The importance of ideology in politics

Last week, on the day Liz Truss gave in to pressure and resigned, the Africa Studies Centre, Africa Oxford Initiative and Yiaga Africa hosted in Oxford their second day of discussions on ‘Redesigning Democracy: Alternative Politics, Popular Culture and Next Generation Politics in Nigeria.’

I was there to speak on alternative politics beyond political parties and shared the day’s agenda with Olubankole Wellington (Banky W), the Peoples Democratic Party’s candidate for the House of Representatives, Eti-Oso; Dr Kayode Fayemi, two-term governor, Ekiti State; Samson Itodo, executive director, Yiaga Africa; Chukwuemeka Nwangele, president of Africa Society; and Dr Portia Roelofs of Kings College.

It was a rich discussion, and while there were points of deviation between speakers, it was clear that our politics needs reforms and there are opportunities that we have not taken.

Less than a week after, the United Kingdom welcomes, courtesy of the chaotic Conservative Party, the youngest prime minister, at 42, that the country has had in 200 years and the first of Indian descent. Some would say ‘about time’ but it did not happen by accident.

The Conservative Party had for decades used Oxford and Cambridge as hunting grounds to recruit young people and shape their ideology as economic conservatives.

Nothing short of ironic that the party perceived as being pro-establishment in the UK is the party that has been led three times by women and now by the first brown person.

This speaks to the power of party ideology as a differentiator as well as a forger of identity and to one of the key points I raised during the discussions at Oxford.

It is difficult to speak of alternative politics beyond political parties because we do not have political parties in Nigeria; we have special purpose vehicles for capturing power. Our parties are not rooted in ideology in a way that differentiates the policies, actions and rhetoric of the members and as such the members of the parties are fluid, moving with ease.

Truss’s credibility was damaged for not adhering to her known policies about managing the British economy.

In Nigeria, people move fluidly from the All Progressives Congress to PDP and back and we have, whether we want to admit it or not, the incongruence of Peter Obi, a free market adherent by all indications, flying the ticket of the Labour Party, who traditionally are socialists and not pro-capitalism.

Nigeria’s politics and democracy is maturing, and the contestation we see around the 2023 elections is evidence of this.

The parties are still resisting and this is where movements come in.

Movements, like Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, have influenced elections in Zambia, Lesotho, Spain, Italy and Austria and these movements are always ideological, rooted in what the parties are not or are unable to be.

The EndSARS campaign to end police brutality – which trended online for years before it boiled over into the streets in October 2020 – has evolved into a movement.

The movement has adopted Obi, the presidential candidate for Labour Party, as the vehicle for political organisation, an adoption that no doubt presents challenges to both candidate and party for the novelty of the situation.

These Nigerians – Obidients- are driven by a fever, a vision for Nigeria that is ideological and the fine-tuning of the movement’s ideology is being negotiated real time by its members, in full view of the world.

The debate triggered by the inclusion of a former general of the Nigerian Army into Obi’s presidential campaign council is a good example.

Then acting as spokesperson for the army, he sought to discredit the EndSARS campaign and shootings at Lekki Toll Gate two years ago and many who considered themselves Obidient considered his inclusion a red-line that they would not accept.

He was dropped from the council but the discussions led to other Obidients asking, ‘What is Obi’s vision for tackling police brutality?’ Others felt offended on Obi’s behalf – the culture of the current parties is strong: top down and never questioning but eventually Obi responded, saying he welcomed being questioned. Norm breaking.

Win or lose, Labour Party, Obi, Obidients and other stakeholders in Nigeria’s democracy are hopefully going to build on the uncompromising ideology for good governance that has been borne out of EndSARS. There are several ways to do that.

First, we need to build and join parties/associations/movements, taking the long-term view to success and being uncompromising in weeding out the disruptors who might seek to destabilise the movement.

One argument will be that movements should not exclude, that the Constitution guarantees freedom of association – this is nonsense, as the movements also have a right to freedom of association.

We must push back, through the courts, if necessary, the long-held fallacy that ‘all are welcome’ is how our political parties must continue to operate.

Parties are supposed to act as a filter for gaining power and a cursory look at the current crop of the elected shows how poor APC and PDP are as political leadership recruiters.

Second, we must build a new majority of Nigerians but focus on a different base from the traditional politicians who target rural dwellers impoverished by them.

A move to the middle, young and idealistic is an unexplored possibility, which could drive an alternative culture to our politics.

We need people with the freedom and luxury to be involved in politics. As Hannah Arendt points out, we should not be asking for sacrifices of individuals who are not yet citizens due to inequality and impoverishment.

We are in effect by fixating, for example, on advocacy against vote selling, asking for “an idealism which they do not and cannot have due to the urgency of the life process the reality of hunger, of want, of lack in the midst of plenty.”

Third, we must invest in building soft guardrails for democracy and fair elections; not all behaviors we want to promote can be codified in laws. For example, for centuries, the United States had norms that had nothing to do with its laws – such as a two term limit, which only needed legislation when President Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term.

An example of a soft convention we can adopt while the president still has power to appoint the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is for the INEC chair to always come from a different part of the country from the appointing president.

We need people in politics who will model bipartisan appropriate behaviour and never condone the removal of a sitting Chief Justice of Nigeria.

Fourth, we must continue to champion meaningful electoral reforms capable of upturning the status quo. For instance, a democratisation of political parties by amending the Constitutional requirement that parties must have offices in 36 states and the FCT.

The sentiments that informed this is understandable, considering our civil war and history of ethnic and religious based violence. However, if all politics is local and we want to organically overthrow the yoke of the hegemonic parties, we should have state parties focused on state and local government elections. When a party decides to play on the national level, then conditions of presence across the country make sense.

Also, our diversity requires that we end the first past the post electoral system and move to proportional representation and in due course we need to end the charade of voter registration, which costs billions in time and money. We must start tracking Nigerians from birth with unique codes they use throughout life; that way, all adult Nigerians can vote based on their identification numbers.

Parties remain the primary vehicle for political leadership recruitment in Nigeria and reforms cannot happen without ideologies that drive, inspire and bind. If we take anything from the moment we live in, despite the messiness of the last few months and the chaos within the party right now, it is that the UK Conservative Party, at some point, thought long term and invested in recruiting and shaping the ideologies of future politicians – that is how we have Sunak today. We must take the opportunity that EndSARS and the Obidients provide to push for more intentional ideologically based parties and recruitment. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us and there is a lot of work to be done.

Ayisha Osori, author of ‘Love Does Not Win Elections’, writes for BusinessDay for the Nigeria Decides 2023 series every fortnight on Wednesdays