Nigeria are waiting for the Supreme Court to make its ruling on the presidential election. That will be the final verdict that will settle the matter and bring the current wrangling to an end. Interestingly, Nigerians seem to be having a lot of fun x-raying the certificates of the three leading presidential candidates namely: Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi.
Depending on which corner they are coming from they seem to find faults, rightly or wrongly, with the certificates of the three men. But that is the task that the Supreme Court justices will sink their aged teeth into. My task today is to see how the PDP, which ran the affairs of the country from 1999 to 2015 can regain its competitive edge and position itself for a formidable performance as an opposition party.
At the moment the PDP is in a miserable shape, because its fear of failure in the last election actually led to its failure. While some of its leaders were talking of demography, they did not understand that in a country with immense diversity good deeds could actually be better than good creeds.
The party failed woefully in managing the success it had recorded in the first 16 years of the Fourth Republic. In 2015, it lost the presidency to the APC and Muhammadu Buhari. In 2019 that happened again. And 2023 it managed its fortune more woefully, allowing the party to split into a newly minted party called NNPP and a rejuvenated Labour Party.
On top of these splits was the emergence of the G-5, five state governors of the party, who had positioned themselves against their own party due to irreconcilable differences. With all these unresolved crises within the party, how did it hope to win against the ruling party? Well, politics is a game for incurable optimists and a man surrounded by pygmies may obviously look big. As the results of the various elections tumbled in, it was clear that the rebellion of the five PDP Governors from Rivers, Abia, Oyo, Benue and Enugu had a significant impact on the elections.
Also, the breakaway factions that formed the NNPP and Labour Party did fabulously well. In the Senate, the Labour Party has five Senators, and 33 members of the House of Representatives. The NNPP has two Senators and 23 Representatives. Both parties also have impressive numbers in the State Houses of Assembly. These gains by these two parties are the PDP’s losses.
However, instead of continuing to moan like a child who has lost both parents in one day, the party should gird its loins, rebuild the party, review its tactics and strategies and choose someone as its party chairman who can command acceptability nationally, someone who has visibility, who has capacity and who has a sense of equity and fairness and courage.
I think that Dr Bukola Saraki fits that bill. He is, in my opinion, someone who can change the game as the Chairman of the party because he has the experience, expertise and the guts for robust politicking. He is a tested and trusted warrior.
As the 13th President of the Nigerian Senate, June 9, 2015, to June 9, 2019, Saraki showed that he understood the way politics is played in Nigeria. For many people, the fact that he became President of the Senate against the will of President Muhammadu Buhari and the party was pure magic. While the President was meeting with a few National Assembly members somewhere trying to dictate his choices to them, Saraki got the nod of the Senators as their President. Every effort to dethrone him by Buhari failed.
And then something strange, infact weird, happened. Saraki became the first Senate President of the governing party to be issued with arrest warrants when Danladi Umar, Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, issued an arrest warrant against him on September 18, 2015.
Twenty-two charges were framed against him. Kanu Godwin Agabi, led 76 lawyers to defend Saraki at the Tribunal. And on any day he appeared at the Tribunal, his colleagues at the Senate trooped out in robust support of him. On Wednesday June 14, 2017 the Code of Conduct Tribunal discharged and acquitted him of the 18-count charge of corruption in the false declaration of assets charge brought against him.
But the Federal Government pursued him further by filing an appeal. On Friday, July 6, 2018, the Supreme Court dismissed all the charges against him. The Federal Government’s gun was still loaded against Saraki despite all these court victories. Each victory for Saraki was a defeat for the government but the vindictive government was not ready to drop its gun. Rather, it went in another very dangerous direction.
On April 5, 2018, armed robbers attacked five commercial banks in Offa community in Kwara State, killing at least 30 persons. Saraki was invited by the Nigeria Police for questioning due to a plot by the authorities to implicate him. At the Kwara State Judicial Panel of Enquiry on EndSARS on January 6, 2021, two individuals alleged that officers of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), forced them to implicate Saraki in the Offa robbery incident by torturing them.
Despite all the attempts by his political enemies to keep him in the valley, Saraki, a man of great courage and wisdom, managed to take his seat on top of the hill despite the witch-hunting expedition by those who saw him as the political enemy that had to be brought down.
In 2003, Saraki ran for the office of Governor of Kwara State on the platform of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), performing the feat of defeating the incumbent Governor Muhammed Lawal of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). On May 29, 2003, he was sworn into office and was re-elected in 2007. One of his most notable reforms as Governor was in Agriculture where he established the Shonga Farms programme and invited some white farmers from Zimbabwe to propel the project. That programme has been replicated today in some states of the Federation.
For most fair-minded Nigerians, the attraction to Saraki as a fair-minded politician was in his refusal to accept the proposal by his father, Dr Olusola Saraki, to make his sister, Gbemisola, his successor as Kwara State Governor. His father who was a kingpin of Kwara politics and a former NPN Senator thought in terms of building a Saraki political dynasty but his son thought that such dominance by one family might be unacceptable to the people. He said: “No.”
In a society where fairness and equity are put at a discount, it could have been possible to push the project through without adverse consequences but Bukola Saraki thought it was not a fair deal. At this time, his father’s gun was loaded so it was no time to start a quarrel with him but Saraki the son, still defied Saraki the father. That will remain a plus for Bukola in the annals of Nigeria’s politics because that action was an exemplar.
In the last election, there were 16 parties gunning for offices. That was a large number eventhough Nigeria is, also, a large country. But these are parties that all look alike. There are no ideological differences between them. The only well-known ideology that one can identify with all the parties is stomach infrastructure, you-chop-I-chop, come-and-chop, food-is-ready.
So, the Nigerian government is seen by many politicians as a restaurant, an ATM, from which naira flows ceaselessly into their pockets, irrespective of the state of the Nigerian economy. That is why there is today a national debate as to whether or not members of the National Assembly should purchase for themselves expensive cars at this time of economic distress and financial drought.
My position is that we need fewer parties than we have now. The fewer they are, the stronger they can become. The fewer they are, the more attention they can get from the people in terms of contributing to their growth and sustenance. The fewer they are, the more focused they can be because the people will also focus attention on them like a laser beam.
For the rejuvenation of the PDP, I think the choice of Bukola Saraki as the Party Chairman is worthy of consideration by the party’s big rollers. Such a decision could bring fresh air into the management of the party and put it in a position to compete favourably with the ruling party and other emerging parties that are showing signs of hidden strength such as the Labour Party and NNPP.
The view by democracy lovers is still that two or three strong parties are the best options for the flourishing of democracy. I agree with that. There is no evidential proof that having many parties is an asset to democracy. Rather it is a subject of confusion particularly in a largely illiterate country like Nigeria.
That is why there are often many voided votes at every election where we have had many parties participating. Let us make our choices fewer. That way the choices will be sounder than what we have been having in the past years. INEC should put a halt to the registration of new parties. The people should infact encourage the existing parties to merge so that we can have fewer and stronger parties to deal with.
Source: The Guardian
