The interrogation before 2015 was essentially about meaning. The focus was fundamentally about the interpretation of essence; about hermeneutics of what constituted “change”. Meaning is important. Meaning speaks to the essence of the subject of interrogation. So, in conflict pre 2015 was the fight to seek meaning vs the struggle for an enthronement and the interrogation of what was to be enthroned.
To create the right sociopolitical culture that drives development, drivers of Nigeria’s socio political discourses must understand the importance of interrogating meaning. Because always, hindsight will speak to the consequences of all social events as then deposits of history. It is what makes hindsight beautiful. Hindsight is a quality of time that crystallises the understanding of social phenomena, either to negate the immediate reading of such events, or to provide a deeper knowing that lays bare all their implications.
In hindsight therefore, events leading up to 2015 as now deposits of history, clearly show that contrary to the otherwise objective reading that it improved our democratic process, APC is the singular most retrogressive force that happened to the quest to improve the quality of Nigeria’s political culture since the fourth republic began. The failure to critically interrogate evolving political phenomena like the emergence of the All Progressive Congress can be fatal. And APC’s emergence has clearly been of fatal consequences; a resultant failure to interrogate what constituted the “change” slogan, and the face of that “change”.
Importantly, AC, ANPP, APGA, and the pioneer political parties of the fourth republic creditably provided opposition to the ruling PDP. When Obasanjo went about his presidential overdrive, these parties, together with the civil societies and the media, helped to keep him in check. Within the PDP itself, opposition was on all fronts. Nowhere was this opposition much more effectively evident, than in the quest of OBJ to get a third term in office. PDP herself killed that dream. That Jonathan became acting president and went on to be president, is credited to the PDP’s “doctrine of necessity”. Now, not only does it not tolerate differing opinions within its party, but APC has also elevated ruthless aggression against opposing views and voices of dissent in the country, into state policy.
Until what became the APC happened, political discourse in Nigeria’s social circles was not this toxic, this ghoulish, this crude, this barbaric, this retrogressively shouting. APC brought together crude and barbarically pedestrian discourses that were before now fringe voices of social misdemeanor and domiciled them as a base for the mental bank of national political discourse. It is a fatal failing that has put Nigeria at the edge of an existential precipice more than at any other time since the end of the civil war.
At no other time have we seen a political party consciously prop up and enable a president into a legally deified emperor. At no other time in Nigeria’s history do you have a political party consciously aiding the erosion of the constitution and completely turning the judiciary and the legislature into mere appendages of an ineffective democratic system. At no time have we seen a party help a president remove the country’s Chief Justice in such a blatant, in-your-face trashing of the constitution. At no time has a political party in Nigeria helped to erode free speech and made serious effort to legalise such tyranny.
No time have we seen a party consciously and doggedly assisting executive impunity whether in appointments or flouting of human rights and judicial pronouncements. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, learned party people took bills to the president in a foreign hospital to sign in a democracy, and proudly defended it as some noble achievement. These are serious failings in a democracy which the ruling party is fast transmuting into a political culture. Now, ably assisted by APC stalwarts, Buhari’s lead government has led Nigeria into officially its second recession in five years. Unofficially, it is muted as the third recession since 2015.
As the #EndSARS protest gathered momentum in what has become not just the most peaceful, but most organically organised civil protest in Nigeria’s history, the APC lead government officials sponsored thugs and hoodlums who not only attacked the #EndSARS protesters, but unleashed arson at the Apo mechanic village in Abuja, burning hundreds of cars and destroying properties worth millions; then followed it up with the shooting of protesters at the Lekki toll gate. Now, the same APC government which claimed to have ordered nationwide inquiries into the extra judicial killings by SARS, is the same government that has been silently arresting and freezing the accounts of perceived leaders of the #EndSARS protests.
But make no mistake about it, APC’s prevailing unraveling in power is not an accident of history. All of their continuing manifestations including Buhari’s persona, were all public knowledge pre 2015; only that ethnic, religious, and selfish politics prevented the necessary germane interrogation that should have happened. No society knows progress that its social engineers continuously fail at the most imperative task of a hermeneutics of meaning in their sociopolitical discourses; a sine-qua-non in evolving the right political culture that can guarantee development. Time will tell if Nigeria’s intellectuals and elites have learnt.
