Dem no get shame: Our political peculiarities

An enduring characteristic of our national politics is its fluidity. It has much to do with the endless instability in our political parties and the lack of committed principles that drive national development through the instrumentality of political parties. But our politicians love it. Fluidity in politics is the absence of principles and commitment to political ideals. It promotes bread and butter politics as the individual mission in politics.

Each national election season witnesses the haemorrhaging of the parties that lost the presidency. The losers beat the path in groves to the door of the winning party. An old word dating back to the first republic defines their action. Decamping. Its current politically correct variant is dumping. Both words describe the action of men and women who place greater premium on ingratitude than principles, honour, and integrity.

Check the decampees and the dumpers. They are men who benefited from their political parties as state governors, legislators, ministers, and commissioners. A simple sense of gratitude should oblige them to remain in their parties, do some critical post-mortem on why their party lost and join hands with others to repair the damage and prepare their party for the battle next time.

That is not the way it works here. Some of them sabotaged their political parties in the quest for greener pastures because the ground under them has suddenly turned brown and can no longer serve their venal purposes. In the venal game of grab and grab, political parties are temporary vehicles for securing personal political power. Nothing else matters.

We do not seem to realise that this great nation is paying a stiff and unnecessary price for the criminal manipulation of the parties to achieve ignoble ends. Our politics has become a racket and our politicians, political racketeers. I have often argued here and elsewhere that political stability in a nation is built on the foundation of stability in the political parties.

If a political party is a group of men and women who share same or similar visions for the future of their country, it should follow that they can take electoral losses or disappointments in their stride. Political fortunes change more quickly in our country than elsewhere in the world. It requires a little patience to see the green pasture on the other side turn brown.

Two things are currently redefining our national politics. One is the recycling of men and women, some of whom insist on being permanent fixtures in our political firmament. Power is so sweet that they and power cannot be separated. Politics is the recognised path to easy wealth in our country. None who has the opportunity to take that path shuns it. Not when a senator going on recess can casually have N2 million tossed into his bank account to continue to enjoy while he rests from the noisy business of law-making in the National Assembly. But there is another possible explanation for why it pays to hug power. The real problem is the eternal fear of anonymity; the fear of descending from the known to the unknown; from somebody to nobody.

The ingenious cure for this consuming fear of political irrelevance and social anonymity is the endless recycling of men and women who must not let go. Thus, a man who has just ended his eight years in office as a state governor, struggles to be appointed a minister. As a state governor, he was the lord of his state manor; the number one citizen in his state, who with his pen, to borrow from Senator Chimaroke Nnamani, built a road or a hospital or a school and minted millionaires of relations and friends.

As a minister, he descends from an executive position and becomes a staff officer to the president. But as a minister, he escapes the fear of anonymity and remains politically powerful and socially relevant. It is worth struggling for because Nigerians have little or no sympathy for men and women with a new title of former or ex. They avoid them like the plague. It just does not feel nice.

The other important development in our national politics that may or may not be good for our country’s political health is dynastic politics. It is inching up with the wives, sons and daughters of former state governors or ministers elected to the national or state legislatures, their first step on the first rung of political power. This expands political power from the individual to the family.

It looks so benign and not particularly strange in some other countries and ours. But it poses two critical problems in our kind of politics and in our kind of country. Here, the utilitarian value of politics as a feeding trough for all citizens. One of the political associations that sought for registration as a political party in the transition to civil rule programme of the President Ibrahim Babangida administration was called You-Chop-I-Chop Party. You may laugh but its founder was spot on in the way we have come to understand the utilitarian value of politics. Political dynasties domicile this important value in some privileged families. They chop, we don’t chop.

This leads us to the second critical problem: fencing in and fencing out in our political system. This has always been a peculiar nature of our national politics. The toeing and froing from one political party to another in endless search for greener pastures has quite often partly resulted from lack of internal democracy among the political parties in that those who have the muscle, muscle out those who do not have it and fence them out of the power loop.

Fencing in and fencing out resulted in the cries of ethnic and religious marginalisation in the 70s. The generals responded to them and instituted policies to make inclusiveness a cardinal principle of state policy in the management of our ethnic and religious diversities. The problem with the law is not usually the law but the lack of respect for it and the unfair and injudicious application of its letters and its spirit.

These policies have been abused over the years and continue to be abused today because in the struggle for limited opportunities and resources, those at the head prefer men and women who speak their language and worship the same deity. It could have been worse without those policies and institutions created to police their effectiveness.

On a larger national scale, political dynasty expands the fencing in and the fencing out in our national politics. It raises the grim prospects of the political have-nots to continue not to have power. The families that have it, hoard it. We are talking of inclusive and exclusive politics that allocates power to some and denies it to others.

This is rather complicated, one good reason being that there is no fairness and justice in politics so long as fairness and justice could be hurdles on the road to realising one’s personal or family political ambitions. You cannot stop a man from replacing himself with his wife or son or daughter in the power loop because you will infringe his fundamental human rights.

However, given the fluidity in our national politics, the politics of dynasty might have problems with establishing a safe berth in the shifting sands of our political fluidity. So, weep not, brother.