DEEPENING DEMOCRACY: Mega parties for dictatorship!

During his recent visit to the national headquarters of the PDP, Governor Sule Lamido of Jigawa State said that he had no regrets about the statement that his party intended to rule the country for the next sixty years.

He asserted that no party in the world would willingly give out power to another. He concluded on the note that “my duty in PDP is to go and destroy our opponents”.

Shortly after Lamido’s statement, President Umaru Yar’Adua proceeded to Bauchi to welcome Isa Yuguda current governor of Bauchi to the PDP. Yuguda had been politically orphaned in 2007 when he was declared a non indigene of Bauchi state and pushed out of the PDP by Adamu Muazu, former governor of Bauchi. In desperate straits, he was rescued by the ANPP who engaged in a determined and successful struggle against the PDP to get him into the seat of governorship in Bauchi Shortly thereafter, he fell in love with and married the President’s daughter,

Yuguda took the decision to betray the citizens who risked their lives to get him to power in 2007.

Elections in Nigeria are organised on state basis and state governors have shown a high capacity to rig elections in favour of their parties. The significance of the ANPP victory in Bauchi in 2007 as well as that of the same party in Kano in 2003 was to show the possibility people could organise to protect their electoral mandate and destroy the governor’s rigging machine.

President Yar’Adua has been a governor for two terms and knows the power of the office. Since he became president, he has been steadfast in incorporating non-PDP governors into the ruling party.

While Ogbulafor and Lamido had been talking about their mega party, President Yar’Adua has been constructing it.

The response of the opposition parties has been to engage in the process of constructing a counter mega party.

The PDP is however busy incorporating leading elements of the opposition into its mega party. The president has recently reconstituted leading elements from the Action Congress formerly in the political family of his late brother into his 2011 re-election campaign machine.

We have fifty registered parties and INEC has announced that twenty new parties will soon be registered. Most of the parties are small and have little impact on the political process. They exist for one of two reasons - to collect grants from INEC or as fall back party for a godfather that might be dethroned from their current party, mostly, from the PDP.

As the number of political parties in the country increases, the movement towards a one-party regime accelerates. It is this fear that is pushing the calls from concerned democrats for the opposition parties to merge into a counter mega party. This strategy is erroneous. Mergers based on parties that are not rooted in popular constituencies would be nonsensical. We cannot solve the problem if the nature of political parties does not change even if it is true that it is difficult to consolidate democracy without strong political parties.

The notion of mega parties is one of the challenges of deepening democracy in Nigeria. Many of the leading politicians outside the PDP have now joined or rejoined the ruling party. The PDP is fast transforming itself from a dominant to a sole party in real terms.

Most parties are not organisations that are owned by members. They have owners at the national and local levels sometimes referred to as godfathers. Party owners have a lot of contempt for members. That was the reason why the PDP in 2005 became the first party in world history to dismiss all its members and request that they re-apply for new membership. After a “thorough process of screening” suitable members were recruited to organise the rigging of the 2007 elections.

Nigerian Parties can afford to sack members because they are not about democracy and elections. Nigerian elections have become occasions in which the outcome has been the subversion of the democratic process rather than its consolidation. Precisely because elections are not events in which party members and supporters express political choices, parties can afford to sack all their members and play politics about which ones will be allowed back into the fold.

Establishing mega parties with the intention of crushing the other is fundamentally anti-democratic. It means the parties are simply instruments for mafia style gangsterism by political entrepreneurs. The key political resources used in such battles are state power, money and violence.

What Nigerians are crying for are parties that are concerned about their welfare and the provision of public goods. Parties that they can remove from power when they are not satisfied with their performance. Rather than the creation of a country mega party, what democracy requires is a new type of party that believes in and respects democratic values.