t is the season in our country when political parties that find themselves trudging along the path of isolation are dumped by their top members who need no one to tell them that political isolation is the equivalent of our own Siberia. No one is found there by choice; hence it is wise to exercise the freedom of movement and the freedom of association at the right time and get to the green grass beckoning from the other side of the septic tank. Both freedoms and the exercise thereof are duly guaranteed by our constitution.
The haemorrhaging of political parties and the race to find safe berths in a ruling political party whenever the election season is upon us, does not necessarily guarantee that the dumped political party will bleed to death. Nothing is that neat in our national politics. It may bounce back. This is a nation of men and women who are guaranteed to bounce back each time life deals them the rough hand. Do not laugh at a Nigerian politician who is down, or you will rue the day you were born when he bounces back. It is the way the pendulum of our national politics swings.
I have written quite a bit about the dumping and the dumpers and the deleterious effect this continues to have on our ability to build political parties able to drive our national development as is the case in other lands, developed and developing. I have done so not because it is not my pet subject. I do so because I know that the toeing and froing in the political parties in search of greener pastures puts personal interests above national interests and cannot help this nation attain its full height of greatness.
I do so because I remain persuaded by our refusal to accept that democracy as an institution of governance rests on the political party as its foundation. Unless we firm it up on that foundation, there is a hollow ring to our belief in democracy. And I can see that ours will remain a democracy in permanent search of democrats. The instrumentality of the political party confers on the people the right to be the custodians of power; it confers on them the power and the right to institute a government of the people by the people and for the people. Anything else is a sham democracy.
It is impossible to have a true democracy with unstable political parties. Political parties are important instruments of democracy because they drive development. Each time a leading member of one political party dumps it after years of reaping political benefits from its platform, our democracy is dragged through the unsightly mud of personal interests at the expense of our fitful attempts to build a democratic nation in law and in fact.
The constant toing and froing in the name of the right of association have robbed our political parties of the power to be instruments of political, economic and social change. They are hollow vessels in the service of individuals and groups. They have become the means by individuals to win, capture or steal political power.
By their nature and by the nature of governments instituted by them, political parties do much more than birth governments. They are in effect the governments they birth. All those elected on their platform are their servants sworn to do their bidding through the faithful execution of their manifestos. Denied their right to fully exercise this mandatory supervisory authority, the parties and the governments they birth are no longer accountable to the people.
And since nature abhors vacuum, the assumed right of the servants of the political parties to do as they wish has replaced the absent party manifestos and has now become the instrument of our democracy at all levels of our government. And since assumed power tends to corrupt absolutely, corruption has become the absolute instrument of governance in the land. EFCC be damned. Ours is perhaps the only country in the world in which people go into politics poor and emerge very rich at the end of the day. Almost every one of our former state governors is accused of corruption involving not kobo but billions of naira.
I find nothing that makes me proud of our democracy. We have treated and continue to treat democracy with contempt. Part of the problem is my pet peeve, to wit, the poor leadership recruitment process in which the system manages to impose on the people as state governors, men who are not qualified to hold offices as a local government councillors. The right leadership is critical to democracy. With it, a country makes a leap in its development. Without it, a country can only trudge along the footpath of history.
We cannot improve the quality of our political leadership without expanding the search for good leaders within our political parties. We cannot engage in the serious search for what is best for us so long as we treat our political parties as platforms of personal convenience. 1999 to 2024 is a long enough time for politicians to learn and apply best practices in democracy, democratic leadership, good leadership and the role of the political parties in national development. The current mediocrity serves their mediocre interests. We deserve better.
