A charm offensive

After 18 months of living in denial, the All Progressives Congress (APC), Nigeria’s ruling party, has turned the bend. It has now accepted that the country’s dire situation is its responsibility to mend and not that of the past governments of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). On October 24, the Governor of Imo State and Chairman of the Progressive Governors’ Forum, Rochas Okorocha, led his APC colleagues to go pay obeisance to President Muhammadu Buhari at the Aso Villa in Abuja.

Okorocha said after the meeting: “We are trying to clear the mess of the past. But we must take responsibility and we must never shift the responsibility to anyone. As APC we are responsible for everything happening in Nigeria. We are responsible for the good, the bad and the ugly. But we are promising Nigerians that we shall fix it.” His speech was a commendable reversal of the stone-faced refusal of the APC to accept responsibility for the affairs of the country which it consistently maintained were brought about by the PDP governments’ wilderness years before it stepped into the saddle last year.

Okorocha, a colourful politician with an abiding love for mufflers, talked about the pains Nigerians were going through and asked for a little patience as the country goes through some kind of painful surgery. He put it colourfully using a graphic pregnancy metaphor. He said the situation can be compared to a pregnancy, “when a woman is in the labour room, there is no joy; she doesn’t wear her high heel shoes, no make-up, no champagne, no party, because she is going through a process. But shortly after that process, joy comes when she sees the baby.”

The new stand of the APC is a bow to the reality that if the misdemeanor of the PDP was going to become the alibi for non-performance by the APC that strategy was dead on arrival. The people unleashed a barrage of criticisms on the APC and its leaders for disproportionately attacking a government, a bad government, that the people voluntarily and angrily voted out of power. The APC’s stubborn refusal to bend or mend was baffling to many fair-minded people and it suffered from scathing attacks by the public. These criticisms of the APC and Buhari’s stand (“I inherited nothing from them”) were not an affirmation by the people of PDP’s saintliness. It was simply a way of saying that the past is history and the present is contemporary history.

In fact, an English novelist L. P. Hartley once said that “the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” The past is irrecoverable and looking too far back can prevent one from getting too far ahead. In fact, most people are inclined to worry more about the future of their children and grandchildren than the past of their parents and grandparents. That worry happens in the present tense. Philosophically, one can say that of the three – past, present and future – the present is the luckiest animal. Why? Because everything that is wrong in society is often blamed on the past and will have to be paid for by the future. The present is innocent, always innocent.

The APC was right to have fingered the PDP for some of the country’s woes: the capture of the Chibok girls and the general dehumanisation of the North East; the depletion of the country’s foreign reserves and the failure to put aside something for the rainy day; the spiraling corruption and the reluctance to stem its tide. No one said that the PDP was an angel but the APC’s obsessive concentration on the failures of the PDP was jarring to the ears of the people who already knew these sins and therefore decided to throw the PDP out of office. The people were beginning to think that the APC which had made rosy promises which were yet to be fully delivered had chosen the sins of the past as its excuse for non-performance. Those who criticised the government were roasted as “wailing wailers” while those in the government’s amen corner grew by leaps and bounds. They came to be called “hailing hailers.”

But the APC seemed to be surprised by its own victory and apparently unprepared for governance. It said during the campaign that if elected it would hit the ground running and move at aerobic speed. It hit the ground alright but did not run. It merely crawled, taking a cool six months to form its cabinet. Within less than two years, there has been noticeable instability within the system. The President’s wife, Aisha, had to blow the whistle about the rapacious cabalism within. The national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu, has asked the Chairman of the party, John Odigie-Oyegun, to resign and the man says he isn’t going anywhere.

There have been divergent views of party members on the ambassadorial nominees amidst complaints of non-consultation on other appointments. But this is understandable if one remembers that the ruling party was cobbled together within a short time (about two years) and that its victory over a sitting government was close to a miracle. All political parties in Nigeria are made up of strange bed fellows with no binding ideology. What binds them together is the spoils of office, the sharing of which always causes friction and the possibility of an implosion. The two major parties, APC and PDP, epitomise this vulgarity and we seem condemned to live with it.

The APC stepped into office with a definite advantage despite what its officials may think. The people’s perception of Buhari’s avowed saintliness was a roar of approval for the government as it rallied the people behind him on his corruption crusade. It also made it easy for the government to impose a hefty increase on the price of petroleum products without the roof falling. There were a few skirmishers but no full blown war as had been witnessed many times in the past when even minor increases were announced by previous governments. The people thought that even if in the short run Buhari did not succeed in taking us to the happy shores of prosperity, he would not steal their money. They thought that if he contested an election four times he was ready to step up to the plate and possibly make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear despite the royal mess left behind by the PDP.

During the campaign the air was dense with exaggeration and the people felt a frisson of rising expectations. No party that is not in power truly knows the correct state of affairs in a government it campaigns to overthrow. The APC knew that a lot of things were probably wrong with the Goodluck Jonathan administration but how far wrong they did not know. They approached the job on take-over with the razzle-dazzle enthusiasm of a new employee and soon realised that they were in for a rude awakening. What they may have expected to be in fine fettle was not. They had to go back to the drawing board and redraw the performance map and do a new spread sheet analysis of our economy.

As the party peeled off the layers of problems they found low foreign reserves, a crash in oil prices, a high import bill, humongous corruption, militancy in the Niger Delta and opportunistic crimes all over the place yet the people expected the party to fulfill their election promises. The people knew that excuses were not acceptable as a fulfillment of promises made, low oil prices notwithstanding. The Buhari government then had to face what one can call the “winner’s curse,” the burden that inevitably comes with winning. But the adjectival mistake that the President and the party made was to continue to talk about the demons of the past to the point of nausea.

The people voted for the APC not only because of the failings of the PDP but also because of the mouth-watering and tantalizing promises of the APC put in a capsule called Change. Change is a revolutionary praxis, an alluring, sexy and solicitous code for some kind of city on the hill, the trains run in time, a chicken in each pot of soup and life more abundant. That is the message even when the details are not broken down. But its amorphousness is where the problem lies. It promises something and promises nothing. A promise without message. The devil is often in the details.

The APC never spelt out the details of that change. They still haven’t done so but the assumption is that we think we know what change means when, truly, we don’t. But if the story is that everything was wrong with the various PDP governments (and this is not true) then change means that everything will go right with the APC government (that, too, is not true). Slogans have a place in politics because they are easy to remember and the multitude is never really able to determine what is pearl and what is plastic. They are often mesmerised by an alluring slogan. The APC got it right. The people were mesmerised by the change slogan. But the mesmerism didn’t last. The people soon started asking for the real change; change from their humdrum existence to an exotic one. And not being in a position to provide it on demand the APC resorted to fault-finding and finger-pointing.

The step now taken by the Progressive Governors’ Forum in the form of a charm offensive by Okorocha is a step in the right direction. Accepting responsibility is a bridge-building and confidence-boosting strategy which will work more for the government than against it. Living in denial was never going to suffice.