Nigeria's Goose and the Gander politics
June 12 2015 By Abi Giwa
Nigeria's new men at the helm
Can a party that has won an election with the support of members of another party who cross-carpeted from their own party en-masse, now be talking of indiscipline and threat to mete out discipline, when it is known that it has itself benefitted from indiscipline to win an election?
It is a question which many Nigerians have been forced into asking following Nigeria's new ruling party's threat to discipline its members who refused to support the party's anointed candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives' leadership, but instead presented themselves for election and won.
The ruling party, All Progressive Party, APC, had said in a published statement by its publicity secretary, Alhaji Lai Muhammed, that the newly elected senate president, Busola Saraki, and the House of Representative's new speaker, Yakubu Dogara, lacked the ruling party's support, and that the ruling party will discipline both men for defying the ruling party.
The development in which both men called the bluff of their patty was a quick reminder among Nigerians, how some notable members that included Saraki and Dogara decamped from the People Democratic Party, the former ruling party and joined the opposition party that later won the election and became the ruling party. Many Nigerians knew that the victim of that gang up was Goodluck Jonathan and it was why he was commended for accepting defeat in the elections without a recourse to vengeance and a long drawn war over the sudden decampment of some notable members of his party into the opposition party. The former president also accommodated a long drawn war of asinine from Olusegun Obasanjo, also a former president, who openly canvassed for the ousting of the incumbent president against every acceptable moral decorum.
The trouble by errant members in the old ruling party was seen as the cause of the former president's loss in the last election, and that the new ruling party was the major beneficiary from the development. The former ruling party had accepted its fate of losing the election with equanimity and the pain of loss rarely turning into a show of unbearable pain.
But the new ruling party's act of threat to discipline its members for the members' decision to stick to the constitution and democratic tenets for the election into the headship of the Senate and the House, rather than allow their party's undemocratic selection of leaders is seen by observers as nothing but arrant demonstration that is unsportsmanlike.
People are ask why the new ruling party should feel the pain of loss and unable to stomach it without spoiling for a show? They ask whether the same party was not in approval of Aminu Tambuwal's choice to dish his party and consequently became Speaker of the House with the overt support of Bola Tinubu, a chieftain of the new ruling party?
They ask whether there is any difference in the new ruling party's experience to the old ruling party's experience comparing the manner Tambuwal emerged as Speaker and the way Saraki and Dogara had emerged president and Speaker respectively? They ask whether it is not a case of what is good for the goose that is also good for the gander? They said Tambuwal came from the cloud and defeated the woman from Oyo State who was anointed by her party for speakership of the house. And Bola Tinubu supported Tambuwal to call the bluff of his party.
And now that Saraki and Dogara have both called their party's bluff by disregarding their party's anointed candidates for the Senate and the House leadership, and both became leaders instead, why should Tinubu and his supporters feel as if they have not done to others what they now regard as Saraki and Dogara's act of indiscipline?
Many Nigerians know that the real losers in this game of politics between the Lagos axis and the Sokoto, Kwara and Adamawa axis are Nigerians, because they say they know that Tinubu and Saraki and their supporters are not agitating for the interest of Nigerians, but their own interests and how to amass more wealth to what they already have.
