USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: Another Look at Party Defections

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From: Tunde Oseni <tundeoseni@gmail.com>

Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2014 15:38:11 +0100

To: ayo_olukotun<ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>

Subject: Another Look at Party Defections

Another Look at Party Defections  

Ayo Olukotun

Call it carpet or floor crossing, defection, decamping or what have you; the switching of political parties at a drop of the hat is a pervasive syndrome of Nigeria’s fourth Republic. There is a long and distinguished list of party switchers, one of the most recent being the sensational instance of Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, former anti-corruption czar and 2011 presidential candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) who switched to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Commenting on the way and manner in which Ribadu was apparently muscled out of the gubernatorial primaries in Adamawa, some have said that he ought to have known better; some have even said that it serves him right given what they term as traitorous desertion of the All Progressives Congress.

 

Uncharitable comments have been made in respect of other party switchers, such as Tom Ikimi, who returned to the PDP after a short-lived romance with the APC. Unsurprisingly, a great deal of moral outrage has greeted the pervasive defections among the political class. One such reaction is that of The Guardian which editorialized on September 8, 2014 that ‘the recent spate of defections by some Nigerian politicians from one party to another is a shameful phenomenon that graphically retells the odious rat race, ideological vacuity, and mundane craving that typify Nigeria’s political life’.

 

In a sense, these strictures are deserved; although it reminds this writer of a comment by the late celebrated American Political Scientist, Samuel Huntington that developing polities or ‘modernizing societies’ as he called them tend to judge their societies in harsher terms than is the case in industrialized democracies. Huntington maintains that practices which would be excused as the normal stuff of politics in industrialized societies are often condemned in strong terms in developing polities. There is a grain of truth in this statement to the extent that to hear Nigerians complain one would think that moral perfidy, even corruption is a peculiarly Nigerian contribution to politics.

To connect this with party switching, it may surprise many to learn that several of the world’s statesmen, past and contemporary, had switched parties in some cases more than once. For example, Winston Churchill, former Premier Minister of Britain, who led the nation in a victorious war, was described as a ‘serial party defector’.  It may be surprising too to learn that Ronald Reagan, famous Republican President of the United States once belonged to the Democratic Party. Reagan’s defection is etched in the history books by his famous remark that ‘it was not so much that he left the Democratic Party but that the Democratic Party left him’.

Interestingly too, Hillary Clinton, who might well be the next President of the United States was once an active member of the Republican Party. Currently, there has been in the Deep South of the United States a political shift rightwards from Democratic to Republican with several politicians such as Gene Taylor former Democratic Congressman from Mississippi switching to the Republican Party.

To avoid being misunderstood, let it be said that this columnist is not out to whitewash or even excuse the extensive and often cynical party switching of the Nigerian political elite. Nonetheless, a global perspective on the syndrome suggests that it is not an exceptionally Nigerian. The other point that needs to be made is that the context of politics and democratic practice differs across nations but as a rule, politicians everywhere tend to be self-seeking and fixated on winning the next elections rather than acting as trumpet of enduring values.  

Let us bear in mind too that the parties we are talking about are not the established political structures of western democracies but very often are amorphous, infant organizations produced in the crucible of transitions from authoritarian rule to semi-democracies. And this is why it is not surprising that party switching has been most prevalent in transitional democracies such as post-communist countries, Africa and parts of Asia.

If we take a temporal perspective, we might say that it will take some time for party institutions to take roots in a developing polities; and even at that, as the preceding narration suggests, there will be probably be no end to it.  

 

Having made those caveats, it is important to understand that in the Nigerian context party defection is so generalized because of the overwhelming power of the state which makes opposition a daunting and costly affair; the cash and carry tendencies of Nigerian politics as well as the human consequences of internal dysfunctions within the political parties including those that may be called progressive.

 

To dwell on the latter point, Ribadu’s friends told anyone that cared to listen that in the 2011 presidential election his party traded him off by sacrificing his presidential candidature to a deal that gave President Goodluck Jonathan an overwhelming victory in the Southwestern states. In the aftermath of that event it was let out that Ribadu was left in the cold with no one bothering to explain anything to him.

It is unlikely that this kind of scenario would have manifested in a context in which the parties have predictable structures, norms and processes of decision making. An anecdote will put the human cost of dysfunction within all the parties in better perspective. Some years back, a former colleague, with a progressive bent, was contemplating joining one of the parties. His obvious choice was the party that governed his state of origin which aligned more with his political beliefs. Explaining why he settled for the party at the center, he said to me that ‘each time I called the governor of my state I was told that he was in a meeting and could not answer my call. On the other hand, each time I called the then president, he picked his phone instantly and engaged me in frequently long conversation’. ‘I then asked myself’, my former colleague continued, ‘who should be busier: a state governor or the President of Nigeria?’

It is of course possible that the politician had skewed the narrative to justify his action. But the story suggests that sometimes politicians with progressive bent do not feel welcome enough in progressive parties and having made politics a career settle for the conservative party option. In such circumstances the best we could hope for is that if they have a reformist agenda they would still find ways of prosecuting such agenda in the unlikely setting of a conservative party.

In other words, rather than simply yell ‘Judas’ at party switchers, we should demand of them that they should seek to reform their new party from within as much as practicable. However, this would not happen unless there is civic support for reformist politicians who too often are left to their own devices. It is when politicians are surrounded by likeminded social forces who demand of them minimal accountability that they would bother to explain their conduct and pursue reforms with which they have been associated.

We will see less of party switching if our political economy is less skewed towards a centralized state which monopolizes resources; and if civil society begins to demand of reformist politicians that they stay true to what they profess eve when they switch parties.

 

·        Professor Olukotun is Dean , Faculty of Social Sciences, Lead City University, Ibadan