In 1984 – 85, I had the misfortune of reporting events at the Special Military Tribunal sitting in Kaduna. The Second Republic had just come to grief and one state governor after another were put on trial for crimes against the Nigerian state.
The governors had like all political appointees obeyed the military instructions from Lagos to report to the police stations nearest to them. When they did that, they were herded to prison and from there to the Special Military Tribunals where they were all presumed guilty. Under Nigerian law, every accused person is innocent until he is proven guilty. Not so at the Special Military Tribunals where every accused politician or political office was guilty and it was his duty to prove he was innocent.
In Kaduna, a Naval Commander by name Elegbede was put in charge as chairman of the Military Tribunal. He conducted the trials there in secret and only assembled us the media to hear the grotesque judgment handed down on the convicts. In that manner, the deposed governors like Abubakar Rimi (Kano State), Sabo Bakin Zuwo (Kano State), Aper Aku (Benue State), Awwal Ibrahim (Niger State) were all handed live sentences before our very eyes for failing to defend themselves successfully on accusations of corrupt enrichment. In other locations, like the Lagos, governors Adekunle Ajasin (Ondo) Lateef Jakande (Lagos) Prof Ambrose Ali (Bendel) Bola Ige (Oyo) and Olabisi Onabanjo (Ogun) were subjected to the same fate in most cases for receiving contributions to their political parties. The contributions were classified as bribes by the tribunals.
Before the Tribunals started handing down their judgments which were based on the economic mismanagement in the states, the new Head of State, General Muhammed Buhari had in his inaugural address to the nation dealt a devastating blow on all the existing political parties that had been in power between 1979 and 1983. He said:
“The only political parties that could complain of election rigging are those parties that lacked the resources to rig. There is ample evidence that rigging and thuggery were relative to the resources available to the parties. This conclusively proved to us that the parties have not developed confidence in the presidential system of government on which the nation invested so much material and human resources. While corruption and indiscipline have been associated with our state of under-development, these two evils in our body politics have attained unprecedented height in the past few years. The corrupt, inept and insensitive leadership in the last four years has been the source of immorality and impropriety in our society.”
Thus to the people who sacked the second republic, the political parties were the bogeymen who ruled Nigeria through election rigging and ensured corruption thrived as a way of life. Is there much of a difference with what we have today?
As a peripheral operator in the second republic, I can only say what I saw and I know. For instance I was at the Liberty Stadium to witness what became the last National Convention of the ruling National Party of Nigeria NPN. It was held late in 1983. What strikes me much as I compare what happened then to what happens now is the difference in party hierarchy and protocol arrangements. What was made clear was that in the NPN, the party was supreme to all those it had sponsored who became very powerful elected officials. The president Alhaji Shehu Shagari was subordinate to Meredith Adisa Akinloye. In fact Shagari came to that convention ground before Akinloye and when the National Chairman of the party finally came, the President had to stand and welcome the party Supremo – ‘Adisco Wonder’ – as he was fondly called by his fans in the NPN. This pattern was followed in all the registered parties of the second republic. The party was supreme. You either took it or you left.
Sadly when we resumed the practice of presidential democracy in 1999, a hitherto unknown practice crept in. We suddenly started hearing of a Party Leader as a distinct person and office from that of a party chairman. It is clear from what transpired that this anomaly started from the behemoth that emerged to rule the country after the 1999 election, the PDP. I am not sure this party took the correct version of giving rational and national leadership to a country that had been traumatized for long by military tyranny. The man the PDP gave us as President never believed in the democratic principle of rule of law; if anything, he saw himself as above the law or the law itself. He had no respect for the principle of separation of powers between the executive, legislature and the judiciary. He often disobeyed court orders, even those of the Supreme Court. In such a position as he placed himself, his opinions, no matter how ill-informed became the law. The other political parties soon took a cue from this. Both at state and federal level, those elected into office became party leaders stealing the show from those elected to lead the parties.
The parties became impotent. With cap in hands, they all crawled up to those their members who ought to be subordinate to them but happened to be elected into office, especially such executive office as state governors.
That was the beginning of absolute powers by the governors in Nigeria. The time worn adage says ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. The PDP ruled Nigeria for sixteen years in which the country was driven aground on almost all fronts. That is why a merger of some opposition political parties, including some former PDP members found it easy to sack their government in 2015.
In the Second Republic, political parties were identified by the cardinal programs in their manifestoes. The NPN spoke about food and shelter; the UPN promised free education, free health, integrated rural development; while the GNPP promised politics without bitterness. As a peripheral operator, I worked for the Adekunle Ajasin UPN government in Ondo State in 1979 up to 1980 and for the Bamanga Tukur NPN government in Gongola State for the last three months of the year in 1983. I was able to see how hard the UPN governor Ajasin and the NPN governor Tukur were working to implement their party programs. But what do the current political parties – both in government and opposition stand for in Nigeria? You ask the most fanatical of their followers and you find no answer.
Some of us have started to see them as simply bogeymen.
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