My attention was drawn to comments in the media, last week, by the National Youth Leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Ebikibina Miriki, castigating the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), for what he posited as PDP’s failure to develop a comprehensive youth policy for the country. Hear him:
“It is against this background that we, the youth leaders of the merging political parties and youth from other associations, do hereby reaffirm our full support and commitment to the merger of our parties to form the All Progressives Congress (APC).”
Beautiful story; perfect myth!
But how did we get here and where do we go from here?
In not too recent times, fantastic myths like these have characterized our politics and rhetoric. It is easy, too easy, to single out what the ruling party is not doing well but it is very difficult to present a superior alternative. What the ACN youth leader has just done – on behalf of his fellow youth leaders in APC – is nothing but a casual assertion – something anyone could have carelessly uttered in the name of espousing an opinion.
Nigeria has never lacked the diagnosis of critics. What we have lacked is the “superior alternative cure.” As citizens of this great country, I believe we all carry a measure of the cure Nigeria needs, irrespective of whether we are APC or PDP. It bothers me when we reduce the politics of national development to political party A, B or C. At present, no political party in Nigeria can really boast of having the “superior ideology”.
None!
Sometime ago, I declared on this column that we are all PDP. I was, almost, wrestled to the ground with the bullets of Twitter outrage from those who think one has started eating the PDP’s political pounded yam. No wahala. But today, very few can deny the fact that what we have as APC, is at best, a distorted and very poor imitation of PDP. Such a vain contraption!
So, who is fooling whom?
We need to understand the psychodynamics of who we are as a people, where we are as a nation, what we have tried in the past and what suits our contextual reality. The Americans have “The American Dream”. What is the “Nigerian Dream”? Do we even need a Nigerian Dream simply because the Americans have one? Do we really need this “ruling party” and “opposition” contraption or what we need is a one party state as successfully practiced by China?
At some point, for us to make progress as a nation, we will need to decide what we want: party ideology or performance? Good manifestoes or good leaders? Maybe what we need is a seamless combination of all of these.
Permit my digression. I’m searching for answers.
I can see clearly that a superficial approach to our democratic experience will produce nothing but a bundle of contradictions as often reflected by the notion that what we simply need to advance as a nation is a change of the party in power. It is this sort of thinking that produces comments like the one credited to the ACN youth leader. No political philosopher could have captured the emerging contradictions of this paradigm as Paulo Freire in his landmark book; Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire posits that:
“It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves. It is therefore essential that the oppressed wage the struggle to resolve the contradiction in which they are caught, and the contradiction will be resolved by the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man in the process of liberation. If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply changing poles.”
If we really want to perform in this “ruling party” versus “opposition party” orchestra, young Nigerians in opposition parties like the ACN or APC must begin to draw critical lessons from the PDP Youth Circuit where intelligent debates and conversations supersede anecdotal conclusions.
Evidence bears this out.
In 2001, under the leadership of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the PDP government enacted a National Youth Policy. The policy provides an overarching framework for youth development in Nigeria and remains valid till this day. ACN youth leader and others, take note.
Up till this moment, no one in the APC or ACN has shown us what its national youth policy looks like. Apparently, none seems to exist. You can’t produce a better leadership for Nigeria by simply demonizing your opponents. You will need to sweat it out on the intellectual front. Nigerians aren’t stupid!
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Ohimai Godwin Amaize is popularly known as Mr. Fix Nigeria, Amaize was born on September 9, 1984. He is an alumnus of the premier University of Ibadan, Nigeria with a post-graduate certificate in “Managing for Integrity”, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. He is a registered member, People’s Democratic Party. He tweets @MrFixNigeria.
