Nigeria And The Threat Of A One-Party State

 By Dan Amor

Aside from the usual historical rendition that Nigeria became a political reality following the fusion of the Northern and Southern protectorates of the River Niger area in the interior coast of West Africa in 1914 by Lord Fredrick Lugard, a British military administrator, Nigeria actually adopted a Federal form of government in 1954. Even though still under colonial rule, party politics thrived in the country. 

*Buhari

The leading parties were: the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) which stood for political democracy in its classical, individualistic form; the Action Group of Nigeria (AG) which stood for federalist democracy; the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), which exemplified the modernization of traditional political authority; and its radical opponent, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), which espoused egalitarian democracy. As a strictly regional party, the NPC did not threaten the Southern parties in their home regions. Since the Northern Region was said to have contained an absolute majority of the national population, (though a myth of the 1959 population census), the NPC could control the Federal government by monopolizing electoral power in the North. 

As a conservative party, pledged to preserve a reformed traditional order, the NPC wished to collaborate with conservatives in the Southern regions. However, the Action Group and the NCNC were trans-regional parties with strong libertarian and egalitarian traditions. They could not come to terms with the NPC without repudiating many of their own political beliefs. The issue of regional versus trans-regional extension was the core of inter-party relations in 1959. After the Federal parliamentary election of 1959 the NCNC joined with the NPC to form a government coalition of convenience, while the AG assumed the burden of parliamentary opposition to the Federal Government. In opposition, the AG condemned both regionalism and social inequality, including capitalist and (in the North) quasi-feudal social relations. 

Inevitably, the Action Group split: its conservative wing in control of the Western Regional Government broke with the National leadership and embraced the NPC doctrine of political regionalism. Conservatives in all three Southern regions, including some leaders of the NCNC, were prepared to live with Northern political supremacy at the centre on condition of political security within their own regions and a proportionate share of national power. The principle of ‘’regional security”, was, in effect, a political formula for socially conservative capitalist development.

In the aftermath of the Action Group crisis of 1962, a coalition of regionalist persuasion, including former members of the Action Group and the Western wing of the NCNC, gained control of the Western Regional government. By the last quarter of 1963, Nigeria’s ill-fated First Republic had begun its fearful slide to disaster. 

In 1964, the Federal coalition partners (NPC and NCNC) quarreled over results of a decennial census, which preserved the Northern Region’s edge in population counted over the rest of the country. Having tasted the fruit of regional power most NCNC members of the Western Regional government refused to support their party on that explosive issue. They abandoned the NCNC for a new regionalist party that aligned with the NCNC in national politics. Belatedly, the NCNC closed ranks with the now battered Action Group. These parties and their Northern allies formed an anti regionalist United Progressive Grand Alliance in opposition to the Nigerian National Alliance of the NPC and its regionalist allies in the South. 

Following a mismanaged parliamentary election at the end of 1964, one that was partially boycotted by the NCNC and its allies, the NPC resumed control of the Federal Government. But the legitimacy of that government was gravely impaired in the southern regions. Confidently, and defiantly, anti-regionalists anticipated an Action Group victory in the Western Region election of October 1965. This, they believed, would redress the overall political imbalance and force the NPC to reappraise its regionalist policies. However, the party in control of the Western Regional Government rigged the election. 

Three months of increasingly violent political unrest in the Western Region (operation wetie) culminated in the coup d’etat of January 15, 1966. At first, the military Government was accepted with varying degrees of goodwill in all parts of the country. Hope turned into disillusionment and anger when the new regime, headed by an Igbo Major-General J. T.U Aguiyi Ironsi, threatened to impose a unitary form of government by decree. But that was the ultimate idea for the command military structure with diktat. There followed an anti-Igbo army mutiny, the massacre of many persons of Eastern origin who were resident in the North, the Eastern (Biafran) secession of May 30, 1967,and a 30-month civil war. 

In anticipation of the Biafran secession, the Federal Military Government abolished the existing regions and reorganized Nigeria into twelve states. This action, comparable in its historic significance to the amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914 and the establishment of a federal form of government in 1954, had a dual purpose and effect. It was also designed to project a national ideal that would help to rally Nigerians in all parts of the country to the cause of unity. Thus, the civil war destroyed regionalism as a political force. In 1976, seven additional states, making a total of nineteen, were created. 

After a decade of “reconstruction” ,under the supervision of the military (1970-1979), a quasi-federalism had been preserved and strengthened; constitutional government, with freedom of association to compete for state power, had been restored. However, the right to compete in elections had been restricted to political parties that had demonstrably national, rather than ethnic, religious, or sectional, foundations. But political power was still seen as the exclusive preserve of a section of the country at the expense of others. 

Out of a total of nineteen applicants, five political parties qualified to compete in the federal and state elections of 1979. Three of the five nominees for president of the Federal Republic in 1979 were presidents of major parties during the ascent to independence: Chief Obafemi Awolowo, presidential candidate of the Unity Party of Nigeria in 1979 had been president of the Action Group; Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, presidential candidate of Nigeria People’s Party in 1979, had been president of the NCNC; Alhaji Aminu Kano, presidential candidate of the People’s Redemption Party in 1979 had been president of the Northern Elements Progressive Union. 

Both Alhaji Shehu Shagari, the successful candidate in 1979 (as nominee of the National Party of Nigeria) and Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim, candidate of the Great Nigeria People’s Party, were rising stars in the Northern Peoples Congress at the time of independence. The ability of these and many other politicians of pre-civil war vintage to resume political command had been a source of wonderment and distress to many members of the radical and technocratic intelligentsia. How, they wondered, could these tarnished leaders survive more than thirteen years eclipse by military rulers?

Looking back at Nigeria’s nationhood, it can never be difficult to finger where the cause lies in Nigerian’s collective failures to make progress from where British colonialist left them in 1960. The antecedence and the present magnitude of the nation’s woes clearly bear a repetition that leadership-the right calibre of Nigerians to point to and lead the nation to the path of progress- has been the bane. From the first civil government of the Azikiwe-Balewa era, to that of Shehu Shagari, the military era, to the current democratic dispensation, Nigerian politicians have consistently shown demonstrable proof of ineptitude, corruption, intolerance and the complete lack of the finest democratic virtues which are the large –heartedness or equanimity to accept defeat and the magnanimity to share their victory. 

Yet, despite our troubling dilemma, Nigeria has never drifted into a one party state in a democracy, like we are experiencing under the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency since 2015. During the Olusegun Obasanjo administration with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the saddle, there was a time the ruling party, the PDP, had about 23 out of the 36 state governors and the Federal Capital Territory (F.C.T), Abuja. There were also defection of politicians from one party to another. But it was not as porous as it is under the watch of the All Progressives Congress (APC) controlled Federal Government. 

In spite of the above, the most troubling metaphor for the Nigerian dilemma, is the prevalence of military intervention in the body-politic. On January 15,1966, barely six years into self-rule, bewildered Nigerians were treated to their first coup d’etat. Led by an exuberant and childish Major Patrick Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, the coup felled prominent politicians and military officers. To legitimize itself, Nzeogwu read to a befuddled nation the alleged sins of the politicians which he and his comrades in arms sought to extirpate. Since then the phenomenon of coup d’tats had been our national life, a leitmotif did run through all coup d’tats. And this contributed in bringing Nigeria to its knees. 

Apart from a breakdown of discipline, military intervention had bred its own peculiar class of political soldiers who would latch onto the flimsiest excuse to take over power. It must be emphasized that it was because the military in India allowed their politicians to make their mistakes until they were able to hone their politics to a considerable art that India is where it is today. The assassination of their Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Ghandi due to intra-party squabbles and that of Rajiv, her son who succeeded her, could not push their military to the Centre stage of their politics. Even the amoebic splitting of our territory into 36 states and a Federal Capital Territory has not helped matters as the nation is constantly in a state of anxiety and unrest since there is complete absence of competition due to an over-centralized unitary system in practice under the banner of federalism. 

The still-born but ironically most expensive transition of the Ibrahim Babangida era was particularly not pleasing to the sense of taste. And so was the one organized by his de facto second in command and successor General Sani Abacha. For the first time in the nation’s annals, Government formed political parties and asked its apologists known as "militicians" to join those parties. Military governments wrote party manifestoes and drew up their programmes. And because they were all similar in form and content, the late Chief Bola Ige described them as "the five fingers of a leprous hand". 

Even since the evolution of the current democratic dispensation in 1999, the ideal political parties are yet to emerge. What we have at the moment are cult groups of strange bedfellows masquerading as political parties. Nigerian politicians have been jumping (what Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, a poet and essayist calls "jumpology") from one party to another right from inception, not for the good of their constituents but for their selfish interests. Whereas Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola jumped from AG to NPC to win election, the current gale of defections from PDP to APC is to escape arrest from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The ruling party which is practically a failed party in terms of performance, is using the anti-graft agency to turn Nigeria to a one-party state. 

The unnerving weight of insecurity bedeviling the country is the result of intrigues by militicians without ideology but who always want to capture political power not to add any value to the lives of the citizenry but for selfish pursuits. These are the same people who held the country hostage for 39 out of the 61 years of Nigeria’s self rule. Due to glaring leadership failure and irresponsible politics, Nigeria has become the story of a perdition in which nobody is gaining and everybody is losing. Insecurity has engulfed the entire landscape like a tsunami amidst pervasive poverty and hunger with no solution in sight. The dearth of responsible party politics had been compounded by the registration of about ninety political parties all of which were like empty shells without ideology. 

Since the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) de-registered 75 parties recently, Nigeria officially has 18 political parties. Yet, analysts believe that it is only a two-party system with politics of ideology that would bring Nigeria back to its halcyon days. Before then, the country must implement the outcome of the Justice Mohammed Uwais Electoral Reform Committee. The INEC must be insulated from Executive control. On no account must the President have exclusive power to appoint and fire the INEC chairman. It is not fair for the referee to be appointed by one of the contestants. For now, there is a nefarious game plan to turn Nigeria to a one-party state by the party in power. It is the death of ideology for Nigeria.

*Amor, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja