By Donu Kogbara
Last week, I commented on Chief Tom Ikimi, the veteran politician who started off with the PDP, then cross-carpeted to a rival party that eventually became the APC…and then recently decided to ditch the APC to re-join the PDP.

I said that while Ikimi may have legitimate grievances against the APC, which he has accused of dishonesty and of disrespecting him, I felt that he had reached an age (he is in his 70s) at which zig-zagging from one party to another party and then back to the original party was undignified and difficult to justify.

I expressed the opinion that he should have exited from the political stage when he got fed up with the APC. And I didn’t say this last week, but if I’d been in his shoes, I would have resisted the temptation to cross-carpet yet again and would have stayed home and written a spicy memoir about my bad experiences.

Alternatively, I’d have disappeared from public view and derived pleasure from having more time to read, relax, travel and hang out with family and friends.

Why must Nigerian grandees work and hustle until they drop dead?! Even when they are seriously rich and do not need salaries or perks or the dividends of governmental corruption, they regard retirement as a curse and insist on trying to retain relevance or on lobbying for slots that should go to younger people.

I normally receive an eclectic mixed bag of reactions to the contents of this column, with some folks supporting a particular viewpoint or individual, while others oppose the same viewpoint or individual.

I therefore expected some Vanguard readers to either sternly tell me off for querying Chief Ikimi for re-joining PDP…or to just simply describe him as a jolly decent fellow who had made a totally understandable political choice.

But, much to my amazement, there was no support AT ALL for Ikimi’s position!

Many Vanguard readers contacted me to comment on the Ikimi issue. And most wholeheartedly agreed with my attitude towards his cross-carpeting.

But while two respondents abused me because they think that I’m a fanatical Amaechi acolyte who always writes from a biased pro-APC perspective (even though I occasionally criticise Amaechi/APC and say nice things about Mr President and other PDP stalwarts!), NOBODY who has recently gotten in touch with me has said that he/she feels that Ikimi has done the right thing.

Interestingly, Ikimi’s detractors didn’t seem to have a problem with his decision to dump APC per se and didn’t say whether they were for or against APC.

What these detractors had a problem with was the fact that Ikimi not only chose to cling to a political arena in which he hasn’t been able to find a stable sanctuary (so why not give up?!) but chose to return to a party he has spent the past few years fighting (will the PDP trust him after such a long absence?).

Nigerian political parties

By the way, I often shake my head sadly and wonder whether Nigerian political parties will ever become more sophisticated than they currently are…and evolve to the point where there are clear differences between them.

At the moment, they are like football teams that are essentially similar in outlook and have no plans beyond trying to recruit the most high-profile players.

There are no intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking debates about capitalism or socialism or welfarism or free market economics or whatever.

All quarrels are personal rather than ideological and there are no sufficiently articulate defences of certain liberal or conservative positions. People jump from one party to another because of personal interests rather than principles.

Hypocrisy is rampant. Members of our political parties pretend to be carbon copies of each other in a fundamental moral sense; and all show up in church or mosque every week and all enthusiastically backed the same sex marriage ban, even though some of them are not strangers to same sex couplings.

Meanwhile, they all think that it is absolutely fine to give incompetent bed mates and cronies of either gender top jobs, while superior candidates languish in the shadows and unemployment queues.

Nigerian politicians only complain about lousy appointees when they don’t get a chance to foist their own lousy appointees on the rest of us.

In fact, Nigerian political parties are far less sophisticated than football teams because football teams are genuinely interested in performance and focus on the skills of the players that they try to lure out of competitors’ camps…

…whereas Nigerian parties are always recruiting/appointing/protecting spent forces or morons or crooks who have no value to add to national development.