Bola Bolawole

By Bolanle Bolawole

“A people who elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims… but accomplices” – George Orwell.

“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then, it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, ex-United States of America president.

By the time you are reading this, the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), would have made or marred itself in Port-Harcourt, venue of its national convention slated to have held yesterday. If the convention is not postponed, and if it is not scuttled, the party would have elected or selected its presidential flag bearer in the all-important 2019 presidential election to face the incumbent, President Muhammadu Buhari, who is seeking a second term in office on the platform of his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). The general consensus is that PDP must get its national convention right before the Nigerian people can see it as a serious party in serious contention for the presidency in 2019. It is bad enough the needless controversy that attended the choice of Port-Harcourt as venue of the PDP convention, it will be worse if the party flounders in Port-Harcourt. The only good thing that must happen to PDP and to conscionable Nigerians is for the opposition party to have a good outing in Port-Harcourt. The convention must be credible. There must be level-playing ground for all the aspirants and the officials and party leaders must not abridge the rights of anyone or manipulate the system. Internal democracy must be allowed to flourish and “consensus” candidacy must not be forced or imposed. Delegates must have the good and patriotic sense to elect a candidate that Nigerians will be able to identify with; a candidate with credibility that voters will be willing to rally round; a candidate with few bags and baggage; and a candidate that can truly lead the party to battle in 2019. Three things are involved here: The candidate; the process of his emergence; and the after-effects of his emergence. Will vote-buying, which has marred recent governorship elections in Ondo, Ekiti, and Osun states, rear its ugly head at the PDP convention? Will party leaders scuttle internal democracy as was brazenly done in the Lagos APC governorship primaries? And, finally, will the party still remain the same after the convention or will it be “to your tents, O Israel? These are the indices that will determine the success or otherwise of the PDP national convention.

We must all take interest because vibrant opposition is fulcrum of democracy. For democracy to thrive, the people must have credible alternatives to choose from. Without choices, freely made, there can be no democracy. Of course, processes determine outcomes. Scriptures ask us the rhetorical question of what can the righteous do if the foundation be destroyed? The foundation of a house or thing is indispensable. The bane of our democracy since 1999 when the Fourth Republic began has been foundational problems. The departing military erected the Fourth Republic on crooked foundations and imposed crooked minds to chaperon it. We all saw the outcome. Since then, even the best of efforts – by Umaru Yar’Adua and to some extent Goodluck Jonathan – to built imposing political edifice on that faulty foundation have floundered. When we thought our elections were getting cleaner, it was then the APC/Buhari administration arrived the scene to set us back many decades. Today in this country, we have no political parties in the real sense of the word but mere platforms which the politicians use and dump at their fancy. Eisenhower is right: What parades as political parties here are mere “conspiracies to seize power” Most of those who gallivant all over the place as “Honourables” and whom we call “His Excellency” are nothing more that vile conspirators and brigands whose goal is seizing power to pursue personal and selfish agendas. That is why, rather than move forward, we have only marched backward; there is so much blood-letting in the country; corruption eats deeper under the “watchful” eyes of an administration purportedly fighting corruption; and, today, Nigeria is the poverty capital of the entire world. But we delude ourselves if we say the leaders only are to blame; for the followers are also equally guilty. Orwell, too, is right: A people who continually sell their votes; who acquiesce to be used as political thugs; who, like biblical Esau, sell their birthright for a mess of pottage; and who salute and pay homage to their oppressors are not victims but accomplices. They are accessories after the fact of the crime being committed by the political class. Take, for instance, the shenanigans that played out in Lagos: Why was the former Gov. Clement Ebri election panel so conscienceless and spineless? Why the outrageous audacity from the Asiwaju Bola Tinubu camp? Why did the entire APC apparatus bow to this monumental pervasion and corruption? Why did the long-suffering Lagosians support as well as applaud the atrocities? Why did Gov.  Akinwunmi Ambode complain and rise up against a crooked system that brought him to power in the first place? And why now is grinning Babajide Sanwo-Olu not mindful of the fact that his own turn to weep and moan and gnash the teeth is also down the road? According to the Yoruba adage “pasan t’a fi na iyaale n be l’odede fun iyawo” What goes around comes around. Oh yes; it comes back to you!

When commonsense is not common

Nigeria is one country where commonsense appears not to be common. Otherwise, the minimum wage issue would not have degenerated into a crippling strike action before commonsense prevailed. Agitations and negotiations for a new minimum wage had been on for a long time; in fact, predating the APC/Muhammadu Buhari administration. And Buhari has been in office three-and-half years. Yet, nothing concrete was achieved all this while until Labour called its members out on a nation-wide strike. I could not collect my reading glasses and those of my boy from the Lagos State Teaching Hospital, Ikeja because they were on strike. The discomfiture of continuing to manage with a pair of glasses whose vision is impaired is better imagined than felt. My boy also had to manage without any, even though he was writing the GCE examination. While mine could have been mere discomfiture and my son’s just a disadvantage in an examination, only God knows how many lives were lost to the strike as a result of medical workers’ withdrawal of services. Does that mean anything to our government and society at large? Life is cheap here; no thanks to Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen. We – all of us and not government alone – have developed a thick skin to news and occurrences of deaths and calamities. We take them in our strides and life continues as usual. Statisticians will try but it is going to be practically impossible to put one’s finger on the actual cost in Naira and Kobo of the strike action. The man-hours lost cannot but negatively impact an economy that recently only barely managed to get out of recession and which is still comatose. The strike is said to have been called off but no one is sure whether it will not resume again. Here, strikes usually are on-and-off. Government enters into memorandum of understanding with strikers just to deceive them to call off the strike, only for it to renege on agreements reached. In fact, most strikes here are as a result of reneged agreements. The minimum wage issue is not going to be easy to negotiate. Governments that cannot faithfully pay a minimum  wage of N18,000 as at when due are being asked to pay a wage three or four times higher. Granted that unbridled corruption and misplaced priorities partly account for why governments cannot pay wages, there is no denying the fact that this country is not as wealthy as we usually deceive ourselves to believe. The resources are simply not there to pay huge wages and still provide infrastructure at the level required. What is spent on recurrent expenditure, which is huge at the moment, will balloon further with wage rise. A tiny percentage of the population gobbles more than 80% of the total budget of the State. This cannot but be sure recipe for disaster. We postpone Doom’s Day if nothing concrete is done to redress the anomaly. The make-beliefs in the system that we operate at the moment are simply not sustainable.

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is preparing for its own nationwide strike and university academic calendar may be thrown into a tail-spin again. Except for the last few years of respite, ASUU had become synonymous with debilitating strikes that have ridiculed the university system and thrown the academic calendar in jeopardy. As a result, many higher institutions lost whole semesters and sessions. Many are still struggling tooth and nail to recover lost grounds. If another long-drawn strike results from the warning signal from ASUU, then, the gains of the recent past will be lost; more disruption in the University system will ensue and everyone will be the loser – parents, students, and the society at large. Unfortunately, the major protagonists, being the strikers and government, usually escape unscathed. Workers who go on strike usually get paid for work not done; they make sure they force this condition into whatever agreement that will make them call off their strike action. As for government officials who do not patronise our schools or hospitals, they lose nothing if such institutions close down for months on end. ASUU has had uncountable number of Memoranda of Understanding with government. One MOU after another has been negotiated and renegotiated ad nauseam. The problem is in interpretation, made deliberately so, as well as in implementation. Here, our leaders enter into agreements just to buy time and gain some respite. Once normalcy returns, they find one excuse or the other to renege. Counting the cost of strikes – and taking concrete steps to avoid them – takes place only where commonsense is common.

If commonsense is common, APC will not, with eyes wide open, be taking on the arrogance and audacity of NPN of yore, seeing how badly the latter crashed in 1983. Commonsense not being common is why PDP boasted it would rule for 60 years but crashed after just 16. Because commonsense is not common in these climes, APC’s aura of invincibility as well as impunity today far outstrips PDP’s.  If commonsense is common Ekiti PDP will not first scatter its own house and, in so doing, empower its opponent to leverage on that to steal its mandate; after which it began putting the same house in order again. That’s shutting the stable after the horse had bolted. In Osun, the same PDP lacerated its nose to spite its face. If commonsense is common will they rubbish Iyiola Omisore only to later crawl back to him begging for his help to win the rerun? I hope Omisore himself counted the costs before embarking on the path he toed. For someone still struggling to live down the politics of Bola Ige’s murder, adding the opprobrium of a villain will not come cheap on the long run. Omisore’s media team has to come up with a narrative that will paint him as the victim and not a villain for him to remain relevant in Osun politics. If commonsense is common, PDP and Gov. Nyesom Wike of Rivers State will not wash their dirty linen in public before eventually “amicably” settling the controversy over the venue of their national convention. The intemperate statement credited to Wike – his threat to teach his party a lesson if the venue was shifted from Port-Harcourt – damaged both Wike and PDP and got people thinking whether these are the characters that can be trusted to come to the rescue. If commonsense is common we will not be witnessing the self-immolation taking place in Lagos APC. The godfathers are not applying wisdom and the estranged godson is bent on going for broke. By the time you read this, the scuffle may have been won and lost but the dust it has thrown up, and will still throw up, would not have settled. In fact, it is not likely to settle in a hurry and Lagos APC may never remain the same again. This is the kind of battle whose beginning we know but the end of it may be difficult to predict. If commonsense continues to elude Lagos APC, then, someone will win the battle of party primaries but the actual war lies ahead. The damage that has been done with the disclosures already in the public domain – and the many more that will likely surface – may eventually prove that commonsense is a scarce commodity in Lagos APC. (First published, with slight modification, in my “Treasures” column of Wednesday, 3 October, 2018 on the back page of the New Telegraph newspaper).

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