies with cash and places price tags on an otherwise principled electorate. And this is situation that makes votes go to the highest bidders and some otheriwse patriotic election umpires are forced by fatal economic realities to act against their conscience to enthrone a political party they so much hate, whether at the federal, state or local government level.
The economy is an important determinant of any democracy. For instance, as far back as 1959, one social scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset, posited a direct correlation between the survival of a democracy and economic well-being of the people. Two scientists, Adams Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, even took a step further: they studied democracies of countries in the world between 1950 and 1990 and discovered that almost all the nations that have a per capital income of less than $1,500 have a survival rate of only eight years. For those countries with $1,500 to $3,000 per capita, they survived on average for only 18 years. Of the 32 democratic countries that have per capita above US$ 9,000 they studied, they have a combined survival rate of 736 years. Of the 69 democracies that were adjudged poorer, they had casualty rate of 56%. Our democracy is threatened basically by endemic poverty, so we should really thank God that Nigeria’s democracy is still breathing no matter how too slow or too fast we think the breadth rate is at the moment.
?We must make conscious efforts to fight poverty. We are all guilty as leaders, both past and present, and as elite. We must be our brothers’ keeper, especially in our access to the resources of the nation so long as we regard ourselves units of a federation called Nigeria. It is no exclusive fault of current leaders in the Niger Delta that we now have what appears like a one country, two nation states owing to what goes to them and what comes to us. It is also not the exclusive fault of the President and the federal government. It is our collective fault that we, over the years, aggitated, accepted, supported or pretended to ignore a system that created a distinction that is capable of breeding hatred rather than uniting Nigeria’s geo-political population.
We used to be one and, insha-Allah, we shall remain one, in spite of all our challenges and differences. But let it be known that there is life beyond the resources around our shores and lands: every Kuwait has its own Iraq; every Bayelsa has its own Abia; every Akwa Ibom has its own Cross River. We should learn to accommodate one another. What our beloved Bayelsa with a population of not more than Dala local government in Kano State gets in one month is what all the six states in the north-east put together, with a combined population of over 20 million, get in three months. The same statistics can be replicated in some parts of the south-east and south-west. More than the economic features, the gap of allocations along the lines of oil deposit has made many societies begin to develop desperate interests in the struggle to join oil producing areas almost to the point of bringing states into boundary disagreements which, I hope, will be amicably resolved so that it doesn’t get violent between border residents. There has to be some equity, some fairness so that people will have a sense of belonging, else we keep expanding gaps that we may, in future, have more reasons to close. Let’s look at life after oil, if not for the sake ourselves, at least for our children and grand children during whose lives something else largely deposited in any part of the country may become the new bride, and on whose exchange the nation may make another mistake of having to solely rely upon. Poverty is everywhere in Nigeria; even in the Niger Delta there is poverty but it is endemic in north-east zone in particular and I say to everyone that the answer for us is agriculture: return to Agriculture to create and spread wealth and make our electorate and umpires principled and less vulnerable to undue influence.
I am a member of the opposition and, naturally, will like a change which allows us to have power at the centre. I believe that we can change many things for the better, if we are voted into power. However, we must also think in terms of a grand vision of national development, superior to what has hitherto been on offer. The opposition must show, in action, in its programmes and in the conduct of the affairs of our platforms, that we can become the alternative which Nigeria yearns for and not another ‘largest party in Africa’. It is not even given that these efforts will reach fruition, as we have seen with previous attempts, either at forging electoral alliances or forging mergers. In a lot of instances, the very tall ego of politicians and their personal ambitions have stayed in the way of the effort to achieve meaningful re-alignment of platforms. Many of the efforts to develop opposition platforms have also been a failure, largely because the efforts were also compromised by fifth column infiltration by the ruling party as well as the incredible situation whereby members of the opposition parties prefer to work for the ruling party while subverting their own parties, again, largely because of poverty and greed. It is almost a peculiarly Nigerian political attitude.
For the opposition, just as for the entire political elite of the country, there are no easy options to becoming the ruling group in a society, especially one as complicated as Nigeria. The opposition must search for viability through a record of dedicated service and the construction of a robust, inclusive platform which is devoid of the generally prevalent opportunism in our political process.
Such a platform must then attempt to address, at the level of its programme, some of the more pressing problems militating against national development today, especially poverty and unemployment. It is possible for the opposition to become a viable alternative, and it is desirable for me as an opposition member. The political opposition has for too long been weak, fractious and easily co-opted and divided. This is because it is very difficult for many politicians to survive without the patronage which comes from government. But it is precisely when we work with the dogged commitment to principles that we can then find the viability to be seen as serious challengers for power, I mean power to work for the people and not ‘our turn to chop’. The Nigerian opposition needs to win the trust of Nigerians to be seen as a departure from what the public dislikes in the ruling system and not a six claiming to be different from half a dozen.
In Nigeria, the opportunism of the political elite has become scaringly wild. To make matters worse, some are forced to lose it owing to lack of internal democracy in which the mandate of a popular aspirant in the primaries is expressly handed out to his bitter opponent. These explain why some persons are members of a party in the morning and those of another at night. With this trend, you may be searching too much to find what differentiates the ruling and opposition parties, in terms of their adherrents, ?their attitudes and their programmes or internal organisation. The danger which this common political elite attitude breeds is to increase? apathy among the electorate. It can also breed the danger that the mass of the people then begin to look for extra-parliamentary and anti-democratic platforms to express their grievances which could manifest in various tendencies of revolt and insurgency.
An opposition must not only be an agent of change but, to borrow from Mahatma Gandi, it must be the change it seeks. We cannot come in to power to dethrone a bad order when we do not represent a clear departure as leaders of the other wing. I very much uphold, with compassion, the inspiring words of Albert Schweitzer, the 1952 Nobel peace prize winner for his philosophy, who said: ‘Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.’
It is possible for the opposition to become serious alternative in Nigeria; the possibilities are enormous but the threats real, huge and rocky. But no threats are insumountable if there is a strong and sincere will for the Nigerian people. The Nigerian electorate is? becoming more politically conscious but, like I had talked about, we must collectively fight that thick, black, stinky snake called poverty so that no one sells a vote for a meal ticket, and this we can achieve through justice, fairness and equity in our style of governance as opposition public office holders and our internal democraccies as parties so that credible candidates with rooted connection to the ordinary Nigerian are not prevented from carrying our flags to defeat a system Nigerians unanimously desire to replace.
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