By Law Mefor
People achieve political power with all kinds of strategies. In Anambra, it is now about politicians promising to stay for only a single term in office, even as the constitution duly guarantees two terms of four years. The inherent insincerity in the promise and its geopolitics calls for critical interrogation. For even when one means it, the dynamics of power will change the one-term decision, and here’s why.
Men who crave power must understand the unconquerable forces that forge it. There is the inescapable factor that the very nature of power does not allow the individual who craves power to leave it by forces beyond his control. There was the case of Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, who started out as the vice-president on the President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua ticket. By the zoning equation in Nigeria, Yar’Adua represented the turn of the North as the President of Nigeria. The death of Yar’Adua dealt a death blow to the zoning process. There was the calling up of the Doctrine of Necessity for Jonathan to mount the saddle as President.
Jonathan was, of course, from the South-South Zone. He served out the remainder of the Yar’Adua years and got re-elected for his own full four-year tenure. That’s when the zoning brouhaha assumed a troublesome charge. Jonathan could not be convinced by members of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) caucus to step aside for a Northern candidate to run in his place even after committing to it before his own election. The lure of power would not let Jonathan see the reason for that argument. That was how a coalition of forces eventually made him lose power in 2015.
The question is: what changed? The president or the governor represents the zone who will ensure that he isn’t going anywhere even when he wants to.
Geopolitics is a very potent force in the governance of the country and the individual states. It is almost always the case that those who want to quit power are prevented by the people from his zone. There is always the “It’s our turn syndrome” that cannot be easily wished away. Even well-meaning people not sure of when their zone would smell power again will force the incumbent to stay back against his wish. Jonathan suffered from this syndrome. He was held hostage by some forces within his geopolitical zone.
The crucial issue is that democracy is, at bottom, as America’s President Abraham Lincoln defined it in his Gettysburg address, “Government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Any political leader worth his name on the ballot counts the people as his backbone. No politician can easily wish away his supporters who are voting for him by asserting that he would only do one term in office. The support groups of the politician can hardly ever buy into such a project.
Getting elected to office takes so much effort from the leader and his supporters. It takes at the very least two years to settle into the saddle of power. There is hardly any politician that can swear that after using two years to settle into office, he would use the remaining two years to do any quantum of work and leave behind legacy projects before stepping down. This would amount to getting elected into power just for the fun of it without doing anything meaningful with the acquired power. Craving for the office as an end in itself, not a means.
Anybody touting the one-term promise should therefore be seen as preaching power without responsibility. Projects take time to mature, and it is incumbent on the trustworthy leader to go the whole hog of taking responsibility. After the first term, if the leader is found wanting, he would lose re-election. The baton will change hands for a newly elected leader to run the course. If a leader from the very beginning knows that he would not be tested through a re-election vote, the likelihood is to take affairs of state without the requisite attention. It’s like he’s counting his days to walk away. We have seen leaders like that.
Politics is much more serious than preachments on how one would not suborn the due process simply because one had made the promise. History is replete with leaders who promised to respect the democratic ethos of term limits only to end up as lifetime presidents. The 3rd Term project is a recent history in Nigeria. Things are easier said than done. Once a man gets to power, it is quite difficult to hold him down to his sworn words – not when sycophants would have taken over, endlessly singing his praise songs that the entire cosmos would collapse if he deigns to leave office.
The normal thing to stand by is to let leaders run the course of the constitutionally guaranteed two terms of office. The system takes care of not re-electing the leader who had not done well with his first term in a multi-party democracy. Strategies like organising to do a single term will only end up disorganising the geopolitics of a volatile state or country because the zone of the incumbent will be losing or gaining unduly over other zones. No matter the number of years Nigeria has put into the practice of democracy since 1999, there are still rough edges that must not be upset through the single-tenure charade.
Anarchy may well overwhelm the land if the promise of doing one term is taken seriously. The Anambra example provides a classic case study. Soludo is from Anambra South, where one or two candidates for the November 8 guber election are promising a single term because incumbent Soludo has already taken one term of the constitutionally allotted two terms. Assuming Ndi Anambra fall for this subterfuge and forces forging power in our clime kick in while the person is in office, it means the South would take three terms and delay the turn of the Central by eight years instead of four.
Thankfully, people know better than to take those promising a single term seriously. Zoning in Anambra has ensured peace, stability and even development. Truncating it will be tantamount to a dog going back to its vomit, and nobody wants that.
· Law Mefor, PhD, is Anambra State Commissioner for Information.