 Weeks after the 2023 General Elections, political parties are enmeshed in a series of crises creating instability and unrest among members, and intrigues as reps plot revolts against APC's zoning arrangement and choice of candidates. This is Plus Politics, I'm Mary Anacar. The 2023 General Elections may have come and gone, but the aftermath of the kidney-contested polls is still being felt across the land. Winners and losers emerged in the process, even as some contestants doubting the credibility of the electioneering exercise have since filed petitions before the election petition tribunals across the country. Now, of the 18 political parties certified by the Independent National Electoral Commission to enter the contest, only a handful justified their registration status in terms of their electioneering outings, especially the Government All Progressive Congress, the major opposition people's Democratic Party and the Labour Party, won many assembly seats, House of Representatives and Senatorial Sits, in addition to the impressive outings in the Governorship election. Now, apart from the big three, the All Progressive Grand Alliance, Young Progressive Party and the African Democratic Congress also made some impact. However, a few weeks after the election, some of the parties still have been enmeshed in different crises. Some are deep as threshing to tear the parties apart. To discuss this with us, we're being joined by two political analysts, Ambrose Igboke and Shegong Shobitang. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for joining us. Good evening. Thanks for having me. Good evening, Nigerians. Great. Good evening. Let me start with you, Ambrose. As you know, because of Nigeria, Michael Zekome was speaking recently to the punch newspaper, and he may reference to the fact that one of the major issues that causes crises in political parties right after the election is because that part of or that time after the election is, according to him, a time of loot sharing. And that is why we see a lot of people at the helm of affairs in political parties going at each other's throats. What do you make of this statement by Michael Zekome? Well, I think Michael Zekome has been a participant in the electioneering himself. He contested one election in a two-state. Well, I tend to differ with his, the Erudite lawyer, because first of all, there would be a lot of bickering if the processes or primaries in the political parties are credible, transparent, and devoid of some interest that we see playing out. The bickering always starts from not having level ground or fairly among contestants for primaries in the political parties. So that is why, first of all, if you find out some of the grievances that have been tailored by the tribuna, you will find that most of them are pre-electron martyrs. Many of these things are pre-electron martyrs bordering on who is the rightful candidate of a political party who was wrongly, you know, outsmarted in the political process for the primaries. The looting, or whatever he called the looting, is usually, you know, during after the government has been sworn in, or now that the president-elect or governor-elect have been declared, that is where you will not go to a people lobby to get political positions and all that, and then to see who can be appointed for different positions. But ultimately, I think the bickering always comes from the fact that some members of the political parties feel aggrieved that they were not given level playing ground. Some of them were, you know, unanimously forced out of the party. Some of them were refused the chance to even pay for party forms. Some of them were screened out unjustly. So all these things come to play. Some of the political parties, the party hierarchy just, you know, unilaterally impose candidates on the political party and call it primaries. So because of, you know, the grievances by political party members, most of them not go to the tribuna, you know, fighting the outcome of their primaries, first of all. And then there are also the other opposition party who feels just changing the electoral process, also challenging the INEC and then the winning party. So I think it is what bothers not on loot sharing, it bothers more on the fact that the processes that throw up candidates in the primaries of political parties and then the processes that throw up elected candidates, even in the general elections conducted by INEC, are the basic problems. Why there are grievances in both processes. We are free, fair, credible and transparent. People will pick up the phone and call the winners. But because there are always issues in terms of transparency and credibility, that is why such grievances are much. So that is the pain of the problem. So I don't subscribe to the part. Why not share maybe some impetissima part of the problem? The major problem is lack of transparency in the electoral process. Okay, Shagrut, let me come to you. Again, quoting the senior advocate of Nigeria, he says, and I quote, Nigerian politics is amala politics, common job politics. Ours is politics and democracy of Stomach. Politicians don't practice democracy here. All they look out for, according to him, is how they have their hands in the till. But let's go back to what Ambrose just said. Not being able to get the processes from the get go. Why do you think this has continuously eluded us, even in our so many years of nascent democracy? Well, thanks, Marianne. I tend to agree with Azecombe Fan, the acclaimed lawyer. With some of his assertions, you know, especially with regards to the motivation, what exactly is it that motivates the actions of a larger percentage of our politicians, you find that invariably and ultimately, most of them are driven by personal interests rather than the common good. So to that extent, I would agree with him. But having said that, then, to answer your question, you know, one of the other things that we do have as a problem as a country is the might is right philosophy, if you like. The fact that impunity is a culture for us as a country. And that speaks to what my colleague has just talked about in part, in that a lot of our political parties, a lot of the political actors, the leadership of these parties, driven by personal interests rather than the national interests of the common good, tends to pursue agendas, tends to pursue intrigues, calculations that will further deepen and entrench their hold on power. And in so doing, they will do whatever it will take, including cloud laws of the land, cloud the rules guiding their own party and the conduct of their affairs of such parties, and so on and so forth. So invariably, you find that people in power generally, in part, whether they're politicians or otherwise, people in power generally in Nigeria will tend to conduct themselves in a manner that suggests that they think that they are above the law and whatever they do, they'll find a way to wrangle it through. And going back to what Barista or Zekome said, I think he also needs to remember and look in the mirror, look at himself and his colleagues, and the role that they play in how these events tend to play out. Because what the politicians do is that they deliberately do the wrong thing, they deliberately ignore the provisions of whatever laws or rules that are guiding their conduct, knowing fully well that to secure, to overturn those decisions in court can be very challenging because they would have the support and the, if you like, connivance of members of the judiciary, whether at the bench or at the bar. So it's easy for him to speak about the Amala politics, but maybe we should also talk about Amala jurisprudence. So for me, I think the challenge we have is, as a country, we need to continue to fight for a situation where people in power can be held accountable by the people they are governing or that they're ruling over. The more we lean in that direction, the less that we have these types of situations that will eventually then throw these parties and these associations and these groupings into crisis or from crisis. If you Google, if you go on Google and just say APC crisis, it's so laughable that you always find every year there is one crisis or the other in the APC. Every year, year in, year out, election cycle after election cycle, there's a crisis in the PDP. Even the Labour Party that has just recently gained national prominence is already embroiled in crisis. And if you look at the underlying issues, you find that it will not be too far away from the fact that people will just stand up, make a pronouncement that is completely unreasonable, that is completely out of variance with the provisions of the constitution of those parties. And then, you know, they go about and parade themselves in whatever manner that they choose, knowing that overturning those actions can be very difficult in the course of life. So these things are fundamental to the way our society works and we need to, you know, we need to continue to fine tune, you know, these things. Let me come back to you, Ambrose. Now, earlier week after the presidential elections and national assembly elections, we saw the APC National Vice-Chairman, Northwest Salih Lukman calling for the resignation of the party chairman and also hinging his demand on the need for religious balance in the power sharing, you know, equation. And this has dragged on for so long. There has been calls for a meeting to be held so that these issues be dealt with. And don't forget, we're getting ready for May 29. For the ruling party, I mean, the PDP had its fair share of drama just before the elections. Many would even tie their loss to, you know, some of the internal wranglings. But looking at the ruling party and this thing that they have to deal with barely a few weeks before the elections, do we see it fading into the background or not? Well, I think that that call is for the best, I would say, is unreasonable. It is a distraction. Why we are trying to focus on what the new governments that we enter has for Nigeria. For example, the constitution of the cabinet, policy direction, the vision, mid-term vision, short-term vision, mid-term vision and long-term vision surface of the incoming administration, how to reposition the economy, how to get out of the huge and humongous debts debacle that is hanging on us both internal and external debt, how to restructure the production sector, how to improve our exports and what how to do to reduce capital flight we have especially through the exportation of food oil and bringing it into Nigeria as refined products. So there's a lot to be done. So this kind of destruction is not what we need. The gentleman who is shouting hoarses now was there when the APC went ahead to do a Muslim-Muslim ticket. Where was he then? And where was he when, where was his voice? When people spoke against a certain arrangement. So I think we have passed that the APC have done what it wants to do in terms of the long, sticking to the agreement of ethnic or religious balancing in the power architecture of Nigeria. So we have passed that stage. The elections have been done. The elections have been won and lost. Great parties are already in the tribunal. So we wait for the outcome of judgment. But as of now, we have a winner that is declared by INEG. And so bringing out this kind of things is what we are talking about. People are already talking about how to look at into the issue of, will I say, trying to afford shun slots for different geopolitical zones in terms of power sharing arrangements. So we are looking at power sharing on a national scale. How to, who is going to be the select president? Which zone is it going to come from? The House of Representatives, the circuitry to the federal government, all those power structures so that you have a fair representation of the regionality, ethnicity, and religiousity of Nigeria. So he should not be talking about his party issues right now. That is not what Nigeria is interested in. We should be focused on how to unite the country because this last election was a divisive one. We're having a lot of division among the various groups and religion. And religion was played more than national policies. And this is very bad for the country. I mean, see the example of what is happening in Sudan. Sudan played that card for a very long time. And even after they separated the country and gave it the feathers to each according to religious leaning, we can see that the war in the North continued. So it is not a question of religion. It's not a question of ethnicity. It's not a question of where we come from. It's actually a question of our mindset. Just like my colleague said, our mindset is dictated on the negative. I don't know why. So we don't have a national ideology. We don't have a national ethos that we can key into. We need that. When you go to the United States for example, there's a national ethos. Serious countries like Britain, even Ghana here, they have national ethos. For example, we say America is American first. It's a national ideology that drives every citizen, that drives every sector and institution. We need that kind of ethos. If we don't have it, then all we're going to be doing is just say, moving around, cycling, movement without motion. Emotion without movement. And there will just be spinning around like a papa's chair, we're going nowhere. So this is the time to remain focused. And we plead with politicians, not to throw up all this kind of frivolities at this point in time to allow us focus. They should go and solve their internal party problems. I don't disturb the national discussion at this stage. That is a submission I want all the politicians to embrace. And if I may just talk a little about Amala politics, I think all of us are eating the Amala at the level that it will be. Just as my colleague said in the judiciary also, in fact, after election, it is time to prepare a huge bowl of Amala. They see it as business. These are judiciary, you see a lot of lawyers now that will become multimillionaires because of petition issues. So this cycle continues after every side, every end. And that's what we must look into. In terms of what a party found in too, people in the big dress formed political parties in this country. And that to what are the cost of a lot of issues. They say they see it as an investment, as a business investment and not for altruistic nationalistic reasons. No, when somebody keys in billions of dollars for an election, he expects reward. And that is what causes a lot of the problem. So party funding is very, very important. How elections, the teachers are also funded are very, very important. We don't get these routes and costs analysis, right? Yeah, we are not going anywhere. So it's the time to look into how we conduct our election, how parties are funded and the outcomes of this so that we can go back to rejoin board and see how we can redirect our systems to the right path. Interesting. You literally went into the area of my next question to Shagun because, you know, every time we talk about how we play politics in Nigeria, the issue of ideologies always creep up and you gave some explanation to me, but Shagun, I want to ask the role of ideologies in Nigerian policy because, you know, if you ask now, there is none whatsoever. I mean, our democracy, as nascent as it is, we keep saying that it's still a growing democracy. Have we not come of age where we can start defining, you know, the ideologies of the different political parties as opposed to making promises or using logos to differentiate these political parties? Just like Ambrose said, in different parts of the world and countries that are poster childs for, you know, democracies, we see the green parties, the independents, the Republicans and the Democrats, and in the UK, you have the Tories and, you know, the Labour, you have the Lip Dems and you have all kinds of people and they have ideologies, Klerkot ideologies that make them stand, you know, unique, that stand out and of course helps people to decide where they want to go. In Nigeria's case, it looks like it's, it goes to the highest bidder. And quickly, to add to what Ambrose said, he talked about Patti funding. There is the new electoral act that's been amended. There are rules and regulations as opposed to a cap when it comes to the funding of political parties. But yet, it's very difficult to get political parties to make public the accounts and for us to know who's funding and who's not funding. If we're unable to get all of these things in place, how ready are we to really have free, fair and credible elections? Well, on the question of ideology, we are a long way off and my guess is that we may never get there. I know that that might sound fatalistic, but, you know, for me, the fundamental problem and the fundamental reason why parties lack ideology, especially in our recent experience, may be in the earlier years of our national journey, you know, in the 60s, for example. You could say that there was some sort of ideology guiding the practice of politics at that time. But you see, there's a correlation between the decline in the ideological leaning and the ideological bent, ideological foundation of these political parties and an increase in corruption in our society and the centralization of power. You know, the fact that we moved from this regional thing and eventually, thanks to the unitary, we ended up with a unitary system of government where all power resided in one human being at the center. You see, leaning from that and leading from that, ideology was bound to die. Because, you know, the point behind an ideology is to say that as a human being, I stand for something and I would like to see that thing that I stand for promoted in the national space. So, for example, I could say that I'm a capitalist by nature or I'm a socialist by nature or maybe I'm even a communist, you know, and so on and so forth. And then, because I'm a capitalist, I would like to see a situation where my country allows free markets, free enterprise to drive national development. If I was a socialist, I would say, no, no, no, no, you can't leave, you know, the national development question to the free markets. It will never work. No, you have to take responsibility for the welfare of the people. So the state must be big, the state must be well funded, the state must do this and that to further the interest of the common man and protect the most vulnerable in society. You know, that would be the things that would be driving the political actions of our political actors. But in Nigeria, what we found is that we further and way we moved, you know, from representing governance and moved into a unitary style of governance. The more we moved into corruption and the more the motivating factor for our political actors became their personal interest, their share of the loot. So ideology is completely useless when my objective of going into office is to enrich myself where politics has become the fastest way to personal freedom, financial freedom, rather than a call to serve. In other parts of the world, what you find is that majority of the people that go into politics are successful already in private enterprise. They have done well, they have succeeded at excel. They have shown what they are capable of doing and then they say, no, I want to serve my people with all of this skills that I've acquired. In Nigeria, it is exactly the opposite. So you find a situation where the worst amongst us who are abled by some means or the other to walk their way into the corridors of power are the ones that lead us and their objective is simply to make themselves rich. So ideology will die. Therefore, it will be easy for me to jump from the APC today to the PDP tomorrow, to Labour Party, to LNPP and any other party as long as that beckon will guarantee my access to the loot. And I think that this is the fundamental thing. So first of all, before we can get to a situation where party ideology is returned, where parties are run based on some sort of shared common ideas amongst the players, you would have to devolve powers. You would have to make public office unattractive. Right now, it is simply to attract them to get into power. I will do whatever it takes, including shove ideology down into the darkest recesses of wherever I can hide it. Because at the volume of resources that are simply available to me as a president or as a governor just makes ideology completely pointless. So if I am a governor and I have access to one billionaire, million, one billionaire, for example, every month that I do not, by law, need to account for, what ideology are we talking about? If I'm as a president, I have security boots running into billions of dollars every year, what ideology are we talking about? We need to fix our government structures, our government systems before we can now begin to talk about our political systems and our political structure that will ensure that the best of us, people that are thinkers, people that have philosophies are the ones that would emerge into the national space. Talking about the party funding issue, it's still revolving around the same conundrum of impunity and all of that. Look, how can INEC monitor party funding sources as provided in the Electoral Act when INEC itself is under-resourced or completely compromised at all times by the political actors who have captured the state and captured the resources of state and therefore have a watches that nobody can resist, that the court cannot stand against. So we have fundamental problems that have just boxed Nigeria into a corner and put us in a circumstance, to a situation that is very difficult to extricate ourselves from. So for me, it will take some visionary leader to emerge who would say with courage and stand and sear down these structures and these machineries that have been put in place to capture the state by political actors until that day. We just continue to try our best. We have just one minute and I'm going to give this one minute to Ambrus. Ambrus, quickly, looking at what's happening in the PDP, as we know, there's an acting chairman for the party, Hutukoba from IU, his name is Damagum. Now, with Damagum, who's a Muslim and a North Easterner sitting at the helm of affairs, do you see peace returning to the PDP any time soon? The Shakespearean book called the Macbeths. PDP has more than sleep, and PDP has no sleep no more. The PDP got it wrong. On site of preparation for this 2023 election, the PDP enthroned this power rotation among the North and the South in the presidency. And when it was now torn for the PDP to make a bold statement, having had eight years of Northern leadership in the presidency, the PDP had it that the presidency should naturally revolve to the South. But what did the PDP do? The PDP started playing to the gallery. The PDP started maruling and dribbling our collective sense of equity by saying that through it's open, whatever that means, should the presidency open, when the presidency was naturally supposed to come to the South, after it not has had eight years. And so they treat it open and see what happened. They produce another candidate. And that was what really, really upsets the apple cart in PDP. And they may not be able to recover from this by merely changing the national chairman of the PDP. That is not the crux of the matter. The crux of the matter was that a particular principle that they brought into the national political language was being troketed by the very people that brought it in for very selfish reasons. Okay, we have to go. At the end of the day, the deed has been done and they cannot recover from this, just by merely changing the national chairman. Well, all that will happen within the PDP remains to be seen. But I want to say thank you, Shagu Shopita and Ambrose Igboke, our both political analysts. Thank you so much gentlemen for doing justice to this topic. Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right, well, we will take a quick break when we return. We'll be talking about the intrigues amongst the House of Representative members following the decision by a senator to pick who would be heading, of course, the committee in the National Assembly. Stay with us.