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AS the battle between the All Progressives Congress (APC) national chairman and his detractors rages, some state chairmen of the party have asked President Muhammadu Buhari to intervene and coax a truce out of the combatants. They fear that if the struggle between the party’s titans festers, it could cause the ruling party to implode. On May 28, 2019, Lawal Shuaibu, the party’s deputy national chairman (North), had asked Mr Oshiomhole to resign his position for being complicit in the loss of Zamfara and four other states during the last general election. In his letter, he obviously derived his daring from the fact that APC lost five states during the last polls but gained only two — Kwara and Gombe States. Mr Shuaibu emphatically blamed Mr Oshiomhole for the loss of Zamfara to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
The APC seems today considerably complacent. If, like the PDP, it had no president to run to for resolution of conflicts, who would be its conciliator and arbitrator? Does the party not have internal conflict resolution mechanisms? The PDP is of course not without its own troubles. But having exhausted itself years ago in internecine conflicts, most of them quite needless, and suffered severe electoral losses in consequence, it has suddenly become fairly mature, a little cerebral even, and, more ominously, increasingly quiescent. In contrast, the APC has seemed louder, pampered, bad-tempered, querulous and grasping. The president has waded into the fray to help his party present a common front in the coming elections of the National Assembly’s principal officers. And he is now being called upon to find the peace formula for resolving the conflict between the party’s cantankerous leaders.
No single person can, of course, be made to shoulder the blame for the party’s loss of five states in the last state elections. Indeed, no two states share the same factors for the APC’s embarrassing dethronement. The reasons for APC’s defeat in the states of Adamawa, Oyo, Bauchi, Imo and Zamfara are as variegated as they are both internal and external. Rather than examine the reasons for their defeat in the 2019 polls and find ways to avoid a similar disaster in the next general election, party leaders, for private and other reasons, have tried to find scapegoats, with some of them seeing one in the fearsome Mr Oshiomhole. For a party that has become naturally and eternally fractious, it is hard to dissuade them from their self-destructive course. Should President Buhari wade into the fracas, it is uncertain that whatever magic wand he waves would bring a permanent solution.
After Mr Shuaibu wrote his incendiary letter to the APC chairman calling for his resignation, other party stakeholders have joined him, including the smug, self-serving and illiberal former Communications minister, Adebayo Shittu, who tries to hang the Oyo defeat on his exclusion from the state governorship poll. Grandiose and full of himself, Mr Shittu even tries to put down the loss of Oyo State suffered by the defunct Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) in 1983 to the conspiratorial manner he was denied the senatorial ticket in that election. He accused UPN leaders of collusion and despotism, just like, in his view, Mr Oshiomhole.
Even former APC chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, has found his voice after what everyone sees as his disgraceful exit last June. Buoyed by the rising opposition to Mr Oshiomhole, Chief Odigie-Oyegun has vengefully waded into the party fracas by doing a very unsavoury character portrait of his successor. Said he: “Oshiomhole fails because he lacks the temperament that is required to run a political party. He lacks the capacity to manage the different interests and tendencies that constitute a political party. He acts in direct opposite of decisions taken by NWC. No minutes of NWC meetings which, in any event, take place outside the party secretariat. How would you not have crises in states with the confusion that Oshiomhole created when he gave the states freedom to choose their methods of choosing candidates for elections? Much of the crises in states arose out of sheer incapacity on the part of the current chairman…He (Oshiomhole) engages his mouth before engaging his mind, so he offends party members. Only a bad carpenter quarrels with his tools. Indeed Oshiomhole is degrading and ‘demarketing’ the party. Rather than seek to bring more people on board, he is chasing people out of the party with his agbero style of engagement.”
But, contrary to what Chief Odigie-Oyegun thinks, there is nothing to suggest that Mr Oshiomhole has failed. The party chairman is under ferocious and relentless attack, and is portrayed by some party members and leaders as intemperate and impulsive. But no one among his detractors has shown conclusively that he is ineffective, a weakling, or a leadership failure. In fact, as party chairman, he has managed the re-election of President Buhari, kept the party’s majority in the states by 20 to the PDP’s 16, has a firm control of the National Assembly, and if the party plays its cards right, will have an even firmer control of the NASS leadership. The party may be instinctively fractious, but it has continued to keep a semblance of unity, a unity that appears to be anchored on unaccustomed internal discipline. The APC may not be as ideological as it has boasted for years, but under its new chairman it is less conservative and reactionary today than it has ever been. These gradual and indeed salutary shifts are in large measure due to Mr Oshiomhole’s intuitive and iconoclastic approach to politics. Undoubtedly, the party chairman still has a lot to learn, and has an even greater distance to go in reforming his often scabrous approach to politics, but he has not degraded the party like Chief Odigie-Oyegun did.
In the face of the blistering attacks on Mr Oshiomhole, the APC spokesman, Lanre Issa-Onilu, rose spiritedly to his defence, particularly denouncing the former chairman for crass insincerity. Said he: “Let me agree that the NWC that led the party into the 2015 elections and continued till June 2018 did nothing different from what you would find in PDP. It was a period the party was seen as a mere vehicle to attain political office. The system accommodated impunity as certain members appeared to be superior to the party. Their interests were far more important than the collective interests of the APC, even when most times such interests are at variance with the ideals the party stand for…” He continued: “The leadership under Chief Oyegun, with due respect to him, condoned all sorts of acts of indiscipline from certain members. It is not surprising that the current National Working Committee inherited such a huge mess, where the party was struggling to differentiate itself from the delinquent PDP. We all know that PDP was practically dead following the devastating defeat of 2015. The PDP bounced back not because the party has changed its insidious way or did anything different, but because APC did not live up to expectations. It goes without saying that when an organisation is unable to enforce its own rules, it would suffer the consequences sooner than later. We should not be ashamed to say that our party’s leadership under Chief Oyegun lacked the courage required to confront the pockets of political despots who could not operate by the party’s rules…”
The ongoing misunderstanding within the APC may turn out to be a storm in a teacup. Whether the president intervenes or not, Mr Oshiomhole is likely to survive this gale. But his enemies are unlikely to relent. His imposing style, which the party needs to restore normality and discipline, will grate on those who prefer a softer, more indulgent approach to party administration. And because Mr Oshiomhole is unlikely to moderate his stand, not to say his style, enemies will proliferate under him until one of the combatants blinks first. One of the dire consequences of Mr Oshiomhole’s affirmative handling of the party is the concomitant loss of influence by governors. That powerful but unconstitutional body is unlikely to give up its obtruding ways having themselves tasted the allure of power and imposition.
If the APC is to survive in the years to come, it must rely paradoxically on Mr Oshiomhole’s strong-arm approach to party administration. The party is at the moment disunited, hesitant, and lacking in savvy and conviction. They must find and imbibe the virtues of a strong and cohesive political organisation faster than the PDP is reforming, if they are not to come to grief in 2023. The president must also not allow himself to be cajoled into aborting that refining process simply because some interested but aggrieved officials are reading to him a different and frightening narrative.
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