MAKE POLITICS HEALTHY, CLEAN
By Emmanuel Nnadozie Onwubiko
As far as politics and politicking are concerned in Nigeria, any researcher who desires a comprehensive understanding of good governance and democratic principles, should simply look up towards the British politics.
For example, a simple visit to the websites of any of the functional political parties and most especially, the Labour Party, Conservative Party, and even the newly formed Reform party, would reveal that these parties are preoccupied with explaining their core ideologies and developmental blueprints to better the lives of the British people. They are all after putting up themselves as servants of the people and not masters and power grabbers.
Each of these and many other recognisable and operationalised political parties in Great Britain, are preoccupied with ways to convince the voters that they have what it takes to make living enjoyable and to practicalise democratic process in such a way that everyone in Great Britain is not left behind.
Besides, if you have monitored either the British Broadcasting Cooperation television or the other stylish Broadcasting platform called Sky News, in the last couple of days, you must have noticed that the key political parties in Great Britain have recently held briefing sessions during which the leaders of these parties including the Prime Minister of GB who is of the Labour Party, laboured so hard to win the hearts and minds of the British public. During these public meetings, there were no exchanges of verbal diatribes or malicious accusations being hauled at each other. What dominated their times were the essential elements of their governmental or developmental blueprints.
Whereas the governing Labour Party which is incessantly criticised especially by the Conservative Party that lost election about few months back, for failures to introduce better immigration policy to keep migrants away from invading Britain, busied themselves with telling the British public that their own version of anti-immigration policies are working and that soon the crisis of immigration would be reduced to the nearest minimum.
The Conservative Party on the other hand which is the major opposition party attacked the key economic policies of the Labour Party and were not seen attacking the person of the Prime minister neither did we see the officials of the Labour Party antagonising or personally attacking the personalities of members of the party opposite. This is called healthy and clean politics characterised by clean and qualitative debates devoid of name calling and chatacter assassination.
Seeing these healthy conversations from the divergent political leanings in Great Britain, naturally brings us to the inquiry as to whether it is a doable achievement for healthy and clean politics to be practiced in my country Nigeria whereby most people think politics is a dirty game.
It is a fact that politics and politicians in Nigeria are known by the rest of the citizens as persons who lack the discipline and the grace to allow for peaceful, healthy and clean public conversations concerning the economy, security, or the wellbeing, welfare of the citizens. What Nigerians have seen their politicians do is to stoke up hate-filled rhetorics and to haul attacks on the personalities of the members of their opponents.
Whereas those of the political party controlling power at every level is busy abusing power and using the might of their offices to suppress dissenting voices.
On the side of the opposition politicians, their preoccupation is to plot in an unending fashion on how to topple the government using every available processes or at the next elections. There is never any kind of conversations by these politicians on their political party’s economic development initiatives or blueprints. The fact that state governments controlled by certain parties do everything against the rules of the clean political game to undermine their opponents, should tell us that our own kind of democracy and politics are anything but clean and healthy.
Besides, there is now the new kind of politics of domination that is in practice. The government at the centre controlled by the All Progressives Congress (APC) has started the campaign for the next election to re-elect the incumbent president even when the first four years which he was adjudged by the court to have won in the year 2023 controversial presidential poll, has only gone halfway, but the politicians in the party running the central government have jumped the gun and have kick-started the next campaign which is totally unlawful if we go by the extant provisions of the electoral Act. Sadly, since the federal government controls INEC and the law enforcement agencies, those who go against the law to engage in campaigns for the 2027 elections belonging to the All Progressives Congress are protected by the government.
And so, if you come to Abuja, you would think that the real campaigns for the year 2027 general election have started because in all of the streets of the metropolitan area of the Federal Capital Territory, the political campaign billboards and posters of president Tinubu adorn every available corners. Even the President believes that his government must be composed of only members of his political party as if to say that he is the president of only APC card carrying members. The APC have used federal might and the anti-graft agency of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to compel PDP governors to jump ship into the All Progressives Congress of president Tinubu.
The Federal minister who runs Abuja on behalf of the All Progressives Congress who claims to be a member of the Peoples Democratic Party, has made it almost impossible for any other political party aside APC to use any of the publicly built facilities to hold their meetings even when these facilities have been commercialised. Few weeks back, the FCT ministry announced that the International Conference Centre that government blew over N300 billion dubiously to renovate, is fully booked till the year 2027.
This announcement came against the backdrops of protestations by the newly formed coalition opposition party of African Democratic Congress that they are being denied of the use of public facilities. Also, a five star hotel in Asokoro suspected to be owned by a serving minister cancelled the reservation of the African Democratic Congress only few hours to the commencement of their merger Conference.
Then from Kaduna state came the information that the police have stopped the African Democratic Congress from holding their meeting even when the All Progressives Congress that governs the state hold meetings frequently without any disruption by either thugs or the police. In Lagos State, the APC government allegedly sponsored armed thugs to disrupt the meeting of the opposition ADC just as the same thing happened in Owerri Imo state whereby APC state government allegedly sponsored armed political thugs to infiltrate the Assumpta Catholic Archdiocese Cathedral and chase away the people who gathered for the annual Odenigbo public lecture just because the former governor of Kaduna State who is now in ADC Mallam Nassir El-Rufai was the guest lecturer.
The questions to ask is why should politicians continue to muddy up the political space and causing commotion? Why is it that politicians in government offices do not tolerate their opponents to freely present their programmes? Why are the politicians making the political space violent and intolerably harsh?
The case of Nigeria is distinctive because here, the Nigeria Police Force is not a neutral institution but the hierarchy owe their allegiance to the president that appointed the Inspector-General of Police in which case the police operatives are put at the services of the central government.
The situation we have found ourselves is that whereas politicians have failed to follow the fundamental principles of good governance and democratic process which simply demands accountability on their part, and then the national policing institution that is the primary enforcer of the law, takes side with the political party controlling the government from Abuja, it therefore means that armed thugs can easily be unleashed to attack opposition politicians just so they are not organised enough to contemplate winning against the party in power.
The one danger in this sort of suffocation of the public political space is that if the opposition politicians are forced to go into hiding and to mount campaigns from their hideout, then we are not all safe going by the fact that since obtaining weapons of mass destruction is as easy as passing the junior WAEC, then these opposition politicians driven underground would be left with the only option available: pay freelance armed non-state actors to work as their political Army and since the politicians in government offices have the control of the police and armed political thugs, what then happens during elections won’t be any different from a full-fledged war.
This is where we need to call a spade by its name and to ask Nigerians to wake up and smell the coffee. Nigerians have a duty to drum it up to the government at all levels, to stop the ongoing political war of the political parties before the nation is pushed into a major war during the 2027 elections.
I say this because the people who are now in the opposition were once in government and so have the right connections to the men of the underworld whom they can always call upon to be enlisted as their foot soldiers. In these warfare and tumultuous exchanges of verbal abuses by politicians both within and outside of government, no party has the monopoly of violence because from both ends, there are persons with very deadly mindsets.
A simple experiment would reveal that there are dangerous people in all of these parties in Nigeria both inside and outside of governments: the people in government are openly telling the opposition politicians that over their (government officials) dead bodies, will the opposition coalition take over government in 2027.
Similarly, the actors in the opposition political camp are also telling those of their rivals inside government that they will do everything humanly possible to kick them out of their public offices in the year 2027. So my hypothesis is this: if these people in government are so desperate to win the 2027 poll and they wield powers and influences over the military, the highly biased Nigeria Police Force and most dangerously, they control the so-called Independent National electoral commission, it means that when two elephants fight, the grass suffers.
Therefore, how then do we expect these desperate politicians in public offices to allow for free, peaceful, transparent and fair elections in 2027? Secondly, since the politicians in the opposition coalition are mostly individuals who have been in and out of government and so have access to hire the bad boys with big guns, and they are striving to dethrone the politicians holding offices who are too desperate to allow for a fair contest, what may happen would be tantamount to a civil war unless something happens to deflate these over-bloated political ambitions from both divide.
Let me provide the context that depicts the warlike political atmospherics in today’s Nigeria.
Around January 2025, the secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume, said it was not yet the turn of the north to produce Nigeria’s president in 2027, warning that to do otherwise could undermine the nation’s unity and destroy her.
He, therefore, advised the Northern interest groups to wait until 2031 before running for the presidency, with a caveat that, it was not their time to throw their hat in the ring.
Akume, who spoke as a guest on a television political progamme against the backdrop of deft political scheming and coalition by different groups with the aim to take over power from the ruling APC and succeed President Bola Tinubu in 2027, declared the current president would serve two terms of eight years.
“It is not yet time for the North. This is my appeal to them. Don’t let us destroy our country because of personal ambition. It is my advice and this has been consistent. Do not let us rock the boat.
“Let us allow this power to reside in the south for eight years and then it will come to the North. To do otherwise, honestly is to destroy this country.
“This democracy and people are entitled to their views. Again, in democracy, you always have groups springing up and forming alliance, creating movement and intending to transform them into political parties.
“The political ball, quite frankly, has started to roll and there is one group that is headed by the former governor of Kano State and the Secretary is from Benue State, Emmanuel Jume. He was a member of House of Representative before.
“People have the right to form alliances but my candid advice to my people in the North is that if you should form your alliances, make sure your candidates are from the South. Why? Because that is one thing that will guarantee our territorial integrity and unity,” he said.
Reacting, former Vice President, Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, queried the grounds of equity and fairness in Akume’s admonishment.
In a statement by his Media Adviser, Mazi Paul Ibe, he pointed out that the South has had more years on the presidential seat than the North, counting from 1999.
Atiku said, “Where, then, does true equity and fairness reside? By the year 2027, the South will have enjoyed 17 years of leadership — eight years under Obasanjo, five years under Jonathan, and four years under Tinubu — while the North will have experienced only 11 years, with Yar’Adua serving three and Buhari eight. This results in a disparity of six years between the North and South, casting a shadow over the balance of power.
“In any case, the power to elect and vote out their government lies firmly with the Nigerian people, entrusted to them upon the government’s ability to prove itself worthy of the people’s ballot. But has the Tinubu government demonstrated that it deserves to be re-elected? The answer, alas, is as clear as the heavens themselves — God forbid!”
Tinubu had defeated Atiku in the 2023 presidential election, even as the latter challenged the president’s electoral victory up to the Supreme Court which eventually affirmed Tinubu’s victory.
Also, a serving senator and former governor of Sokoto State Alhaji Aminu Tambuwal gave a television interview in which he professed that he has devoted his time to ensure that Tinubu is defeated in the year 2027 election.
Dateline: February 7, 2019, Reuters reported that a key ally of the then Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said people from overseas who sought to intervene in the country’s election to be held in little over a week then would go back in body bags.
Nasir El-Rufai, then governor of the northern state of Kaduna, made the comments during a discussion programme on the Nigerian Television Authority when the topic of the international community’s role in elections was raised. It followed an international outcry over the suspension of Nigeria’s top judge.
The discussion about the role of foreign countries in elections was raised on the programme in which reference was made to concerns expressed by the European Union, the United States and Britain over the suspension of Chief Justice Walter Onnoghen over allegedly breaching asset-declaration rules.
“We are waiting for the person who will come and intervene. They will go back in body bags because nobody will come to Nigeria and tell us how to run our country,” said El-Rufai.
“We have got that independence and we are trying to run our country as decently as possible,” he said.
That same El-Rufai is now in the same camp with Atiku in the African Democratic Congress.
So there is the balance of threats and therefore the political atmospherics and climate is that of fear because politicians wanting to retain power by all means including using crooked machinations and their rivals in the opposition political camp, are well equipped with the powerful tools of violence to try to torpedo the other to win the 2027 presidential election.
This is exactly why we are calling for a clean and healthy politics to ensure that Nigeria does not burn because of the 2027 polls. Unfortunately, those who can mediate peace are warmongers. Who bails the cat? The people of Nigeria of course.
*Emmanuel Nnadozie Onwubiko, is the founder of the HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA and was NATIONAL COMMISSIONER OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF NIGERIA.
