You would expect that Julius Abure would be so proud of the unprecedented electoral success that the Labour Party (LP) achieved in 2023 under his watch as National Chairman that he would be loathe to do anything that could hurt the party’s interests. For the first time in the history of the Workers’ Party in Nigeria, LP won one governorship, six senatorial and 34 House of Representatives seats in the 2023 general election, becoming the third largest party in Nigeria in just one year of intense politicking.
More importantly, LP’s candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, practically won the presidency but for the well documented shenanigans of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the judiciary and Nigeria’s bone-deep anti-democratic political establishment. Even then, LP still performed feats that couldn’t have been imagined possible before the presidential election of February 25, 2023. In Lagos, it defeated all the other parties in the presidential election, including the All Progressives Congress (APC), which was eventually declared winner of the presidential election by INEC. It also defeated all the other parties in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, and in the strategic North Central State of Plateau. And by INEC’s vote counts, LP’s presidential candidate scored 6m+ votes, to another 6m+ votes by PDP’s candidate, to the winning 8m+ votes by APC’s candidate and now president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
All these and more were positive developments in LP for which Abure should justifiably take credit and be glad in it, unshaken and uncompromising in his resolve not to do anything that could hurt the party’s political interests, but to help it to achieve greater heights going forward, whether or not he remained the chairman.
But not a chance, not for Abure! As if bent on destroying his own history, the former National Chairman of LP, to the consternation of all party stakeholders and millions of supporters and voters across the country, chose, instead, to plot self-perpetuation in office as LP’s National Chairman, not minding the deleterious effects of his actions on the party. And so, despite the obvious constitutional obstacles in his way, including the fact that his tenure had expired and that the party could ill-afford to have its national leader (the presidential candidate) and chairman come from the same part of the country in political Nigeria, Abure pressed on, defying all entreaties from party elders, including from Peter Obi, to step back.
It is instructive that Abure adopted, as his own party-dismembering method, the same filibustering legal suits that Lamidi Apapa, the suspended Deputy National Chairman of the party, and obviously the first invidious tool in the hands of anti-democratic forces against LP, had used to try and stop the rising popularity of Abure and the LP before, during and after the 2023 presidential election. Were they working hand-in-glove with each other? Was the apparent antagonism between the two a smokescreen?
But no matter. Suffice it to recall that while Abure’s legal tango with Apapa lasted, the leadership and key stakeholders of the Labour Party had stood solidly behind the former National Chairman and fought Apapa to a standstill. But instead of leveraging such support to cement the unity it had spurred in the Labour Party and help the party to resolve any lingering leadership crisis, Abure turned to the courts, the exact same way Apapa did, to drive his tenure elongation scheme, sparking the leadership crisis that has engulfed the LP since after the 2023 presidential election.
Not only LP leaders and supporters but all lovers of democracy in Nigeria and in the Diaspora, were aghast that Abure scored what, however, turned out to be pyrrhic court victories against the Labour Party, one after another. But, every dog, they say, has its day. In a judgment on the 4th of last month, the Supreme Court was to set aside the earlier judgment of the Court of Appeal in favour of Abure and Co, ruling that only the political parties had the authority to determine their own leadership. By the ruling also, the Supreme Court dramatically reinforced the autonomy of the political parties in the management of their internal affairs, devoid of any external or judicial interference.
One had expected Abure, who had heavily relied on court rulings (rule of law) to justify his insistence on remaining national chairman in clear opposition to the caretaker arrangement brokered by the LP leadership and stakeholders, to obey that clear, unambiguous judgment of the Supreme Court, instead of resorting to clever legal interpretations of the judgment in a bid to cling onto to power as National Chairman. Thus, despite the judgment and, by extension, the validation of the internal crisis management arrangement represented by the 9-member National Caretaker Committee, Julius Abure has insisted on parading himself as LP’s National Chairman.
Now, one wonders: does Julius Abure profit from the crisis in the Labour Party in a manner not known to the rest of us? It would be a gross abuse of privilege if he does. But that is exactly what it seems. And we have to ask: who is egging Abure on; who is making him adopt the hardline position of either him or the party dies, as his hankering after the national chairman position, even in the face of a looming disintegration of the party, would appear to connote? Or what successful party manager as Abure has become, working with the phenomenal Peter Obi before and during the 2023 presidential electioneering and election, would watch unconcerned as as practically all the legislators elected on the platform of his party dump the party for another, as the Edo-born political party executive has done?
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, the legendary William Shakespeare was to write in the classic ‘Julius Caesar’. If Abure were acting without any external inducement, would he rather the party, which he led out of oblivion to national prominence, is consumed by his chairmanship ambition than that it grows beyond his expectations, in spite of his ambition?
Little known before the 2023 presidential election, Julius Abure has, to all intents and purposes, become a popular national figure, thanks to the LP. But he is also probably the only party leader who, in fits of irascibility, constantly throws potshots at the only Governor elected on the platform of his party, and at the party’s national leader and presidential candidate whose uncommon political sagacity and appeal had catapulted the Labour Party from nothing to a national phenomenon, and Abure to national limelight in under one year. What kind of party is the one Abure so desperately wants to continue leading without the support of Peter Obi or Governor Alex Otti or the Senators and legislators elected on the platform of the party? Empty shell? Perhaps.
Among Nigerian politicians, something called the Abure Syndrome may already be afoot. The Abure Syndrome speaks to the tendency among politicians to be disloyal to party and the Constitution, to act with total disregard for principles in their unabashed promotion of their selfish interests, in words and deeds, within the party.
There is the Abure Syndrome aplenty in the soulless high-profile defections that have all but depleted the former national ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the past few weeks, for example. One is not aware of any other political dispensation besides Nigeria, where a former national ruling party, which was once in power for 16 years, is almost inexorably on death-row because its leaders would rather the party dies than let go of their ambitions and or inter-personal animosities, which are identifiably at the core of PDP’s unending leadership crises.
The effortless ease with which political parties in Nigeria crumble once out of power, rankles. Disturbingly, it speaks to the depressing lack of ethos and altruism, even a sense of duty to country and citizens, that defines the conduct of public affairs by those in, or seeking, high public office in Nigeria. Many are hard put, for instance, to understand why the PDP and LP would appear to unconcernedly brook the seeming disembowelment of their set-ups by the ruling APC (effectively making a mockery of their democratic credentials), instead of pooling their resources to be able to provide a solid, uncompromising opposition to the ruling party.
With a combined 136 seats in the House of Representatives to APC’s 162 and 36 seats in the Senate to APC’s 60, why can the PDP and LP not work together to hold the APC’s feet to the fire in order to save Nigeria’s troubled democracy and the country from the ruling party’s leprous hands? And with 11 States (12 before Delta Governor, Sheriff Oborevwori’s recent defection to APC) under its control, why does the PDP continue to fail to put its house in order, after such a long period of bruising leadership crises?
Who is afraid of the opposition and, by that same token, democracy? Is Julius Abure a willing tool in the hands of enemies of democracy in Nigeria?
Twenty-five years after, democracy faces its worst existential threats in Nigeria, not from soldiers but from the politicians themselves. And nowhere are those threats more pronounced than in the state of the political parties. Too selfish and unpatriotic to create other strategic outlets for citizens to channel their political ambitions, the politicians have ensnared all of us with their design of political parties as the only vehicles by which all aspirations to political office in Nigeria are driven. No to independent candidacy, they insist. But that is not for any strategic national political interest but just so they can shut out effective competition from the polity while manipulating the system to revolve around their selfish elite interests and conspiracy.
Or isn’t it strange that politicians aren’t raising hell over the country’s creeping descent into a one-party state? Instead, the so-called opposition politicians, practically all of them, are gleefully moving, or ready to move, into the ruling party in droves. That is because for these people, democracy in these parts isn’t about moving the country and citizens to the next level of human development; it is all about Ayo Fayose’s stomach infrastructure, how to stay in power, or the corridors of power, and enjoy access to the common till in order to loot and loot and loot and never stop until death do part them.
To do away with the deleterious Abure Syndrome, therefore, the next citizens’ march should focus on getting the National Assembly (NASS) to open up the political space by legislating INDEPENDENT CANDIDACY into law, even before 2027.
