For the first time in the history of Nigeria, a member of a minority party, Senator David Mark, is the Majority and Minority Leader of the Senate! Under the guise of non-interference, President Muhammadu Buhari has maintained absolute neutrality in a most partisan world! Whoever emerges is his own. Fine! APC legislators-elect were left rudderless – sheep without shepherds.
By Hon. Josef Omorotionmwan
In every Election Year, the National Assembly has become the epicenter of political intrigues, particularly in filling the principal offices of both chambers.
It is commonly asserted that the Constitution reserves no role for the political parties in the composition of these offices.
This is good theory but in actual practice, the invisible hands of the political parties can be felt all through the exercise.
Indeed, only an irresponsible party leadership will remain neutral when its house is burning.
We wonder how many parents will stay aloof when some of their children are fighting. For all we know, a mother is only as happy as her saddest child.
Quite often, though, there are cases where legislators up-turn the arrangements handed down to them by their party leadership.
They do this in the name of asserting the independence of the legislature, like what happened in the ill-fated Third Republic.
Contrary to the brief that the then Edo State legislators-elect took to Abuja, not to opt for any principal office, the late Senator Albert Legogie (Edo North Senatorial District) coasted home with the position of Deputy Senate President. Back home, we celebrated what was an open defeat of our arrangement.
The current trend – the use of legislators-elect of one political party to destabilize the arrangements of an opposing party gained prominence in 2011.
Then, the defunct ACN used Hon Aminu Tambuwal (then PDP/Sokoto) to scuttle the arrangement of the PDP for the Speakership of the House of Representatives.
This is what we call Tambuwalization. Throughout the Seventh National Assembly, Tambuwal had what could pass for a split personality – he was PDP in name and in body; but for all intents and purposes, he was more ACN/APC than the National Chairman of the party.
Tambuwal was a smooth operator and a team player who played good politics of total inclusiveness with the speaker’s position.
Essentially, Tambuwalization could pass for a younger cousin of the Open Primary, which until recently, was prevalent in the US for nominating candidates for elective positions.
Parties that adopted the open primaries had an open mind that since the office being sought was one in which the occupant would serve all members of the community, it made sense for all the registered voters in that community to participate in nominating the candidate.
There was also a selfish motivation – the thinking that at the election, voters would normally vote for the person they nominated.
With time, the open primaries became injurious to the parties that adopted them. Members of an opposing political party used the avenue to nominate weak candidates that could be easily defeated at the main election – call it dumping or what you will. The open primaries have since given way to closed primaries.
For more than two months after the 2015 polls, Senator Rabiu Kwawkwaso (APC/Sokoto) was shouting to the high heavens that the National Assembly would be “Tambuwalized”.
Who cared about the premonition of an impending danger? Alas, it has happened!
What we now have is a systems failure on the part of the APC and that’s putting it mildly.
Besides ensuring that the preferred candidates of the APC did not emerge, the PDP has successfully installed Senator Ike Ekweremadu (PDP/Enugu) as the Deputy Senate President in an APC-dominated Senate!
For the first time in the history of Nigeria, a member of a minority party, Senator David Mark, is the Majority and Minority Leader of the Senate!
Under the guise of non-interference, President Muhammadu Buhari has maintained absolute neutrality in a most partisan world!
Whoever emerges is his own. Fine! APC legislators-elect were left rudderless – sheep without shepherds.
In truth, there is no neutrality in politics. If there was, it would have started from the beginning – you didn’t have to transverse the entire country, asking for the people’s votes as whoever voted would have been your own.
While APC was under the spell of neutrality, it should have realized what transpired on the PDP side – how the PDP legislators-elect were being carefully guided by the political strategists and tacticians of their party.
We leave the neutralists to wonder how hitherto sworn-enemies like David Mark and Bukola Saraki became the best of pals overnight.
The neutralists should also wait till they hear of the budgetary outlay that went into the venture on the PDP side. Neutrality, my foot!
In all this, where were the APC governors? For once you went to war without the Governors who have in their arsenal, all it takes to fight a war – superior planning and execution, strong hold on their legislators, power of the purse – and you bungled everything! What a bitter lesson in party supremacy, so called!
What type of power are we talking about? Even as a party supposedly in power, the presidency could not send an effective message across to the National Assembly that as a result of a meeting between the President and his party-men, the inauguration should hold on for a few hours?
Was this neutrality? Could it also be weakness or kindness? We have advised elsewhere that people should try pocketing a small snake out of kindness and they will soon realize that there are limits to kindness.
Evidently, the PDP over-rated the APC. If they knew that the APC leadership was as clueless as it has proved to be, nothing would have prevented them from collecting all the principal offices.
Would it not have been a question of simply hanging on to their 49 consolidated votes for a single candidate in each position while leaving the multiple APC candidates to scramble for their 59 scattered votes?
Once in a while a political party should wear its cult-like garb. Did the APC leadership have to take that mock primary to the market place?
Certain decisions are better taken after midnight when cameramen are already asleep. But the APC leadership, instead of keeping its plans in its chest pocket, preferred to address a world press conference, to expose its plans. The Financial Times of London did an editorial on this.
In all this, not much is lost. The PDP must resist the urge to keep basking in the euphoria of this Pyrrhic victory because within the strength of the deal, reside bundles of weaknesses.
Indeed, PDP may have just lost some substantial vitality, perhaps unwittingly. Tambuwal tasted APC and didn’t return to Egypt. Where is the masochism in Ekweremadu that would make him behave otherwise?
In this Buhari’s coalition government of neutrality, if Ekweremadu gets his politics right, he may as well be the very nucleus for mainstreaming the Ndigbo into the new era of change from which they had inadvertently shut the door against themselves.
For Ekweremadu and co, the court is wide and the ball is big. For now, APC must let the “lying dog sleep”. Let all those in court come home and get on with the task of developing the nation. As they say in the colloquial, nothing spoils.
Hon. Josef Omorotionmwan is a public affairs analyst and Chairman, Board of Directors, Edo Broadcasting Service. He can be reached at: joligien@yahoo.com
