Reforming Political Parties

Written by Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim.

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According to the National Chairman of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Bamanga Tukur: “It is an illusion for the party’s members to think that the PDP will rule Nigeria forever, if there are no reforms that will enable the party to deliver good governance to the Nigerian people” (Daily Trust, 29/7/12). The party, he said, is engaging in a major drive to recruit new members. Along the same line, the woman leader of the party organised an E-Conference in Abuja last week with the objective of attracting young cyber-literate women to the party. She committed to paying 100,000 naira to any woman who is able to recruit 1,000 women into the party. These developments signal a new frame of mind for Nigeria’s ruling party.

One of the challenges of Nigerian politics is the penchant for everybody to be part of the ruling parties. Over the past 12 years, most of Nigeria’s political class has been in and out and in the party again. It is in that context that the party has seen itself as the dominant party in the country. We recall the words of the former Chairman of PDP, Col. Ahmadu Ali: “The PDP is full of members who fraudulently obtained their party membership” (Tribune, 23/11/2005). He was justifying the decision of the party to dismiss all its members in November 2005 and request that they all re-apply for new membership. For weeks, the PDP enjoyed the distinction of being the only ruling political party in world history without a single member. After a “thorough process of screening”, suitable members were recruited to organize the rigging of the 2007 elections. Obviously, the PDP did not believe it needed members.

Nigerian parties can afford to sack members because they are not about democracy and elections. Nigerian elections have become occasions in which the outcome has been the subversion of the democratic process rather than its consolidation. Especially during the 2003 and 2007 elections, the polls were not opportunities in which party members and supporters expressed political choices through voting who they wanted to rule them. The elections were massively rigged and the ruling party could not have been in need of members because it could deliver votes without having party members.

To be fair to the PDP, the other parties in the country also resemble the ruling party and are also not organizations that are owned by party members. Most Nigerian parties are “owned” by godfathers and the historical strength of the PDP is based on the fact that it has the largest concentration of godfathers in the country. It is normal that party “owners” would have a lot of contempt for party members. Party members are people who are paid and ‘bused’ into party conventions and rallies and are therefore not stakeholders. The new change we are seeing today might not be unconnected to the fact that for the first time in 2011, the elections were better than the preceding ones. When elections are free and fair, political parties need members and supporters as that is the basis on which they have access to political parties. The recent crushing defeat the PDP suffered in the Edo elections might have raised their consciousness about the importance of attracting members.

There is however still a long road for our parties to travel before our political system can improve significantly. Political parties in Nigeria since 1978 have had a persistent tendency to factionalise and fractionalise. This is because they have been instruments used for mafia style gangsterism by political entrepreneurs. The key political resources used in the battles are state power, money and violence. Godfathers decide on party nominations and campaign outcomes and when candidates try to steer an independent course, they use their favourite instruments to deal with them. The result was that they raised the level of electoral violence in the country and made free and fair elections difficult.

Most of the parties are small and have little impact on the political process. They have existed for one of two reasons – to collect grants from INEC or as fall back party for a godfather that might be dethroned from their current party, mostly, from the PDP. The birth of the Action Party of Nigeria has been a game changer in Nigerian politics because they were able to demonstrate that the PDP was beatable. In the North, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) could have been another game changer but the party ruined its chances due to its inability to respect choices party members had made in the nomination of candidates. The failure of the party to win in many states where it had real chances is the evidence that political parties need to respect their members.

The tendency in the Fourth Republic has been that as the number of political parties in the country increases, the movement towards a one-party regime accelerates. This tendency has now been challenged by the ability of the ACN to demonstrate that the PDP was beatable. Should the rumoured merger between the ACN and CPC occur successfully, the new party would have the ability to challenge the PDP for national political power? Mergers of political parties are however very difficult because there are too many egos to satisfy and too many people who will lose their positions.

It is for this reason that many opposition party members have sought for the easy answer by canvassing for a statutory reduction in the number of parties to between two and five. This option cannot work in a way that enhances democracy. The state would have to play a major role in devising the parties to be registered and once that happens, state manipulation becomes the order of the day. Even after the initial registration, the state, and by extension the ruling party, would retain the power to foment splits within opposition parties and influence which factions get recognised as authentic.

The only solution is for committed Nigerians to establish new forms of parties that are owned, financed and controlled by members rather than by godfathers. As Obama has shown in the United States, with sufficient planning and foresight, it’s possible for people to change the nature of politics. The godfather syndrome makes it impossible for true accountability to be practised in parties. The fact that one or two individuals bear the cost of running campaigns and funding of other party activities leads to a privatization of both party and state machinery because government officials would naturally owe allegiance to the political godfather who “put” them in office rather than to the ordinary citizen.

One of the legacies of militarization of Nigerian society and its impact on the political process is the organization of political parties around personalities, tribe or religion rather than on issues. Parties that are not in power have serious difficulties raising funds for their activities. The ruling party is rich because it has access to state funds through government contracts and other creative means of funding.

The new type of party we require must subscribe to the principle that all citizens can freely join and participate fully in all of its activities regardless of ethnic, religious, gender, class, social background or standing and disability. Above all, the practices of the party must conform to the principles of internal party democracy, especially in regard to the nomination of candidates for elections. They must be accountable to their members. I do hope that more parties understand this and move to reform themselves rather than wait to be thrown out.