APC vs. PDP: The emergence of a two-party dominant system in Nigeria?
Last week’s registration of the All
Progressives Congress by the Independent National Electoral Commission
opened the way for a two-party dominant system in the country, and
signals the possibility that the current hegemony of the ruling Peoples
Democratic Party will come under a serious challenge. Several
democracies such as Britain under the Conservative Party and Japan under
the Liberal Democratic Party have been through phases of one party
dominance without necessarily being the poorer for it. What is
unsettling in the Nigerian version of one party hegemony are the dim
prospects of any of the opposition parties on its own steam giving the
PDP a good run for its money and its deployment of federal might.
The formation and recent legal
imprimatur of the APC, a merger of the Action Congress of Nigeria, the
Congress for Progressive Change and the All Nigeria People’s Party raise
for the first time, the possibility of
a genuine competition between
the PDP, a behemoth, and the emergent APC. It is also foreseeable, that
the logic and rules of competition will force the smaller parties, most
of which exist in name only into the waiting embrace of either of the
big players. Proponents of the two party dominant system look back with
nostalgia on the 1990s when competition between the Social Democratic
Party and the National Republican Convention produced two great unifying
umbrellas, even if coercively, resulting in one of the freest and
fairest elections, although tragically annulled by Gen. Ibrahim
Babangida, in our chequered democratic history. It is doubtful if
democracy can grow in the immature circumstances of the developing
polities if the opposition has only a nominal chance of defeating the
dominant party. Predictions about the PDP ruling for 100 or more years
came from a mindset which took for granted that the opposition will
perpetually remain fragmented, unable to compete viably and produce the
alternation of parties in government which has greatly enriched the
quality of democracies elsewhere.
The other reason for welcoming the two
party system in Nigeria had been broached in my piece entitled, “Can APC
reform the unreformable?’ (The PUNCH, February 15, 2013); namely
the prioritisation by the PDP of spoils sharing arrangements
legitimated by the federal character, featuring an extreme form of the
politics of the belly. It is not that the other parties are immune from
large scale, crooked and cynical deals which enrich the few at the
expense of the poor; it is just that the ruling party, on balance, had
converted the “you chop, I chop” syndrome into a philosophy of
governance, with disastrous consequences for its ability to transform
the lives and welfare of the majority. There are, to be sure, noble
politicians within the ruling party who have been demonised by
association; just as there are scoundrels within the so-called
progressive parties who have been sanctified or given blank cheques by
virtue of being in opposition to what is generally perceived as an
efficient machine for carrying out raids on the national treasury in
rotation. Nonetheless, opposition parties governing in states with
sophisticated electorate have tended to be more sensitive to the pulse
of the people and conscious of the need to tackle mass poverty upfront.
Regional disparities in statistics of development are fast becoming a
pronounced feature of the Nigerian story, with better governed states
netting in more of the indices of development. This may be partly
attributed to the prolonged insurgency in the North which has taken its
toll on growth; it is also, in part, the result of emerging poles of
relatively efficient and redistributive governance styles in the
South-West and South-East for examples.
It is too early to say whether the APC
will shape up to be a genuine alternative to the mediocrity of the PDP,
given, for example, that it had to cast its net wide, to accommodate
politicians of every stripe and creed. Dr. Doyin Okupe’s jibe published
on Monday that the party consists of “politically expired”, “analogue”
yesterday men, maybe, a case of the pot calling the kettle black but it
underlines the extent to which the two parties are saddled with aging
politicians, several of them of doubtful reputation. I suggested in my
write-up of February 15 that the APC should differentiate itself from
the PDP by projecting new faces and politicians of unsoiled reputation,
although, understandably this has to be balanced with the reality of
having on board those perceived to have political clout across the
geopolity. Much depends, however, on the identities of those who emerge
within the party as presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the
run-up to the 2015 elections. If large swathes of voters are not
persuaded by the merit of the presidential candidate of either the PDP
or the APC, they may stay away from voting, leaving the post-2015
government with a distinct legitimacy problem.
To harvest the benefits of a two-party
system, it will be useful for the APC to distinguish itself from the
ruling party by indicating its ideological departures, if any, from it.
It is not enough for the APC to say that it will run a more disciplined,
more efficient, less corrupt government than President Goodluck
Jonathan, if he is reelected should he decide to run for a second term.
If the PDP had visionary aspirants, which is what they ought to be
saying even at the risk of getting the Governor Rotimi Amaechi treatment
of victimisation. There should be, in my opinion, a further
differentiation from the PDP by a revision of the current neoliberal
growth model, which even if it were being driven by the keenly
result-oriented chief executive of a United States conglomerate, will
still produce disastrous consequences for the poor. We ought to be given
snapshots of utopia as defined by the APC, with respect to the kind of
redistributive policies that will mark it out as a party to the left of
the centre.
Unfortunately, such debates are not on
the menu for now. It may well be a tall order to interest Tom Ikimi, one
of the dominant faces in the APC, and a holdover from several previous
Nigerian governments including Gen. Sani Abacha’s in such debates. We
can only hope, however, that the media and the rump of the intellectual
class, still active in public debates, will put such issues squarely on
the national agenda. There is, of course, the danger that the APC, an
uneasy amalgam of strange bedfellows, will fissure and fracture over
elective positions as the PDP is doing over what looks like the
inevitable prospect of a Jonathan second term. Much will depend on the
ability of its leaders to rein in divisive tendencies or resist the
temptation to foist on the party jaded leaders with controversial
antecedents.
However matters go, it is important to
emphasise that the bottom line in all the multiplying shenanigans is for
Nigerians to get a new deal by breaking away from the grooves of
unfulfilled promises, as well as a crisis of governance occasioned by
the advent of Nigerian politics as the most lucrative, extractive
industry on the globe.
