Towards a true ‘party of change’ for Nigeria by Gbogun Gboro

  Recently, I wrote that Nigeria does not want another mega-party, but a true party of change. I added that our politicians who had recently tried to create a party of change, though they had put enormous good intensions, energy and resources into the effort, had made crucial mistakes, including the mistake of not negotiating thoroughly with groups inside the group. Since then, I have given some more thoughts to this matter.
First and foremost, a true party of change must be a party of ideas and programmes. Its agenda must state clearly how the Nigerian federation will be restructured, and
what the principles, process and time-table for restructuring will be. It must include programmes for change in all sectors of the Nigerian economy (modern agriculture, rural development, modern job skills development, entrepreneurial development, infrastructural development, educational improvement and expansion, small business development, business assistance programmes, export promotion, urban renewal, fiscal policy, cast-iron protection for public treasuries and bank accounts, systematic inclusion of the Nigerian Diaspora in Nigerian development, etc). It must include protection of the integrity of various regulatory agencies (Police, Electoral Commission, Judiciary, the Civil Service, etc) to enable them to do their duties properly. It must also include sincere plans for returning Nigeria’s elections to orderly, free, fair, peaceful, democratic exercises. And it must include a no-nonsense programme for eliminating public corruption. Very importantly, since sections of the leaders in the new effort will need to negotiate certain critical issues among them, the agenda must include assurance that this will be done in unalloyed interest of Nigeria, and in the open sunshine, and how the agreed details will be made spring-clear to all Nigerians.
In yet one more direction, the true party of change must lead Nigeria back to sanity. In modern democratic systems, the well-established practice is that members of political parties own and control their parties, and politically active members have voices in the affairs of their parties. By and large, this was the kind of parties created by our founding fathers in 1951 – AG, NCNC, NPC, NEPU, etc.  Individual members of each party bought inexpensive party membership cards as proud proof of membership – and such cards were usually renewable annually. Members attended party meetings at their own expense at all levels, and did not expect money from their party or party leaders. Persons who got elected or appointed to public positions on the platform of their party paid into the coffers of their party an agreed small percentage of their salaries from those positions. Rich members might donate large sums of money to their party, and a government controlled by a party might employ its power to find money for the party, but even the smallest individual member was able to enjoy the pride that he was one of the persons financially supporting his party’s existence and strength. Parties had executive committees at local, state and national levels, and such bodies were respected within the party. Parties also had independent party financial accounts, as well as party secretariats, and paid party officials earning their salaries directly from the party accounts.  Party constituencies responsibly nominated their candidates for elections to all levels of government. All these contribute to making political parties democratic in their structure and activities, to making party leaders respectful and responsive to party members, and to making governance democratic.
Change must include a return to this kind of sanity. The party of change must not only conscientiously organize and run itself along these norms, it must promote the establishment of these norms as the legally binding standard for political parties in our country. It must also commit itself to promote strict laws and regulations directed at making Nigeria’s politics responsible, oriented towards ideas and serious debates, and respectful of law, order and public peace. It must also commit itself to legally and truly eliminating from Nigerian politics such destructive practices as the use of thugs in politics, the amassing of armies of thugs by politicians, and the payment of citizens for attendance in political meetings. And it must advocate for legal provision for regional parties that choose to focus attention on the development of their particular regions.
Parties of change like this have been done before in Nigeria, and can be done again. Intrinsically, the pre-independence political parties (AG, NCNC, NPC, NEPU, etc) were, to varying extents, parties of change, parties with ideas and programmes of development, parties under pressure to show that they could develop their country better than the British had been doing, parties which, to varying degrees, tried to organize and operate as parties of the people. To varying extents, these parties generated serious development and progress in their different regions of Nigeria in the 1950s. These progressive tendencies were strongest in the Western Region and in the Action Group which originated in the Western Region – part of the reason for his being that such progressive traditions had been well established from ancient times in the political life of the Yorubas of the Western Region. Also the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) founded in 1978, was a big improvement on the progressivism of the AG. Even though the UPN suffered hostility from the military dictatorship of the years before the 1979 elections, the UPN was phenomenally successful at mobilizing membership and support all over Nigeria because of its thoughtful development programmes and its well-known sincerity. And then, though the UPN was robbed of success at the presidential election of 1979, it easily swept the South-west, and it gave to the states of the South-west the highest quality of governance and development in Nigeria in 1979-83.

In country after country in today’s world, parties of this kind have been known to change the directions of their countries astoundingly for the better. In Ghana, in the years of Jerry Rawlings’ second coming (as a civilian politician elected as president in 1991), his most important gift to his country was that he reorganized his ruling party and his country’s politics along these lines – and that is when Ghana began to emerge from disorder and poverty into the sustained progress that the world is commending today. Lee Kwan Yew, the man who pulled Singapore out of abject poverty and made her “Asia’s success model” in only a few years in the late 1960s, achieved his miracle by first reordering his party and his country’s politics in these ways. Korea was devastated and split in two (North and South) by the Korean War of the 1950s. After some more years of uncertainty, South Korea bravely reorganized its political life along these lines, and it is therefore a successful country today. In contrast, North Korea chose a communist dictatorship, and it is therefore still a desperately poor country – a country that is trying to divert attention from its internal hardships by rowdily threatening the peace of the world. And yet others are Slovakia and the Czech Republic, after these two peacefully agreed in 1991 to dissolve the joint country of Czechoslovakia into which European powers had forced them in 1918. By organizing their political lives sensibly along these lines, the two countries are among the most successful economies in Europe today.
The emotional support for a party like this is potentially overwhelming today in Nigeria. In the disaster facing Nigeria, there are countless Nigerians, high and low, who would support serious and sincere efforts to save their country. Most Nigerians are shocked, embarrassed and pained by the sordid poverty, corruption, confusion and instability of their naturally rich country, and the irresponsibility and rapacity of their country’s leaders. When the aged statesman, Maitama Sule, recently called for a revolution, he was speaking for most Nigerians. The critical population mass exists for an invincible mass movement for grabbing control of Nigeria from those who see politics as a means of amassing personal wealth and those whose mission in Nigerian politics is to impose and expand their own ethnic nation’s domination over Nigeria.  Very many prominent Nigerians demand restructuring of the Nigerian federation so that Nigeria may become efficient for development and for harmony among Nigerian peoples. Many of these are warning that delay in restructuring could destroy Nigeria. Most Nigerians believe that widening regional autonomies (to empower each section of Nigeria to develop its resources and curb poverty among its people) could bring to an end even the most extreme demands for secession.  The masses of Nigeria’s unemployed youths, the millions of Nigerians who are poor, hungry and destitute, the majority of Nigerians who hunger for basic safety and security and who daily suffer from failures of electricity, clean water, and public administrative services, are desperate for change. The door seems wide open for a true party of change.


credit: http://thenationonlineng.net