Saraki and Nigeria Political Parties

The chain of events that was set in motion by the circumstances of the election of Senator Bukola Saraki to the office of the Senate president gathered momentum with the code of conduct tribunal warrant for his arrest. It is doubtful he would have found himself in the crosshairs of this gun barrel were he not to have mounted the tiger of the Senate presidency. This being the case, we patiently wait to find out if he would, accordingly, end up in the belly of the majestic beast.

That the Sarakis have become quite a fascinating fixture in the politics of Nigeria is stating the obvious. The father, Olusola Saraki, was significantly instrumental to the formation of the dominant political party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) of the second republic. A measure of his recognition as a key player was his election as Senate leader of the National Assembly from 1979 to 1983. He ushered in the era of the strong man (personification of city-state) politics that latterly manifested in the Olusegun Mimiko and Ayo Fayose micro nationalist personality type politics in Ondo and Ekiti States respectively.

Unlike Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello and Nnamidi Azikiwe, his was not an ethno-regional\religious aggregation waiting and anticipating a leader-protagonist. The Ilorin writ large Kwara State (of which Saraki was dominant) is a pot-pouri of contending ethnicities and religion.

He proved himself by successfully installing nearly all the elected governors of Kwara State including the opposition party candidate Cornelius Adebayo in 1983 whose election he secured by the default of withdrawing support for his party candidate, Adamu Atta, with whom he had a personality clash. His near perfect record of playing the godfather of Kwara politics was halted by his son and protégé, Bukola, who, Brutus style, humbled him at the penultimate governorship election, and, perhaps thereby sent him forth to a not so premature grave.

Notwithstanding the fallout between father and son, the common goal and objective of dynastic consolidation (of kingmaker proprietary rights) was secured and has been sustained. In the careers of both gentlemen, the idiosyncrasies of the Nigerian political system can be generally identified and studied. In addition to the strongman political phenomenon, their common penchant for party cross carpeting exemplified the amorphous nature of political boundaries among Nigerian political parties.

Upon the recurrence of his perennial conflict with his godsons, typified in his estrangement with Governor Mohammed Alabi Lawal in 2003, Saraki senior abandoned the All Peoples Party (APP) and embraced the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on which platform he got his son elected as governor. In disagreement with the same son over the proposal to actualise his mission and belief that what is good for the son is equally good for the daughter, he left the PDP and took over another party platform to make Gbemisola successor governor to her brother in the 2011 general election. It ended a mission impossible.

A minor implosion within the PDP in the run-up to the last general election resulted in the formation of a breakaway faction captioned the new PDP. The faction subsequently resurfaced as a major legacy party in the formation of the APC; and at the core were Senator Bukola Saraki and five PDP governors including his proxy, Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara State. Given his pedigree as a two-term governor, Chairman of Nigerian Governors Forum, senator, godfather of Kwara politics and presidential aspirant, Saraki readily emerged as a rallying figure within the APC. He might or might not have been inspired by his father’s precedence (as Senate leader) but It was an open secret that he had positioned himself for the office of the Senate president, which aspiration he had, speculatively, secured the endorsement of major party leaders.

The crucial difference between an aspiring opposition party and a party in power was the fate of Saraki’s aspiration to become Senate president the moment APC attained the status of the ruling party. In light of the reality of ascendance to power, prior assumptions of political possibilities, especially individual aspirations, suddenly become vulnerable to the emergent power politics equation. Prior to the APC victory at the polls, how conceivable was it that (haven produced the vice-president), the South-west zone would stand on solid ground to seek and be granted the party concession to produce the Speaker of the House of Representatives? Again, with the president coming from the North-west who would imagine that the regionally and politically overlapping North-east would be favoured for the position of the Senate president?

Rationale for the former was predicated on two negative reasons. First was the precedence of the era of President Goodluck Jonathan where the machinations of the opposition party and the incoherence of the PDP worked together to compel the accumulation of the offices of the vice-president and Speaker in the North-west at the expense of the South-west and the geo-political equilibrium of the Nigerian federation. Second was the discriminatory doctrine that subsequently found articulation and exposition in the express belief of President Muhammadu Buhari that those who voted APC should be accorded preferential treatment against those who did not.

Hence the South-south and the South-east are deemed ineligible for the office of the Senate president, Speaker, Senate leader, House leader and any other equivalent position.

I have been asked to project the evolution and sustenance of Nigeria’s political party system and democracy from hereon. I commenced the projection from the thesis of correlating per capita income and economic development to the sustenance and consolidation of democracy; of the level of income as a predictor and determinant of the survival of democracy. On this score, the plummeting per capita income of Nigerians bodes ill portent for the durability of democracy and the fourth republic. Beyond the contentious validity of this linkage, there are two Nigeria specific variables which are germane to the survival of the fourth republic party system, more so the opposition parties.

What makes for the survival of political parties in contemporary Nigeria? It is easy enough to fathom that more than any other, the factor of incumbency at the centre is the most powerful glue that binds the governing party together. With incumbency comes the power of patronage, untold financial resources and coercion. Otherwise the PDP would have unravelled long ago or there might not have been the PDP in the first place. It is not so easy to similarly account for the relative durability of the opposition parties.

Drawing from the experience of the fourth republic, one of the most crucial factors is, unfortunately, ethno-regional casus belli. The Alliance for Democracy (AD) and it’s longevity in the subsequent mutants, that is, Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), is substantially accounted for by its long taproot in the tribulation of the 1993 annulment crisis-validly appropriated as a Yoruba national adversity. And of course as the annulment crisis memory recedes and gets soothed by the healing balm of time so does its potency dilate and diffuse.

And this is where the second crucial factor comes to play. As, with the passage of time, the sense of solidarity in adversity wanes, the shortfall was made up by the utility of Lagos State. Next to the federal government, Lagos State is the next most powerful political unit in the capacity for patronage and accumulation of political slush fund. Metropolitan Lagos is also home to the dominant axis of the Nigerian media and the intelligentsia. And in Bola Ahmed Tinubu was found the political virtuoso who would weave all these elements together into a coherent and cohesive political fighting machine. It was from the Lagos base that, in one form or another, the ACN spread its tentacles to the other states in the South-west.

One man’s poison is another man’s cup of tea and so it became with the unintended consequences of the compensatory concession of the presidency to the South-west in 1999. It is not exactly clear when and how the political power withdrawal (from the North) syndrome kicked in, what is certain was that the Sharia crisis that rocked the Muslim North in the early days of the fourth republic (aptly captioned political sharia by Obasanjo himself) was an expression of anger and bitterness with the Obasanjo presidency. It is not a coincidence that the personality who best embodied the Sharia battle gong thereafter commenced a political career and continuously contested for the presidency essentially as the Northern candidate. The resultant block vote of the far North never wavered and constituted the core constituency that saw him through the trial and triumph of his odyssey to the Nigerian presidency.

Many Nigerians, including those who actively sought the defeat of the party at the last general election, are anxious that the PDP should survive and mount a robust opposition to the ruling APC. In other words they do not wish that multi-party democracy in Nigeria should retreat into collapse. In the frequency distribution of the political map that emerged at the conclusion of the 2015 elections, the PDP stronghold now resides in the South-south and South-east zones.

Haven held the Nigerian presidency for six years and its grievances somewhat assuaged, it is, to this extent, more difficult to sight a ready-made inflammable grievance amenable to instant political mobilisation of the South-south. Pretty much the same inference can be made of the South-east.

The potential for the Lagos State utility model can be found in the oil rich Rivers, Akwa-Ibom and Delta States. The combined effect of the economy and financial standing of these states can realistically absorb the irreducible minimum cost of funding and sustaining the PDP. Even then, the viability of the party as opposition-alternative party is quite shaky on the equation of present political dynamics. The salvation for the prospects of a viable opposition is going to come from the reinforcement that will materialise from the imminent implosion of the APC.

The early intimation of this imminence is the patently Northern biased lopsided composition of the Buhari presidency, marginalisation of the South-west faction and the travails of Saraki and the caucus he personifies. Just before embarking on these reflections, I sighted a social media caption that reads: Saraki distances himself from APC. That is what we are saying….