New year window â€” The Nation Editorial

News Express |9th Jan 2022 | 810

This is one of those calendars when the wish of a happy new year bears a great deal of political resonance. It is an election year in the sense that two major polls, in Osun State and Ekiti State, will invoke the gubernatorial choices of their citizens.

But more broadly, it is the prelude to Nigeria’s major democratic rites. It is the year that major political parties will chart their path for the next half decade at least, if not a full decade. The parties will pick their major officers. They will convene conventions that should help them mollify internecine rages, placate mammoth egos, navigate ethnocentric bigotry and inclinations, sue for general peace and decide who should be their point persons in key positions in the general elections billed for 2023.

It is true the race for a general election begins after a general election. But it is never more tense and never more febrile than when the door opens for campaigns, candidates are nominated and deadlines erupt whether in the parties in primary quests or in the National Electoral Commission.

It is often an uncertain time in the country. We see individuals duel for positions, aggregate interests and try to win either by following the rules or by overthrowing them

That is when the social and political peace is at the mercies of perverted men and so the fabrics sometimes creak and crinkle. We see persons of great influence and affluence who deploy their resources to stamp despotic ideas and interests on the political parties.

As we begin the year, the two major parties, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), hold the nation in their grips. It is the nature of de facto two-party states. One of such is the United States with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party sometimes called the Grand Old Party (GOP).

Osun State and Ekiti State will show us a hint of what is to come. We want to cheer at the Anambra State governor poll that ended as a joyful anti-climax. The winner Chukwuma Soludo will be sworn in this year.

While the PDP has arrived at his party helmsman, it still has a convention to hold in order to resolve quite a number of issues. One of such is whether it wants its party to discountenance a convention of rotating the presidency between north and south, in which case the party has to chew whether its version of democracy will chose hegemony over accommodation. That remains nebulous as some of its key contenders have forsworn rotation and are couching it in terms of competence as though any region monopolises ability.

Wherever they go, they have to be sensitive to the multi-ethnic profile of the nation. Again, the APC also has choices to make. It has fixed February for its convention, but it has not decided on the date. The internal unease within the party leadership has stirred much fear as to whether the party has or can ever design a formula for peace or find the time and avenue to do it.