By Ugoji Egbujo

Very few gave the party a chance. Infant mortality rate for political mergers in Nigeria is very high. Many predicted a stillbirth. They were certain it would have many insurmountable congenital abnormalities. For others, the ambitions of its founding fathers could simply not be contained in one hurriedly stitched political basket. But the party surpassed initial expectations in a Nigeria where amalgamations have struggled since 1914. It fused well, well enough to snatch victory from a wobbly PDP.

Since the elections, the party has failed to progress. It’s not about winning elections. Its structures have wilted and processes, stunted. It is not certain whether it has remained in infancy or, whether having proven its manhood against the PDP, it has suffered a castration. What is undeniable is an arrested development. Its impotence is now the talk of market women. This regression is majorly attributable to the ambivalence of an otherwise firm president and leader of the party towards party politics.

The president has an unclothed contempt for party politics. The president prides in his reputation for brutal frankness and incorruptibility. The compromises and intrigues upon which party politics is built, he must despise. This finickiness denies him the pragmatism needed to weld a fractious party of many political war lords into a cohesive whole. So the president wallows in righteousness while his party wobbles from one crises to another.

The APC looks, from the outside, like a garden with many beautiful flowers besieged by insolent weeds. The gardener hates the disorder of weeds but never likes to be seen without his white robes, which must not be sullied. And this gardener is scared of the ambitions of his friends. He is reluctant to let those with whom he cultivated the garden do the weeding. So his relatives come in once in a while and decide what is a weed and what is a flower.

A political party isn’t a cynical

contraption for harvesting power and dispensing privileges and immunities. It is a vehicle by people who share similar political philosophies to channel resources, energies and thoughts for societal development.

The very first item on the APC manifesto is ‘Restructuring.’ You can call it true federalism. It is no longer mentioned, let alone a programme of actualization designed. But more pathetically,the party never even manages to hold regular National Executive Council meetings and hasn’t bothered to constitute a board of trustees. Who would have believed that a party midwifed in Southwest Nigeria, by progressives, would distance itself from that June 12 inspired magic wand of yesteryears, so totally? Donald Trump may be a villain, but he has proven faithful to his many contentious campaign promises.

A political party is a compass and a shock absorber for its government. It keeps the government from wandering because it is the custodian of legacies and aspirations. It keeps the president wide eyed because it is ever calibrating its electoral fortunes. The nation wouldn’t be this polarized, if the APC were alive and well. A national party would be more conscious of the damaging effects to national unity of the systematic liquidation of lives and property being perpetrated by murderous herdsmen. Individuals , even pious ones like president Buhari, are vulnerable to debilitating biases. At no consequential forum of the party would what is happening in Benue not be declared an immediate national emergency. The seeds of disunity are being sown. Governors, even APC governors, are now being forced, by the inexplicable and indefensible lethargy of federal security agencies against herdsmen, to make declarations that are frightening but expedient.

If Benue is juxtaposed against Ife, conspiracy theorizing is let loose. Law and order must be the first response in any violent uprising. But how Ife and Agatu can happen in one country is baffling. A seasoned national political party by its nature is better gifted with the visual acuity and tenderness of heart to promote national unity than egotistical officials of government. When these riddles become rife even in states controlled by the APC, the fabric of national unity suffers worse rents. Because without cries of political partisanship, only divisive sectional, ethnic or religious interpretations can retain plausibility.

Party members are encouraged not to be zombies. Democracy thrives on freedom of expression, and contest of ideas. But the fact of party membership invariably entails assumption of personal preferences under party consensual positions. A president can re-nominate a rejected candidate. But the president and the Senate his party controls, cannot pretend to be noble while washing their dirty linens in public. African fathers don’t stamp their feet on the ground if they lack the courage to enforce obedience. And how does a party sit astride, playing ludo, while its leader suffers such indignity.

But who can blame the party chairman for lameness? The president’s attitude leaves everyone charged with party discipline enfeebled. In being outwardly indifferent to party politics, in preferring taciturnity when outspokenness would be forthrightness, the president leaves party leaders to wither, second-guessing him. The communication void created is then filled by manipulators who flaunt nepotistic access to the president. They come to be relied upon to read and interpret the mind of the president. Party structures become redundant and gradually atrophy.

A cabal is born. And before long, seized by opportunism, and propelled to new heights by sycophancy, members of the cabal become lords. They will dictate to the enervated party officials first , and later, to the effectively quarantined president. With all powers concentrating in a few mercenary hands, the party’s retardation becomes chronic. The party becomes inconsequential and is left to crawl on its belly, from one avoidable crisis to one ridiculous scandal, muttering baby gibberish.

President Obasanjo’s patriotism is widely acknowledged. But he failed woefully where it mattered the most. He established a sound economic team but was politically shortsighted. Perhaps he was hamstrung by an oversized personal ambition. He left the politics of PDP in the hands of pliable minds and political mercenaries. The PDP naturally failed to mature and let the nation down. A few years after Obasanjo, a big-for-nothing PDP crumbled like Humpty Dumpty. The nation drifted and all the economic gains were decimated by wolfish politics.

President Buhari, time is running out.