We are all most likely still aware of this old but still very interesting theory of global politics which says that great powers constitute and are constituted by a tragedy because, no matter how hard they try, they cannot get out of the tragedy of fighting each other and self-destructing. They just have to because they are scared stiff of each other, no matter how harmless and good intentioned the other might be.
This is the basis of the prediction that it is a matter of time before the US and China clash dangerously, similar to how Germany and Japan clashed with the subsisting world orders in the early Twentieth –century, leading to the First and Second World Wars. The only exception in recent history has been Britain and the US and this happened because Britain’s resistance to the German challenge to its world leadership got it to a where the US became a benefactor. It is a scary prediction which could come true although over which we do not have to panic because that is just one and there are other countless theories, each with its own different claims about how relationship between the US and China, the two great powers of today, would play out. Now, as with great powers and tragedy, so it seems with dominant parties and crash landing out of power, given what has happened to historically dominant parties across the world recently.
Symbolised by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, (PRI) in Mexico whose own loss of power has been the subject of an interesting book, titled Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective, the trend has moved across Asia and Africa. The India National Congress which has existed since 1885, controlling much of Indian politics since Independence in 1947 can be said to have finally lost power in the 2014 elections. Its ability to come back rests in speculation. The liberal Democratic Party in Japan would fall in here but its own is slightly different in that it has since successfully staged a come-back.
The ANC of South Africa doesn’t fit in here because, although it has a his- tory of over 100 years behind it, much of it was in the bush. It is only since 1994 they have been learning statecraft. And it has not crashed out of power yet. Situated within this typology of dominant parties, it is debatable if Nigeria’s People’s Democratic Party, (PDP) would fit. But it fits as a dominant party crashing out of power by the nature of its self-construction as a ‘Great Party’, a discourse which corresponded significantly with the idea of Nigeria as a great country that we took for granted until we were rudely confronted by the turbulence of 1985 – 1998. So, when the PDP came with the idea of people, democracy and party, there was something great about it. It also lent credence to its potentials when one looked at the structural innovations built into it, with particular reference to the Board of Trustees, to be composed of individuals whose stature and pedigree would be such that no president of Nigeria could contemplate, much less intimidate, individually and collectively, should he or she begin to think of power in a manner antithetical to ‘people, democracy and party’.
This is not to talk of the fact that it rose in revolt against a lethal regime and, by implication, started as a radical movement to the extent of that origin. To this we add the fact that six of the original seven rebels who gave birth to the party were politicians of the broad left, those who gave substance to the Second Republic. I am referring to people like Solomon Lar, Bola Ige, Abubakar Rimi, Iyorchia Ayu, Sule La- mido and Jerry Gana before they merged with Adamu Ciroma, Francis Ella and eventually Dr. Alex Ekwueme to commence their opposition to Abacha. This had started under the innocuous platform they called ‘The Institute of Civil Society’ under which auspice Professor Akin Mabogunje delivered a powerful conceptualisation of Nigeria as a society undergoing triple transitions in her journey from neo-feudalism to modernity in February 1998.
The Punch published the lecture in full. Abacha regime did not know or did not show it understood what was building up. Buoyed up by that, the group approached Dr Alex Ekwueme to assume the leadership. His qualification was that, in the absence of Shehu Shagari who had quit politics, he was the next person on the line if anyone was talking about bringing back democracy. Alex Ekwueme wanted proof of commitment to the idea instead of falling prey to people or an idea that might as well be Abacha’s. It was commonsensical. That request for an assurance that the fledging PDP was not a cover for Abacha and, by extension, a northern thing was what gave rise to the G-18 which delivered an explosive warning against self-succession addressed to General Abacha early 1998.
It was to be G-19, meaning one person from each state of the north but one per- son raised questions and dropped off. After the letter, Dr Ekwueme was convinced it was not a ploy and, from there, things gathered pace as it metamorphosed into the G-34 and then the PDP. An equally very interesting feature of the PDP is that it came into existence with a party school which, tragically, assumed the character of the party after the larger tragedy in early 1999 when Obasanjo consciously and in a very determined manner, divorced the PDP he met from its roots immediately he became the president. It was probably understandable for him to do that. He certainly found himself sitting on a chair whose features he had no idea how they mapped unto each other.
Having made up his mind to dump the idea of stabilising the polity and quitting the state for the return of the other members of the cohort, he was bound to re-arrange the PDP. Whether he had no better ideas of how to achieve restructuring the party is what I would not stretch this discussion into given my enhanced rating of Obasanjo’s recent politics. Anyway, he started a process of reconfiguring the party quite early. In this, many groups and individuals suffered but the ‘radicals’ must have suffered the most. Radicals in Nigeria have a problem with consolidating power, even if we cite just the case of Balarabe Musa in the Second Republic and Kayode Fayemi in the current Republic.
In both cases, overwhelming oppositional advantages seemed to explain loss of power, the kind of stuff that makes you wonder if they ever heard of a guy called Castro. In the case of Fayemi, the rigging video that came out afterwards tend to absolve him but rigging was not the initial or original story for his loss of power. Originally, it was the stomach infrastructure analogy. Anyway, in the case of the PDP, the radicals did not even manage to latch on as a group. Solomon Lar, the arch party builder and inaugural National Chair- man was eased out quickly. Rimi, the most colourful of the lot lost out too. Lamido did well on the job but a foreign affairs minister is basically someone on exile. Jerry Gana was made the inau- gural minister of Integration in Africa. It was a position too nebulous and too unstrategic for him, because no one else suffered as much for the PDP as Jerry Gana. In the formative years, he served as messenger, typist, tea boy, secretary and whatever else you can think of.