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2019 elections and battle for the soul of Nigeria

By Simbo Olorunfemi
27 September 2018   |   3:43 am
The characteristic vice of the utopian is naivety; of the realist, sterility – E.H. Carr The reality of the 2019 elections battle is finally dawning upon us. The contestation for power is becoming heightened. Alignments and re-alignments are taking place. Some of the early birds who took the assurance of a ticket on some platforms…

[File] Election

The characteristic vice of the utopian is naivety; of the realist, sterility – E.H. Carr

The reality of the 2019 elections battle is finally dawning upon us.

The contestation for power is becoming heightened. Alignments and re-alignments are taking place.

Some of the early birds who took the assurance of a ticket on some platforms for granted are beginning to realise their mistakes.

The party that was in power yesterday has now become a receiver of presidential aspirants of all shapes and sizes, who have come to the realisation of the folly in nursing such ambition within the fold of the governing party, with the incumbent favoured to pick the ticket.

Port Harcourt has become the de facto headquarters of the party.

There is a new godfather in town, and people are trooping in to pay obeisance and genuflect before him in the name of condolence visits.

It is the way of our politics. The contestation for power is usually high-stakes. The godfathers of yesterday have become irrelevant.

The man who sits on oil money now calls the shots. The governors have the structure, the resources and other evident elements of power. They have the advantage.

But then, they strategise for their return to power in the mistaken belief that 2019 will be like 2015 and that all they need to do is conjure a CUPP in the name of a coalition and simply self-medicate on a potion brewed by a different set of people for a different ailment.

Party A, born of an amalgam of three-and-a-half legacy parties, shoves the ruling party out of power.

Three years down the line, Party B assembles a long list of briefcase parties along with some weather-beaten men from some other parties, expecting that this assortment of paperweights will replicate the act of Party A. Self-medication. That it worked for A, we simply assume that it will work for B. Political engineering is like medicine.

Accurate diagnosis is critical to a successful course of action. Proceeding with medication without proper diagnosis is fraught with error, if not danger.

That is why a diagnosis of what the problem is must be the first step in political engineering, for you to attain power.

There is a different face of the battle going on for the soul of Nigeria that they are only at the fringe of, even if they are paying attention to it and attempted to embrace or hijack it in the name of a poorly-cobbled together coalition that predictably collapsed before it could even take off.

The real battle for the soul of Nigeria is at the other end of the spectrum.

A gap has been rightly identified, interpreted by some as the need for the ‘Third force.’ Early this year, there was much fuss about such force.

The excitement was palpable in some camps – avowed opposition forces to the present leadership were beyond happy at the coming of the Third Force.

Some, yesterday-supporters of the present, unimpressed by the performance of the government embraced that as the possible alternative.

Indeed, we had predicted the birth of a third force far back.

Early in 2016, I submitted that “the contradictions within the PDP resolved itself in favour of Nigeria, leading to a paradigm shift towards a little to the left.

If contradictions within the governing party are not speedily resolved to the satisfaction of its progressive tendency, it will only hasten the birth of a strong opposition outside of its control.

The APC will then find itself pushed to the right, for the opposition of the future to take its place, further to the left of the spectrum.”

Not sure if the APC will still end up to the right as I had projected, as the left-leaning side might have pushed the right-leaning side out.

I had thought the left-leaning tendency within might be forced out, but the defections happening now are largely right-leaning, which might just help post-2019 to push the party towards the left, for the new aligned forces to take to the right.

I had wanted the progressives outside to team up with the remnants within APC to shape its thought and philosophy with a view to causing a paradigm shift within, but I am not sure many of them see that as the way to go.

Even outside, the progressive tendency is simply unable to coalesce, to die to the self, forge a consensus to take advantage of the vacuum to the left.

Each one thinks it is all about forming a new party, not realising that it only splinters progressivism and weakens the collective.

So, rather than the right as we used to know it to die now, it is being handed another chance at life, courtesy of the contradictions within the left and an apparent lack of foresight and strategy.

The political space abhors a vacuum. Since the left will not take its place, the right sees the gap but it is misreading the opportunity.

Yet, I maintain, on the strength of a dialectical extrapolation, that the future is still to the left, even if the form it would take remains unclear, for now.

When the Third Force was launched, we were quick to let it out that this was not the real thing and that we were only dealing with a different face of a single force. Of course, the idealists had some other version and then there was the red card joke.

My argument was simply that there was really nothing in our recent history to support the optimism some reposed in a Third Force, as was being touted as a vehicle for upturning the cart.

If anything, the coming of a Third Force, in the manner we are seeing it, can only favour the fortune of the incumbent more than it can ever benefit the opposition, as the incumbent’s base is often largely left intact in such a scenario, while the opposition further splinters.

•Olorunfemi works for Hoofbeatdotcom, a Nigerian communication consultancy and publisher of Africa enterprise

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