By Adagbo Onoja
The frightening powerlessness of all the centres of power in Nigeria in facing down equally frightening indicators of the catastrophic compels us to be interested in any and every proposition about how to reverse the national misfortune. Those who have never encountered, slept with nor died from one form or the other of generalised insecurity may not accept a catastrophic understanding of the current state of insecurity. But they live in denial because only a false sense of safety may blind anyone to the truism that much of the rural areas are not within the control of the Nigerian State, including rural or sub-urban Abuja.
As early as 2019, General Abdulsalami Abubakar drew the attention of Nigerians to the challenge to state authority in the rural areas. On the face of it, it did not mean much. But there is a deeper message in that warning for anyone who deconstructed him. And it is that all cases of collapse of any society in history is preceded by seizure of the rural areas, first and foremost. The military is obviously aware of this and hence the phenomenon of military deployment in deep rural areas across the country today. In some of those places, no life at all is possible without the presence of troops. The Nigerian Police also knows. But does the police have what it takes to undercut such experts in irregular warfare? The police does not which is not to say they are doing nothing. The point is that an unusual level of insecurity is enveloping Nigeria. In other not to create panic, the Police takes the option of telling everyone that it is on top of the situation instead of amplifying the threat level as an alibi for invoking extra-security measures without which it cannot reverse the adversity.
The late Julius Nyerere
The foregone is the basis of interest in Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s recent announcement of a party school for the Nigeria’s ruling party. It is, according to him, to be called Institute for Progressive Studies (IPS). Uhmm! It is a very good case of better late than never. Otherwise a party without a party school is akin to calling a building a hospital even when it has not a single medical doctor.
Most of the things happening upside down in Nigeria today would not be happening if the parties have proper party schools which act as its radar. It must be awareness of that which made the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to, unlike the APC, arrive on the scene with a party school. But they did not anticipate that an Obasanjo would simply replace the party school with himself as the source of wisdom for the party, notwithstanding the absurdity of a candidate of the party functioning as well as the leader of the party.
Interestingly, neither the PDP nor the other parties have been able to do away with that culture. Even former president, Muhammadu Buhari who pretended not to like Obasanjo’s style and promised to make history by outshining Obasanjo in performance had no problems inheriting and enjoying that status throughout his eight years in power. President Tinubu who also never agrees with Obasanjo has, similarly, not done away with the uniquely Obasanjo absurdity. Nigeria, we hail thee!
So, it will be a great news should any of the existing parties build a party school, provided any such party extends its gaze far and wide enough in terms of the different models of party schools. Should they do that, a party school can become the saving grace in this slow motion to cataclysm in Nigeria because a party school should, ideally, be the engine room of the party and, therefore, of governance. It is the inventor and explainer of the doctrines, the incubation centre for party leaders as well as cadres, it is the coordinator of cooperative works with other parties across the world and purveyor of democracy as an instrument of Nigerian foreign policy. Oh yes. There are damned many things a proper party school can do for a country.
What all the above lead to is the witticism as to who knows if it is not the absence of proper party schools in Nigeria that explains why Nigerians, more than any other countries one can think of, are happy clapping at their own humiliation by embracing some of the things we embrace without any sense of reflexivity.
One of it could be the concept of democracy. Ask most of our legislators and leading politicians today what democracy refers to, you will get nothing more than the problematic notion about democracy as government of the people by the people for the people. But who are the people? There was a time slaves were not people and were not covered by democracy if defined as above. There was a time women were not considered as people and were not covered by democracy in the above definition. Up till today, blacks are grudgingly regarded as people and are more or less spectators of the democracy game in both the hubs of liberal democracy in the world as well as in their own countries.
By his theory of ‘culture is destiny’, he meant that any understanding of democracy that is not cultural is nonsensical. A very powerful argument
This can only have been possible because, unlike women who have questioned democracy and inserted themselves as its core, blacks, especially those in Africa, have not adequately done so. It is therefore, possible to say that without an African conceptual framework of democracy, democracy has been an antithesis on the continent. While one must agree that the intelligent African leaders who started or could have advanced an African equivalent of the Asian debate on democracy were all eliminated quite early, leaving the stage for the Emperor Jean Bedell Bokassas and Field Marshal Idi Amins, it is also important to note that most of them were too consumed by the one-party state phenomenon to tolerate a party school. Gaddafi’s exceptionalism in this regard is too singular to be generalisable at this point that we still do not know the balance between its merits and contradictions.
Yet, democracy, like any other words, is an empty signifier. What does anyone do to what is empty? You fill it. Africans have not filled democracy to reflect its own geo-cultural specificities, mainly because Africa’s Others have filled and handed it to Africa. Without debate and critique under dictators and autocrats, Africans have not been able to face down democracy and bring out anything original. Debate and re-interpretation is what party schools, like think tanks, ought to have been doing. Unlike think tanks even when they are state owned, party schools have direct access to government when the party is in power.
It is not surprising that there is not a single African country on the list of the countries covered by Fareed Zakaria’s ‘rise of the rest’. Those who want to know what ‘rise of the rest’ refers to can go and observe the international airport at Doha as one example. The grandeur of that airport and the nationalism cum patriotism of its masterminds dwarfs everyone.
In this regard, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo is absolutely right when he said recently that democracy is the antithesis of progress in Africa. He must have stopped the articulation because he must have perceived that he runs a risk of being charged with being up to something if he continued like that. Otherwise, he got it completely right even as debatable as it is if he is the right person to say so after consuming the democratic item on the menu for eight long years during which he left Nigeria with nothing more than the do-or-die electoral mentality and Keke NAPEP at a time East Asians and Arabs were shaking logocentrism. But Obasanjo is a difficult person to dismiss on all these things. His interrogation of democracy at this point is one of the reasons. If he has philosophers by which I mean serious philosophers, they will further problematise that argument about democracy to his credit.
The African experience contrasts with the Asian experience. As early as the mid-1970s, the Asians had advanced a notion of democracy original to it. The unambiguous Asian spokesman for this is no other than the remarkable Singaporean leader, Lee Kuan Yew. He alone made three important statements. First, he told The Economist of London in an interview that liberal democracy is unsuitable for a country when it is on the bend trying to transit from agrarian polity to an industrial polity. He gave the example of India and Philippines, two Asian countries that ‘opted’ for democracy and didn’t go anywhere in terms of the rapid modernisation that the Asian Tigers achieved.
Empirically, it is an unbeatable argument although his critics said it was a manifesto for authoritarianism. Perhaps a justifiable authoritarianism because what he said in that interview is that democracy is not possible in such situations because it involves transferring agricultural surpluses from peasants to the industries, a process that must employ disciplined callousness somehow because peasants will resist.
His second statement came in an interview with Fareed Zakaria in which he said many years before Huntington talked about “clash of Civilisations” that ‘culture is destiny’. While I cannot give the reference for the interview with The Economist off head, the interview with Fareed Zakaria is freely downloadable. In it, he explained why his government was not an anti-thesis of democracy in dealing harshly against spitting on the streets, people who consumed or sold cocaine or traded in fake drugs.
One of the few African interrogation of democracy
His third statement on democracy was his rejection of any of the existing models of redistribution then which were capitalism, socialism and the welfare system. He criticised each one of them and came up with the Fair system. It is his definition of the Fair system that one can see originality and statesmanship in him. He was absolutely sensitive to the dangers of an unfair society, of the danger that those who are unfairly treated could pose to social stability.
Of course, the Chinese have raised the stakes on democracy even higher by going ahead to insist that even its version of socialist democracy can only be with ‘Chinese characteristics’. It is either has not read widely enough or one is too young in these matters to find the African equivalent of such deep interrogation of democracy as in Asia.
The Arabs are serving their people better than the Africans through a system that nothing stops us from calling monarchical democracy. Most Arabs do not vote in periodic elections but they get dividends of citizenship in contrast to Africans who spend billions conducting elections but only to run to monarchies such as Saudi Arabia or UAE or China for medical tourism without any sense of embarrassment.
It is worth pointing out though that it is not every party school that can help out. A party school can equally be a useless institution. A lot will depend upon the party mandarins and their acceptance of a party school as a necessary evil. This is what brings about the Nyerere imperative.
The late Dr Julius Nyerere of Tanzania is about the only known African leader to temporarily leave office for the sake of building the party. The story as I have heard it from a senior African citizen repeatedly is that, worried by indicators of decay and the prospects of elected politicians taking the voters for granted in the event of relatively big money, pretty ladies and choice wine in Dares es Salaam, Nyerere had to do something. He was worried that the party was heading for a wreckage if those young cadres who won only because they stood on the legacy of the party thought nothing of service to the people beyond the pleasures of their offices in Dar es Salaam.
So, he found time to move around to correct that possibility by ensuring that each cadre won his election. Nyerere did not like the regular election because he didn’t like the competition and bitterness or the do – or- die ideology behind it. So, he organised a completely different kind of election which brought any cadres embarrassing defeat in his ward if he was the type that had shown that the people didn’t matter as much as good life in Dares es Salaam after victory.
One cannot say how much of this is still the case in Tanzanian politics today. If it is filled with less and less of charlatans and charlatanism compared to other parts of Africa, we must trace that to the party building works Nyerere did decades ago. That is where the Nyerere imperative comes from as a condition of possibility for Ganduje’s party school gambit, especially if we call it the Progressive Party Institute (PPI) rather than Institute of Progressive Studies (IPS). The party school idea is one of the issues several speakers canvassed at the presentation of Salihu Lukman’s recent book on the APC. There is something impressive in Dr Ganduje’s ability to reframe the ideas canvassed quickly into an item in the agenda of APC politics. Of course, a party school can be worth it because it can produce very positive outcomes quickly if …
