The anxiety that some Nigerians are having over what looks like the imminence of one-party state in the country is misplaced. The basis for the angst is not deep-rooted enough. It is borne out of a poor reading of Nigeria’s political barometer in the present circumstance.
At issue here is the ongoing charade that is being packaged and sold as political defection. Some players in the political field are abandoning their political parties and moving in droves to the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). There would have been reason to worry about the imminence of one-party state if the APC were a well organized and properly managed party with a coherent strategy on how to re-engineer politics and governance. The party is not even anchored on any ideology. There would even have been a bigger reason to worry about the poorly rehearsed defections, if the government that the APC formed at the centre was meeting the yearnings and aspirations of Nigerians. But neither the party nor the government it formed looks attractive. As a political party, APC has nothing to commend it. The party is an amalgam of strange bedfellows who are violently yoked together by the mad urge to grab power. Their belongingness to the party or quest for power is not borne out of conviction or belief in the political party or on the need to wrest political power in the service of the people. If anything, the APC is a concatenation of disparate entities who have massed up under the umbrella of the ruling party in the hope that they will get a slice of their own cake in the national scheme of things. In other words, the motley crowds that populate the APC find strength not in their belief in the party but in the booty to be shared.
The government at the centre, a product of APC’s mercantilist disposition to politics, is a negation of everything a people can expect from an administration. The government is a product of the mad rush for political power. Those at the helm did not think about governance before they began their inordinate quest for power. Their approach was: grab power first and then decide what to do with it. That was why they threw Nigeria into a tailspin from the very moment they assumed the reins of governance. The country has been the worse for it since the present administration came into office.
In the face of this unflattering situation, no proper person whose mission in politics is to serve the country and the people will find the APC an enticing platform. In a normal setting, politicians will be leaving the APC in droves in favour of one or two opposition political parties. The objective would have been to strengthen the opposition so that it will be in a position to wrest power from the failed ruling party. Regrettably, the reverse is the case. The impression this creates in the minds of many is that we are headed for a winner-takes-all situation. They believe that the defections will weaken the other political parties to the extent that they will stand no chance of challenging the ruling party in the elections to come. But this impression presents only the surface appearance. A deeper appreciation of the situation will readily tell us that life does not, usually, follow such a one-to-one mapping. But it must be recognized that those defecting to the ruling party are not the Nigerian people. The people on whom governance is anchored are not involved. They are mere onlookers in this game of make-belief. The real people of Nigeria, the change-makers, are not taken in by the antics of the defectors. But those who rule and reign are not seeing clearly. They are entertaining themselves with histrionics. The whole idea is to distract the people and take away their attention from the real situation. But that is not working. The people are normal enough to recognize that what they should be entertaining is feelings of positive change. The people are yearning for a situation that will see the ruling APC out of power. They want a new order that will rescue them from the vice grip of buccaneers. If those scrambling for space in APC’s camp understand this, they will begin to see the futility of their actions.
What is happening at moment, strictly speaking, is not political defection. It is scramble for political power. Those who are joining the APC from other political parties are not thinking about the country. They are just concerned about the next round of selection that will produce those who will preside over the commonwealth of Nigeria. Those who are flocking into the ruling party are not driven by the love of country. They are propelled by the quest for political relevance. They want to feather their own nest even if that is done at the expense of the common man.
Regardless of the surface appearance of things in the polity, I submit that there can be no one-party state in Nigeria because the fad we are witnessing today will not endure. It will fade fast. It has no root or ideology that can sustain it. It is just a fancy of the moment which, like taste and fashion, change arbitrarily. The contraption will certainly be blown away by the wind of change. Nigerians are bound to throw away the present disorder that has practically sent them to the gallows. The people, the real owners of the country, are not fascinated by the show of shame that the politicians are staging. They know that the defectors are sanguine opportunists who want to sell the country for a mess of pottage. The people are sneering at the lowness that defines the elaborate charade. They know that this house of defection is not standing on solid ground. It is built on sand and as such stands the risk of collapsing like a pack of cards. When it does, those who anchored their hopes on the fancies of the moment are bound to be stranded.
Contrary to the expectation that one political party will reign supreme in Nigeria in the coming years and lord it over the others, Nigerians are going to see a recrudescence of political activities that will bring about a keen contest for power in 2027. In that election year, the fanfare of defections that we are witnessing now will pale into nothingness. The party in power will be scampering for cover because it will be confronted by, at least, one political party that will give it a run for its money. In that election year, some of the people who are rushing to APC now because they want to protect their political turf will be disappointed. They will be stripped bare by the turn of events. At the end of the day, their party, the APC, which they are seeing today as an impregnable concrete fortress, will become a shadow of its papier-mâché self. When that happens, all the talk about the imminence of a one-party Nigeria will melt into thin air. A one-party Nigeria is an idea whose time will never come, at least not in the foreseeable future.