APC: Beyond “The Cradle Memos” By Uchenna Osigwe

I got rather confused after reading
Pius’ latest piece. On the one hand,
he’s telling APC not to bank on the
fact that people are tired of the PDP,
and on the other, he’s advising them
to use “a groundswell of national
disgruntlement with the PDP…as a
door to mass appeal…” So where does
he want them to begin? Wouldn’t it
have been better to wait until they
come to seek advice, then the
Professor would decide either to give
it free or charge them for it. In the
meantime there’s something I think is
more pressing.
Pius was right on target when,
speaking of the PDP, he said that
“Nothing about that party inheres in
the people. She has never even needed
the people to win elections. She
“captures” power and political offices
in a process driven by corruption and
rigging. Nothing is explained to the
people.” The question then becomes,
how do we solve the problem of
rigging elections in Nigeria? I think
that is a bigger, more pressing
problem than investigating how the
new party is like the old one. If we’re
able to entrench free and fair
elections, then if the new party
doesn’t convince people, they’ll be
voted out in a transparent process.
Otherwise the party may be all that
Nigerians really want and still be
rigged out by the formidable PDP
rigging machine, using the law
enforcement agents and the judiciary
that have shown themselves again and
again to be mere extensions of the
ruling party! That’s the biggest
problem to which we need to find a
lasting solution if we want to be
sincere with ourselves. This is because
it seems that after 12 June 1993, the
oligarchs from the east of the Niger
to its west, from its south to its north
decided that they’ll never again allow
a free and fair election, especially at
the federal level. For how long shall
we allow them to get away with that?
Finding all kinds of faults with
ourselves isn’t going to solve that
gargantuan problem!
Many Nigerians think that once they
cite examples from America, their
case is made, after all, isn’t America
“God’s own country”? And so we’ve
been lectured about how the
ideological divides in the USA political
scene, specifically between the
Democrats and the Republicans, is set
in stone. Really? In asserting that,
the writer seems to be delving into an
essentialism that exists only in his
imagination. Well Professor, I hate to
break it to you, but you seem to be
living in a bubble when you said that.
Ronald Reagan started his political
career as a Democrat, yes he did! He
was a Democrat for years! Democrats
and Republicans change parties all the
time, may be you’ve not been
following events carefully. Recently a
high profile Republican senator,
namely Arlen Specter (1930-2012),
became a Democrat. His story is quite
interesting because he was a
Democrat from 1951-1965, then a
Republican from 1965 until 2009 when
he switched over again to the
Democratic Party! A state senator in
Louisiana recently switched from
Democrat to Republican.
Perhaps the most famous case is that
of Joe Liebermann who was Al Gore’s
running mate in 2000. He later chose
to sit as an independent in the
Senate, then endorsed John McCain
over Obama, and actively campaigned
for McCain, spoke eloquently at the
Republican Convention, voted against
Obama’s health care law at a point in
the Senate, etc. He was McCain’s
first choice as running mate but the
Republican establishment successfully
fought against that. Colin Powell, a
card carrying Republican endorsed
Obama for president twice! The
immediate past Republican governor of
Florida, Charlie Crist endorsed Obama
in 2012, spoke at the Democratic
convention, and announced a few
weeks later that he’s now a Democrat.
Cross-party endorsements are as
common as the switching of parties in
the USA!
In Canada where Pius lives, politicians
change parties all the time, in fact
some even cross floors at crucial
moments to prop up a (ruling) party
they had opposed all their political
lives! And in so doing they sometimes
manage to change the political course
of the country. The current opposition
leader in the Canadian House of
Commons was even a minister in
another party, namely the Liberal
Party, albeit in the Quebec wing of
the party, before he switched to the
New Democratic Party. It’s not a
Nigerian phenomenon, it happens all
over the world. In the run up to the
last general elections in Britain, who
would have thought that Nick Craig
would pitch tent with David Cameron
given their seemingly irreconcilable
ideological divides? But that was
exactly what happened, and the two
of them are now ruling in a coalition
that would last for five years, after
which they’re expected to go their
separate ways. Political party
ideologies are made for human beings
and not the other way round!
Most politicians all over the world have
permanent interests, not permanent
ideologies. President Obama has put
many republicans in top posts since
ascending the presidency. His current
Defence Secretary is a republican. In
fact, Obama has implemented many
republican policies during his
presidency. His signature Affordable
Health Care Act is lifted almost
directly from Republican policy think
tanks.
We shouldn’t let our manifest
discontent with the way things are
going in the Nigeria degenerate into a
contemptuous condemnation of
everything about Nigerian politics,
even if some of those things obtain in
other well established polities. We
shouldn’t demonize Nigerians for
changing parties. After all, there is
nothing in the Constitution of the
country that says that one could not
change parties. Indeed sometimes it
could be a heroic service to the
father/mother land. Instead of
excoriating them, we should rather
look into the content of their
characters and not the color of their
party affiliations. Ours is still a
democracy at its gestation, with all
the problems associated with that
stage of life. So we shouldn’t be quick
to compare ourselves to others for the
wrong reasons. If we want to
compare, for goodness sake, let that
comparison be balanced, based on
facts, and not merely used to score
some cheap points. I think
Sahareporters readers deserve a more
balanced approach.
Beyond that, it’s disappointing that
Pius hasn’t deemed it fit to see
anything good he could credit these
guys who came together despite all
seemingly insurmountable odds to
form a formidable opposition. Let me
add, for the curious, that I am not a
party man and don’t aspire to be one.
But Pius’ piece is really not a criticism
but a condemnation which I reckon is
unwarranted. As I already said in a
similar rejoinder to the good
professor, criticism is constructive
when it is positive. This criticism
smacks one as being in bad faith
because it’s a wholesale condemnation
of everything the APC has done so
far, in total disregard of all the
empirical facts. As such, it is a
criticism that does neither the critic
nor the criticized any good. He
announced that his ‘memo’ comes
“with loads of good intentions.”
However, one was left still looking for
those ‘good intentions’ at the end of
the lengthy piece.
We want to build not destroy. But if
we want to destroy, let it be, as
Nietzsche would say, a prelude to
building something more magnificent.
Pius’s piece, centred as it is on a
phantom ideological purity, seems to
be waltzing one way in the direction
of destruction. As an Igbo proverb
says, when you ask an old woman to
help you take care of a new born and
she complains that she has no teeth,
you cannot but wonder what her
intentions