15th January, 2017
By: Amir
Abdulazeez
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y early 2019, many elements of the People’s Democratic
Party (PDP) may have reached the climax in reaping the dividends of the rotten
political system they helped nurtured in the country between 1999 to 2015. When
the PDP normalized and regularized impunity, weakened and destroyed opposition
through deliberate efforts, politicised the nation’s judicial and security
institutions, monetized and materialized our politics, made our civil service
and government agencies partisan, rubbished our electoral umpires; little did
they know that they will one day become opposition and by implication become
the victims of all that they helped put in place.
Many politicians have between 2014 to 2016 jumped ship
from the PDP to APC in an apparent attempt to eat their cake and still have it.
Perhaps, they don’t want to become victims of the type of system they helped
put in place while they were still in the PDP. However, a close look at
unfolding political events suggests that the rewards of their actions will
gradually follow them to wherever they go; that is, if it hasn’t started
already.
Let us take an instance that happened in Kano-a state
where the former and current governors are at loggerheads, last year as an
example. An official of the state’s radio corporation was reported to have been
suspended simply for mistakenly or may be deliberately playing a political song
praising the former governor, Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso. The camp of the former
governor widely publicized and bitterly complained about the incident as
injustice and witch hunt. Of course it is, but they have forgotten that, it was
their hero who laid the foundation for the radio station to operate as a
puppet. During his first term as governor, between 1999 to 2003, Kwankwaso
turned the state radio station into his personal toy of transmitting sycophancy.
That was how the station has been shaped over the last 16 years; their duty is
to serve the interest of the governor first and then may be or may be not, the
people second.
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The current governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike is complaining
almost on daily basis on how operatives of the Nigerian Police, military and the
DSS are ‘harassing’ him and his government. However, he has basically forgotten
how between 2013 to 2015, he was reported to have actively participated or even
masterminded the deployment of same operatives he is now complaining about in
making the state virtually ungovernable for his predecessor. So far, he has not
received arguably up to 10% of the treatment he and his paymasters allegedly
meted against his immediate predecessor, but he has forgotten in a hurry how
the unprofessionalism and partisanship of the Nigerian security operatives was
taken to an unprecedented low in Rivers State during the time of the government
he served.
Today, Rotimi Amaechi on the other hand is still
licking his wounds over how the Rivers State 2015 gubernatorial elections were
widely acclaimed to have been violently rigged and how his anointed and beloved
candidate was brutally deprived of the chance to succeed him. Amaechi must
still be having a tough time accommodating Wike as governor, but he has
forgotten that Rivers is one of those states in Nigeria who are believed not to
have had any meaningful free and fair election since after 1999. Most importantly,
he has forgotten the central role he and his then PDP played in turning the
state in particular and the south-south region in general into a notorious PDP
rigging territory. Why will he and his candidates be immune to the system he
helped built?
Some State Houses of Assemblies were easily used to
impeach or threaten state governors especially between 2005 to 2014. However,
what many people forgot is that it was those state governors who trained and
forced the state legislators to be rubber-stamps, dependent, inefficient and
corrupt. Governors removed the speakers of these assemblies at will. Little did
they know that such assemblies that always do their bidding would one day be
used by a superior authority against them, since they are trained not to be
independent but to obey orders right from start? Many governors have complained
of betrayal by their successors, but in essence, it is not their successors
that are betraying them, it is the system that they bequeath to them that is
haunting them. While out of office, many of them will criminalize in others
what they themselves earlier legalized while in office.
The former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar have been
muscled out of one presidential contest after another since 2007, many a time
not because he wasn’t a good or even the best candidate, but because the
bulldozing system he helped built between 1999-2007 have now outgrown him. Now
that he wants to enjoy transparency and fairness in electoral contests, the
former system which once made him an object of worship won’t allow it.
The Nigerian political terrain is replete with many
similar examples. It is evident that those who were in the position of
leadership across all political parties between 1999 to 2015 didn’t do justice
to our political system. Many of them have become victims of the system, others
will sooner or later be, but the question is that, are they learning any lesson
at all?
Senator George Akume at one time was possibly the most
powerful politician in Benue State. He governed the state under PDP for 8 years
between 1999 to 2007, but by mid-2008 he has almost been relegated to the
trenches in the power game primarily by the man he helped installed as successor
in collaboration with other forces. The same Akume who was once as big if not
bigger than the PDP itself was forced and humbled out of the party. He joined the
defunct opposition ACN and by 2013, when the APC was formed, Akume was a force
to reckon with again and among the most powerful opposition figures in the
North Central zone. How did he use his new power? He reportedly used it to
force a gubernatorial candidate on the APC in his state, a candidate who just
joined the party from PDP, days or hours before the APC primaries. Senator
Akume has forgotten what this type of action in 2007 caused him.
Weeks ago, the PDP caucus in the Senate staged a
walkout, because the Senate President refused to declare the seat of their
colleague from Ondo State who decamped to APC because of the on-going
Makarfi-Sheriff debacle, vacant. They have forgotten that it was their party
who protected all those who illegally decamped to their fold in the past. Today it is the once might PDP leaders that
are complaining about the Nigerian police oppressing them and subjecting them
to humiliation asking them to seek for permission whenever they organize even
the most minor of gatherings. Return them back to power tomorrow, they will not
learn any lesson. Few years ago, it was the APC leaders (formerly in
opposition) that were the victims of the police impunity and bias, two years
into their tenure, they don’t deem it fit to address the issue.
We are no longer asking our politicians to fear God or
to fear the hereafter, neither are we asking them to fear us the voters; we are
asking them to fear the consequences of their actions. While we congratulate
the PDP for reaping the fruits of the kind of political system they helped put
in place, we caution the APC to remember posterity and reform the system now if
not for the good of we the citizens but for the good of their own unknown and
uncertain future.
Twitter: @AmirAbdulazeez
