Even in the most established democracies, when a political party points a finger at the other, it is likely to be unknowingly pointing four fingers at itself for the same reason it is pointing one at its rival. In Nigeria’s seeming democracy, the reality is not often a likelihood, it is almost a guarantee that whatever the two main political parties accuse each other of, they are likely to be both guilty of same. Let us break it down in non-cryptic talk.
What would the All Progressives Congress (APC) be without the likes of governors Rochas Okorocha, Rotimi Amaechi, Rabiu Kwakwanso, Abdulfatah Ahmed, Aliyu Wamakko, Senator Bukola Saraki, impeached Adamawa State Governor, Murtala Nyako, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar and the likes? These political heavyweights and their supporters were mostly in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) less than ten months ago. This writer never saw an ounce of complaints or tears from known APC members on social media for such an exodus from the PDP to its rival APC.
That exodus was the move that truly set APC up as really and truly an opposition party the PDP had to take seriously. If the PDP were complacent about the competition it is now facing in the country’s political games, why would it desperately field known rogues and at least one murder suspect in gubernatorial elections? The PDP means business and its use of the armed forces to intimidate voters in recent elections is only one pointer to that reality.
The other pointer is its willingness and desperation to make deals. Don’t go all holier than thou on me: deals are part of the political business like other businesses. So the latest move involving former anti-corruption czar Mallam Nuhu Ribadu is likely to reverberate around political circles for a while. Amongst the many arguments against him, his leaving APC for PDP will be the weakest. APC members have no moral right to weep or cry over such a move because if we do the arithmetic of defections since the formation of APC, it remains the biggest gainer. If all politicians were to move back to their previous parties before the first defection into APC, the PDP would only need to conduct a primary and we’d already know who the president is, based on the winner of the PDP primaries, as it always was.
Not only is the APC the overall leader on the league table of defections, its primary MO was actually to lure members of other parties into it. Wasn’t that the crux of the voyages across the country to meet with old political powerhouses? So some of our social media friends calling Nuhu Ribadu names would probably have been seen as not being hypocrites if they had called him such names while he was in the APC. The ‘no one is a saint’ that accompanies the defection of alleged rogues into your party and the ‘s/he is a thief anyway’ that is readily stamped on those defecting from your party, especially when you never called them same while they were in your party, easily give you away as a clown.
The real conversation is the Ribadu fans from his EFCC years that feel betrayed he has joined the PDP. A party many Nigerian and often non-voting middle-class members see as the worst thing to have happened to Nigeria since 1999. It is hard to argue against the bit about whether the PDP has been a disaster. It has.
But politics is not crime fighting. The Ribadu of EFCC cannot be Ribadu the politician. The man can be the same but the same man cannot play different games the same way. Nigerian politics is about difficult compromises. For example, you must be willing to sit with someone accused of starting a terrorist group at your party’s meeting but you’d have no business meeting with same except to arrest him if you were a crime fighter. You deal with handcuffs and arrest thieves as a crime fighter. As a politician, you deal – whether you admit it or not – with renowned rogues.
Naija politics is not a gathering of All-Saints and even members of the All-Saints Church are not all saints. Politics here is a game of hard, tough, often heart-wrenching choices. Once you join partisan politics in today’s Nigeria, you have subtly made a choice to play with the bad guys. If you are a good person, you have made a choice to give our people better choices as voters. If all we do is complain about bad politicians – assuming all of us who complain are good people – all we will achieve is have same bad politicians rule over us. We have done this for 50 years; we have mostly had bad leaders rule us for 50 years!
Those pragmatic enough understand that the political parties cannot be better than what they were if they continue to be left in the hands of those who made them same. Let us stop pretending ours is an ideal society, because there are no ideal societies and ours is closer to grossly abnormal than ideal. We have to make choices, join the PDPs of this world, get power and give the system one better leader one state at a time or complain all century about the bad leaders until another century creeps in on Nigeria.
A wise friend once said, Nigeria will not be saved from Abuja because a vibration in Abuja will weaken out before it reaches across the country. Nigeria will be saved by each state choosing better leaders. A vibration in 70 per cent of Nigerian states will have a more reverberating effect on the whole country. No matter how good a man or woman we have as president in Abuja, s/he is just never going to fix this country better than if we have 36 good governors. It is the reason why the likes of Nuhu Ribadu and Nasir El-Rufai must be supported if they indeed run, irrespective of the platforms under which they run.
The north especially needs people like them to add to the good works of Rabiu Kwankwaso in Kano. We may not agree with their politics, but we cannot argue against their pedigree and result-oriented antecedents. We can talk about political ideologies after we talk about what matters to Nigeria’s 70 per cent poor; it is not PDP or APC, it is a country, states and local governments that work. The time for voting ideologies will come after we have a sane society.
What would the All Progressives Congress (APC) be without the likes of governors Rochas Okorocha, Rotimi Amaechi, Rabiu Kwakwanso, Abdulfatah Ahmed, Aliyu Wamakko, Senator Bukola Saraki, impeached Adamawa State Governor, Murtala Nyako, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar and the likes? These political heavyweights and their supporters were mostly in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) less than ten months ago. This writer never saw an ounce of complaints or tears from known APC members on social media for such an exodus from the PDP to its rival APC.
That exodus was the move that truly set APC up as really and truly an opposition party the PDP had to take seriously. If the PDP were complacent about the competition it is now facing in the country’s political games, why would it desperately field known rogues and at least one murder suspect in gubernatorial elections? The PDP means business and its use of the armed forces to intimidate voters in recent elections is only one pointer to that reality.
The other pointer is its willingness and desperation to make deals. Don’t go all holier than thou on me: deals are part of the political business like other businesses. So the latest move involving former anti-corruption czar Mallam Nuhu Ribadu is likely to reverberate around political circles for a while. Amongst the many arguments against him, his leaving APC for PDP will be the weakest. APC members have no moral right to weep or cry over such a move because if we do the arithmetic of defections since the formation of APC, it remains the biggest gainer. If all politicians were to move back to their previous parties before the first defection into APC, the PDP would only need to conduct a primary and we’d already know who the president is, based on the winner of the PDP primaries, as it always was.
Not only is the APC the overall leader on the league table of defections, its primary MO was actually to lure members of other parties into it. Wasn’t that the crux of the voyages across the country to meet with old political powerhouses? So some of our social media friends calling Nuhu Ribadu names would probably have been seen as not being hypocrites if they had called him such names while he was in the APC. The ‘no one is a saint’ that accompanies the defection of alleged rogues into your party and the ‘s/he is a thief anyway’ that is readily stamped on those defecting from your party, especially when you never called them same while they were in your party, easily give you away as a clown.
The real conversation is the Ribadu fans from his EFCC years that feel betrayed he has joined the PDP. A party many Nigerian and often non-voting middle-class members see as the worst thing to have happened to Nigeria since 1999. It is hard to argue against the bit about whether the PDP has been a disaster. It has.
But politics is not crime fighting. The Ribadu of EFCC cannot be Ribadu the politician. The man can be the same but the same man cannot play different games the same way. Nigerian politics is about difficult compromises. For example, you must be willing to sit with someone accused of starting a terrorist group at your party’s meeting but you’d have no business meeting with same except to arrest him if you were a crime fighter. You deal with handcuffs and arrest thieves as a crime fighter. As a politician, you deal – whether you admit it or not – with renowned rogues.
Naija politics is not a gathering of All-Saints and even members of the All-Saints Church are not all saints. Politics here is a game of hard, tough, often heart-wrenching choices. Once you join partisan politics in today’s Nigeria, you have subtly made a choice to play with the bad guys. If you are a good person, you have made a choice to give our people better choices as voters. If all we do is complain about bad politicians – assuming all of us who complain are good people – all we will achieve is have same bad politicians rule over us. We have done this for 50 years; we have mostly had bad leaders rule us for 50 years!
Those pragmatic enough understand that the political parties cannot be better than what they were if they continue to be left in the hands of those who made them same. Let us stop pretending ours is an ideal society, because there are no ideal societies and ours is closer to grossly abnormal than ideal. We have to make choices, join the PDPs of this world, get power and give the system one better leader one state at a time or complain all century about the bad leaders until another century creeps in on Nigeria.
A wise friend once said, Nigeria will not be saved from Abuja because a vibration in Abuja will weaken out before it reaches across the country. Nigeria will be saved by each state choosing better leaders. A vibration in 70 per cent of Nigerian states will have a more reverberating effect on the whole country. No matter how good a man or woman we have as president in Abuja, s/he is just never going to fix this country better than if we have 36 good governors. It is the reason why the likes of Nuhu Ribadu and Nasir El-Rufai must be supported if they indeed run, irrespective of the platforms under which they run.
The north especially needs people like them to add to the good works of Rabiu Kwankwaso in Kano. We may not agree with their politics, but we cannot argue against their pedigree and result-oriented antecedents. We can talk about political ideologies after we talk about what matters to Nigeria’s 70 per cent poor; it is not PDP or APC, it is a country, states and local governments that work. The time for voting ideologies will come after we have a sane society.
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