APC Needs To Provide A Chair For Nigerians While Squatting

You don't ask a toad to give you a chair. When you can vividly see it's squatting....

To say that Nigerians are easily excitable people is stating the very obvious and indeed our political players do not spare any effort in providing the much-needed entertainment. The fever was intense, everyone talked about it, and you will be forgiven to think that the world was coming to an end, but it all came and went—The 2015 General Elections, which saw not just a new President, but a not entirely new party but with a CHANGE mantra.

Forgive Nigerians, we are like that, in our clime when everyone starts talking even patients at Psychiatric homes air the views.

Many analysts have written and quite a number of commentaries are in public domain regarding how the Peoples’ Democratic Party imploded, and how and why the All Progressive Party won.

However the morning does not seem good, however there is hope, that aphrodisiac that keeps Nigerians going. We are again witnessing at best the typical episodic irritation of a political system in which groups that seem to have been outsmarted conglomerate are at war with themselves. It is not about Nigeria – not about its future, progress and prosperity, its evolution and integration, but again we see it is about ‘them’.

Leadership and followership is in a state of higgledy-piggledy, Nigerians being docile people, despite our acclaimed intellectual prowess, remain largely politically ‘miseducated’, and majorly functional illiterates, that are still naïve. While this might sound hard and derogatory but we are equally cowards that are quick to celebrate a bunch of self-serving, self-interest and petty interest infested persons.

Political schemes and permutations are largely regional, religious and ethnic based. We engage in two psychoses, first is the self-destruct, we are not meant to live together, and the “we have too many problems myth”, while the other, is the fallacy of ‘god’ will come down and solve it all, because it is Nigeria.

We are a group of people that would complain right from meat not being in the soup, to that the meat is too soft or too hard, in cases that we do not want meat again, rather we want fish but when given fish we tell people only yesterday, we had become vegetarians, thus denying goats their own livelihood and wasting the soup in the process.

And the All Peoples Congress APC seems to be making all the same mistakes that tumbled the PDP—because APC is no political party: and in few lines, let me elucidate.

In democratic societies, people who share similar views and goals often join together to form political parties. They do this to strengthen their ability to influence governmental decisions of the nation. However in Nigeria the reverse is the case, we at best have a collection of anything and everything goes, no ideology, they all stand for nothing other than position, money and power.

With our democratic trek nearing the twenty year mark, it is sad that we have parties that do not have a defining process, they have not been able to identify the needs and concerns of the people by interacting with the public at different levels of society, address these needs and concerns through the formulation of policies and thirdly execute their policies to the public.

The APC as opposition hardly proffered solutions, nor did they ‘co-optite’ (cooperatively compete/competitively co-operate), so governance now looks a simple task made hard. And the PDP that has consistently in the last 30 days criticized the Buhari administration for not having ministers does not have leaders either.

A political party ordinarily has three persons called voice, choice and continuity. The voice is the capability of parties to provide a voice for different elements of society, and provide a safe means of competing with other parties without threats of violence.

There is nothing wrong with interests, or opposition within the governing party, and this I have said regularly and I stand by it, but then in line with the personae called choice, they should offer a wide variety of voices to allow citizens to interact among different ideas of governance, these parties should differ in how they think government should work and what it should provide to its citizens.

One strong characteristics of TRUE democracy is that it offers at least two or more strong political parties/ideologies which offer voters a real choice in government, our case is that of political parties of two sides of the same coin; nothing is really different in terms of spending value. This is where we get it wrong; all the present political gladiators are offering the same goods, same price and conditions, so our leaders, albeit for the exception of Buhari--Trading is at the same rate, same old faces, and same ideologies if any is available.

Finally continuity is it, political parties are more effective when they are founded on a set of ideas for governance; this is so because IDEAS LIVE LONGER THAN PEOPLE. If a political party has a strong grounding in ideology, it can keep its members and supporters and provide leadership to the governed even if the leadership changes. This is exactly what is lacking in the political party structure in our nation.

The reason why Saraki and Dogara’s emergence has hampered the ideologue of APC and all we are hearing is “Party Supremacy” when there is no Party.

If APC is to get it right, my counsel, is that the conglomeration, must have one common characteristic and that is to be really open and transparent, committed to a democratic system of governance.

All of APC’s teething problems must be addressed, or else its CHANGE mantra would remain an ‘isi ewu’ discuss. They must make sacrifices for Nigerians, they need to understand it is about Nigerians, or again it will be failed expectations--only time will tell.

Prince Charles Dickson
Freelance Journalist
Research|Policy|Media|Private Investigation
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Articles by Prince Charles Dickson