EDITORIAL: To save Nigeria’s democracy, opposition parties need urgent reset

Opposition political parties in the country are being buffeted by intra-party wrangling, which takes the wind out of their sail. By and large, they are self-inflicted wounds that weaken not just the parties, but democracy itself. When vibrant opposition takes flight in a democracy, what is left is no more than a silhouette, which is worthless.

Entrapped in this maelstrom are the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) that rattled the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC in the 2023 presidential election. The New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) has also joined the mix.

The fight for the control of the soul of these parties has factionalised them. As such, their leaderships preoccupy themselves with how to survive, rather than putting the APC-led government on its toes as the opposition, through constructive criticisms or offering policy alternatives to citizens. Sadly, only one outcome could emerge from such a milieu: the gradual but steady making of the APC into a one-party dictatorship in Nigeria. It is a dangerous drift that should be halted at all costs.

In the PDP, one camp is loyal to the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, while the other is on the side of a former Vice President and its presidential candidate in 2023, Atiku Abubakar. Matters came to a head penultimate week when a splinter group within the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) suspended its Acting National Chairman, Umar Damagun, and National Secretary, Samuel Anyanwu, for alleged anti-party activities. Both are suspected surrogates of Wike. A counter-suspension of the National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, and National Legal Adviser, Kamaldeen Ajibade, for disloyalty was swift, having masterminded the Damagun suspension.

It took an immediate injunction of the Federal High Court, Abuja, to nullify the chairman’s suspension, for a semblance of normalcy to return to the party. Damagun took over from Iyorchia Ayu, following his suspension from his ward in Benue State last year. This marked a point of no return for him.

The PDP’s orgy of self-nihilism has been its reward for jettisoning the North/South sensibilities in the running of its affairs. With Atiku’s emergence as the presidential flag bearer in 2023 from the north, a southerner was required, naturally, to be the party’s national chairman – a position that Ayu from the North-Central then held and clung onto. The party’s constitution entrenches such balancing acts to avoid crises like this. But Ayu refused to see reason. This upset the apple cart, to Wike’s disbelief. He had then vowed to revolt over this lack of equity and he subsequently went on to support the APC candidate, Bola Tinubu, during the 2023 election. He also delivered the Rivers State votes to him.

For doing so, Wike was rewarded with the plum post of Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. And, he insists that his support for the president will not waver even in 2027. The Wike factor in PDP is so strong that it is telling in his home state, Rivers, where the governor, Siminalayi Fubara, is not in charge of the party structure, as evident in his use of the APP in the recent local council polls to sponsor 22 out of 23 candidates who won the chairmanship seats. This and other related matters have put the state in perpetual confusion and litigation.

A similar battle of attrition is playing out in the Labour Party, dating back to the 2023 election period. A faction headed by Lamidi Apapa even challenged the petition of Peter Obi, its presidential candidate at the Election Petition Tribunal, as he squared up with the Julius Abure-led party leadership. As Apapa exhausted all his legal challenges and lost, the party is entangled in yet another crisis.

Without conducting national ward congresses, Abure held a convention at Nnewi that returned him and his cohorts to office. Obi, Governor Alex Otti of Abia State, some of the party’s lawmakers and other LP bigwigs demurred. They have set up a 29-member caretaker committee, chaired by Nenadi Usman, to midwife a new leadership within 90 days from the 4th of September. A court decision that ratified Abure’s leadership has been appealed against by the Obi camp.

These debility sketches explain the parties’ loud silence as the APC-led government plunges the country into the abyss of economic crisis with the removal of fuel subsidy and devaluation of the naira by 43 per cent, following its floatation in the past year. Food and headline inflation, astronomical transport fares, and the exorbitant price of fuel at over N1, 300 per litre in some places, have inaugurated the worst living conditions in a generation.

The PDP and LP parties had combined total votes of 12.8 million in the last presidential election, as against Tinubu’s 8.7 million votes. This figure advertises their potential or strength to provide an alternative government if they can get their acts together with their leaders, bury their egos, personal ambitions and put the country over personal interests.

With the naira being among the three worst-performing currencies in Sub-Saharan Africa, alongside the birr of Ethiopia and the pound of South Sudan, according to a recent World Bank report, a virile opposition ought to have been offering a redemptive economic blueprint to the confusion in operation presently. Their only countervail to Tinubu’s policies are Atiku and Obi’s frequent statements, which do not go far enough, nor do they supplant those that their respective parties should have presented to show why they should be entrusted with governance, rather than the APC.

As the parties are destitute in the understanding of their roles in a democracy, so are their elected representatives in the National Assembly, who initially gave us a false sense of hope of a viable opposition. They are always nowhere to be found when the chips are down. With their combined numerical strength of 163 members in the House of Representatives – across parties such as PDP, LP, NNPP, APGA, ADC, SDP and YPP, as against 162 of the ruling APC, the later had earlier feared that it might be upstaged in the election of the leadership of the House.

We can’t figure out their robust debates and constructive filibustering so far, which steer parliaments away from being rubber stamps of the executive arm of government. It is a chasm some could easily situate within the ideological vacuity of our democracy. It is for this reason that some concerned Nigerians now advocate a new political construct, not the special purpose vehicle (SPV) that some of these parties are, for a new breed of politicians to emerge and champion a purpose-driven and altruistic democracy.

Opposition lawmakers who collected N160 million worth of Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) each, while their constituents went to bed at night with empty stomachs; parties that are dead silent in the face of mindless levels of oil subsidy scam and crude oil theft are nothing but allies of the ruling party in creating hunger in the country and its attendant mass psychosis.

For emphasis, the only committee in the National Assembly entrenched in the 1999 Constitution is the Public Accounts Committee. Conventionally, it is always headed by the opposition party to act as a check on the excesses of the party in power. But the reality is that on opposition parties’ watch, the public treasury is being routinely pillaged without consequences.

Given our national experience since 1999, Premium Times advices the opposition parties to re-evaluate their role in our democracy and borrow a leaf from the book of models in other jurisdictions and begin to retrofit. In the UK, for instance, the opposition keeps the Prime Minister in the House of Commons on his toes, with no-hold barred questions and the scrutiny of all facets of governance. This is geared towards enhancing accountability and quality service delivery.

Even in the US presidential system, from which ours is modelled, congressional debates and oversight do not give the ruling party any chance to mess up. This is why the government’s businesses are shut down, as it happened for 35 days during the Donald Trump presidency, from 22 December 2018, over budget disagreements.

In the Senate, Kawu Sumaila was recently appointed chairman of its Committee on the downstream Petroleum sector with a resounding declaration that there will be no more cover-ups in the oil industry. He is a lawmaker from Kano and his assertion is an indictment of the opposition, which ought to be the watchdog of our public treasury. He should be compelled to unpack his statement.

Off-cycle elections have continued to produce winners with some declared results being different from what INEC’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV) displayed. Election observer groups have shouted. It was one of the nightmares of the 2023 general elections. INEC is still filled up with partisans. Resolving these puzzles is the burden of a viable opposition. Shockingly, this responsibility is being shirked, thus reducing the hope for credible 2027 polls to a mere fantasy.