Salihu Lukman, until a few days ago, vice-chairman (north-west) of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has had to resign his position as a member of the national working Committee (NWC) of the party. In his July 26 resignation letter addressed to Abubakar Kyari, acting national chairman of the APC, Lukman explained that his resignation was informed by his conviction that the atmosphere in the party had become completely at variance with the founding vision of forming a progressive party.

In his words, “rather than remaining in the leadership of the party and becoming a source of distraction for leaders and especially for the young government of President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, it is better to excuse myself.”He said he would remain an ordinary member of the party while hoping that the leaders of the party would learn to retract from acts that are unjust and illegal that could counter any claim of being democratic or progressive.

The resignation of Salihu Lukman could not have come as a surprise to those who have followed his activities especially in the last 8 years. This latest resignation was not his first. In January 2022, Lukman resigned from his position as Director General of the Progressive Governors Forum (PGF). At that time, he told the media that he took the action to enable him to continue with his criticism of the APC with a view to returning the party to its original vision.

He had before the resignation mounted sustained criticism against the continued aberration of a caretaker committee running the affairs of the ruling APC which could simply have organized a national convention from which an elected party executive team would have emerged. Lukman no doubt deserves the credit of being a loud voice in the effort at redressing the situation.

Remarkably, at no time has Lukman’s agitation shown any trace of personal ambition or the urge for material gains, instead, the critic has continually fought for members of his party and indeed all politicians to hold-on to some modicum of principles in their actions and activities. The premise of Lukman’s political standpoint is that given where the nation is coming from, under the former ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party PDP, changing Nigerian politics requires a departure from requiring citizens to be blindly loyal to elected leaders. In his words, “politics of change should produce elected leaders, who should be highly tolerant and where possible, even accommodate disagreements and criticisms as part of the process of decision making.” In other words, citizens and party members should be allowed to disagree and criticise elected leaders.

Understandably, many politicians would be quite critical of Salihu Lukman, because they perceive him as a publicity seeking politician who always likes to be in the news. But it is difficult for such perception to take away from Lukman the positive trait of a moral reformer who is largely committed to the ideals of politics for good governance. There is also the criticism that he hardly follows the established procedures and processes available to all party members for ventilating grievances.

This is no doubt a strong point because a party member should not wash the party’s dirty linen in the public. But then, the argument is simplistic because in the third world, party leaders are hardly democratic; the only point they listen to is that which meets their predisposition. It is therefore easy to see that Lukman usually goes public after his internal entreaties had been ignored.

Lukman pleaded with and cajoled leaders severally to bring the abnormal caretaker system to an end before he began to publicly demand and advocate for the convening of a national convention which holds in Nigeria only when the party is facing a major controversy. If Abdullahi Adamu and Iyiola Omisore APC’s immediate past chairman and secretary respectively had listened to Lukman’s initial pleas for them to run an open party system, it would not have been necessary for him to go public with a demand for financial accountability. The only place he could have presented an internal claim is the regular executive committee meetings which never held. Why would a party official as high as vice chairman be left in the dark and why indeed should a party leadership that garnered as high as N100million per aspirant to procure nomination forms for presidential election wait to be pressurized to account for the money? 

From what has been said so far, it is rational to commend the few Salihu Lukmans in Nigeria’s political system who have had the courage to call out undemocratic party leaders. A major merit of the call-out is that it persuasively questions the validity of the old order which presupposes that in politics there are no principles or morals and that a politician need not be realistic, truthful or sensible. The courageous members of a party do not have to be many or in the majority, it is salutary that we are able to point to one or two persons who now and again are able to stand-up and speak truth to power. This is why this column today commends Salihu Lukman who has consistently fought against party tyranny and the criminalization of political dissent. Without him and a few others, dictatorship would remain the defining feature of political leadership in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s two major political parties have given the nation copious examples of the high degree of dictatorship in our political party system. When PDP was the ruling party, she developed a habit of replacing winners of party primaries for no just cause until judge-made law intervened to demand for “cogent and verifiable reasons” for any replacement. The new ruling party, the APC, has gone several steps below logic, to present as winners of primaries, those who were not even aspirants and therefore did not take part in the primaries. Both parties have always believed that the principle of party supremacy can be used to sustain the dictatorial stance of their leaders – a standpoint which undermines the rule of law and every democratic tenet.

Evidence that party leaders enjoy dictatorship is located in their refusal to ever voluntarily resign from office. In other climes, once there are latent signals that a party leader’s stay in office is no longer popular, such leaders resign from office. In truth, leaders leave office on account of controversies for which they have no direct blame but simply on account of the principle of vicarious liability. That doesn’t happen in Nigeria. Neither Abdullahi Adamu of the APC nor Uche Secondus of the PDP saw the need to quit as soon as some segments of the party began to object to their continued stay in office. Perhaps a better example is that of Iyorcha Ayu who could have saved his party from defeat by stepping down when against party tradition, events threw up both the party chairman and the presidential candidate from the same region. 

The greatest implication of the failure to get leaders who are truly democratic is that it is the major reason why we have been unable to attain free and fair elections. Such party leaders have no inclination to play the game of election by its rules. They go all out to compromise the electorate, election officials, law enforcement agencies and the judiciary thereby creating opportunities for  all manner of electoral malpractices, such as faulty card readers and BVAS as well as unfathomable technical glitches. Of course, where elections are neither free nor fair, the result is usually fake winners who would not only be unacceptable to opponents or be capable of implementing viable policies that can improve the living conditions of the people. 

The point to be made is that there is a strong connectedness between all the factors creating political disorder and instability in Nigeria and that poorly managed political parties are at the front burner of the dilemma. With no one playing the role of the Salihu Lukmans, people cannot identify what Nigerian political parties stand for and what differences exist between them. To reverse the situation, our political parties urgently need men and women of honour who are ready to jettison the politics of selfishness, greed, sectionalism and corruption that have since independence hindered the growth and development of our nation.