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As many people have argued, the anti-Third Term coalition must not get carried away by its recent victory and get caught napping in the race to elect a successor to Mr. Obasanjo. Victory can be so sweet as to lead one into thinking that it is its own object. But for it to mean anything in the long run and in the larger picture, a political victory must itself be reinterpreted and understood in the context of a larger struggle, with lessons drawn and mistakes noted. Victories, especially interim ones like the defeat of the constitutional amendment bill, should be platforms for further action and must therefore be used merely as a tonic for further struggle. In that spirit, I want to suggest and elaborate upon two key lessons that we must internalize and reflect on from the Third Term fight, lessons that should inform the way progressives conduct themselves and adjust their activist hats as we approach 2007. The first and most important lesson entails a deep reflection on the nature of the struggle against the Third Term, and the need to prevent its gains from being consumed by its contradictions. In its deservedly delirious celebration, the anti-Third Term coalition must acknowledge that it was indeed a coalition, not a monolith—a coalition of incongruous forces ranging from perennial activists and impulsive critics to recycled and excluded members of the political status quo seeking new credibility. By its very nature, such a coalition cannot outlive the victory against the Third Term agenda. It is fractious and non-cohesive, with differences of ideology, antecedents, and method constituting abiding barriers in the way of longevity. The coalition was indeed an assemblage of strange political bedfellows; progressives, even while not working directly with compromised political forces like IBB, Atiku, Chukwumerije, Buhari, and others, were compelled by circumstances and political expediency to accept or tolerate them temporarily as political allies in the struggle against the constitutional amendment. To be sure, this weirdly diverse coalition, which threw up comical associations and pitched former political foes in the same anti-Third Term camp, was not a creation of the forces that constituted it; it was not even the proverbial marriage of political convenience in that the associative cleavages which emerged were not underwritten by prior intent or the law of free-willed association. As counterintuitive as this may sound, the coalition against the Third Term was created by Mr. Obasanjo and his insensitive and selfish political ambitions. Without the Third Term, there would not have been the anti-Third Term coalition. Thus, all criticisms about how the anti-Third Term struggle provided a platform for spent and credibility-challenged politicians to rehabilitate themselves must recognize that it was Mr. Obasanjo who, through the third term, provided that platform. It is not the fault of the progressive and sincere members of the anti-Third Term movement that political opportunists have used their struggle to reinvent themselves politically as democrats. It is the fault of the originator of the Third Term, Mr. Obasanjo. Regardless of how complicated and unworkable it looked, the anti-third term campaigners did become a coalition, albeit a loose one, and remained somewhat coherently focused on the goal of scuttling the third term. But it will and must now unravel. If there is any indication of the makeshift and fragile composition of this ad-hoc struggle, it is illustrated ironically in the way that the victory over the Third Term is being celebrated. The conservative wing of the coalition, represented by the likes of IBB, Atiku, Buhari, and other scions of the status quo, has been celebrating the event separately from what one, for analytical convenience, may term the progressive wing. The conservative wing is also celebrating the event differently; for the defeat of the third term means something radically different to this group of politicians than it does to the progressive wing. To the likes of IBB, Atiku, and Buhari, the victory at the National Assembly opens a way for them to realize their declared and rumored presidential ambitions; they hope to parlay the victory into the general elections of 2007. They calculate that the victory over the Third Term has given them a momentum, a new political capital and goodwill that will boost their ambitions. Whether this is misguided or not is not the issue. What this post-Third Term mindset of the conservatives betrays is a total disconnect from the more popular and populist meanings and significance with which the progressive wing have invested the anti-Third Term victory. Unlike the conservative wing, the progressive wing sees the victory as a small triumph for Nigerian democracy, not for individual political ambitions which may benefit from it. The progressives have understandably been more circumspect about the victory, seeing it as a short term success and as an encouraging development in a much larger, long-term struggle for the soul of the nation and for the deepening and nurturing of democracy in Nigeria. The celebration among progressives has therefore been subdued, lacking the self-congratulatory bravado of the conservatives. Many progressives see the need for heightened vigilance; they see the need for broadening the struggle beyond individuals and their ambitions; they recognize that the acrimony and tension generated by the Third Term has taken a toll on governance, if there was any governance to begin with, and that this state of affairs will continue to the detriment of Nigerians until 2007; they see that the politics of succession is still a volatile minefield of unpredictability; they see that the humiliated Obasanjo clique still holds the ace in the national political permutations; and they see that the likes of IBB, Atiku, Buhari—the very symbols of the failed status quo that they rail against—are positioning themselves to ride the momentum of the anti-Third Term victory to Aso Rock. Such is the level of disarray and divide in the anti-Third Term coalition. I am sure that there are intermediate positions between these two extremes on the anti-Third Term spectrum that I may have flattened. I started by saying that the anti-third term coalition must acknowledge that it is a coalition of diverse persuasions and ambitions. In view of the realities outlined above, this acknowledgment should be accompanied by an honest acceptance of the fact that the coalition has died with the Third Term. There no common grounds between the conservatives and the progressives now that Third Term is no longer an issue. And I suspect that the ambitions of the anti-Third Term conservatives themselves will soon come under attack, as it should, from the progressives. The progressives must disentangle themselves from the opportunism of the conservatives and resist any attempt by the latter to profit politically from what was in fact a national grassroots movement to scuttle the Third Term. This is the task ahead, the new layer of a long-drawn struggle, which, in some sense, may be more difficult than the struggle against the Third Term. This is the real tragedy of the Third Term. It has saddled Nigerians with a whole new struggle; we now need to fight off a reinvigorated attempt by those who contributed to the present rot to come back to power. If this is allowed to happen, the gains of the anti-Third Term movement would have been eroded; the ambitious political opportunists who hopped on the anti-Third Term bandwagon because they saw it as a threat to their aspirations do not represent any qualitative departure from the bankrupt vision that characterizes the Obasanjo government. We must remain alert to this possibility: that in a few years we could be back to where we were before the recent vote of the National Assembly. The second lesson to be gleaned from the anti-Third Term struggle and which we must reflect and build on is the way in which, for the first time in a long time, there emerged a trans-regional unanimity in opposing the extension of Mr. Obasanjo’s tenure. It is a testament to the justness of the struggle, to the widespread disillusionment with the Obasanjo government, and to the desire of Nigerians for an enduring democratic culture. It is commendable that Nigerians were able to cast aside the usual ethnic, regional, and religious bickering to frontally confront the brazen assault on our young democracy. Without being naïve about the potential of this national political unanimity to spill over to post-Third Term struggles, and without suggesting that Mr. Obasanjo’s attempted power grab has had the unintended consequence of instituting the much vaunted but elusive national unity, it is heartening to note that when it comes to real threats to our civilized political sensibilities, we can suspend our primordial interests and cleavages. It was not a perfect consensus in that some regional and sub-regional voting blocs and patterns manifested during the debate on the Third Term and betrayed predictable considerations of ethno-regional power calculations. But there were no neat and wholly predictable regional and ethnic blocks in the debate, and that is a good sign. This is a culture worth building on. It is an issue-based democratic culture, not one founded solely on ethno-regional interests. It is not that there is anything wrong with political interests cultivated and pursued from the prism of regional and ethnic affiliation. I have argued consistently that in fact this must be recognized as the true foundation of a bottom-up political and democratic culture. However, certain political circumstances and forces tend to pose equal threats to the interests of all regions and ethnic groups because they aim to hijack a national political space where, unfortunately in my opinion and perhaps for a long time to come, regions and ethnic nationalities will continue to derive their authority and negotiate for resources. Let us reflect on these lessons from the Third Term struggle while we realign for the 2007 succession battle.
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Posted by Robot| 20.05.2006 13:10