The Unending Structural Frailties Of The Labour Party (LP
By Mike Ikhariale
The structural frailties that have trailed the Labour Party (LP) since inception and up to the buildup to the last general election is regrettably not showing any appreciable sign of improvement. If anything, the Party and its logo graphically showcasing a united family of Papa, Mama and Pikin is now in disarray with things rapidly falling apart.
The Labour Party family has become a house divided against itself signaling serious problems ahead.
Traditionally, labour parties in most political systems are generally associated with workers and their unions. They are set up essentially to pursue the interests of members and their political orientation is usually unapologetic in its leaning to the left of the ideological spectrum.
It was probably that understanding that motivated some Nigerian labour chieftains in 2002 to form the party as a political vehicle for making their voices heard electorally and, if possible, win political power like their counterparts in the UK, Germany, South Africa, Australia. Of course, in most of the socialist countries of the world, “workers parties” are politically dominant.
So far, those who have emerged as Labour Party flagbearers in Nigeria have been mainly individuals who were drafted into the party or accommodated as political refugees fleeing from the other so-called established bourgeoise capitalist parties because the unions are materially incapable of fielding their own members as candidates to prosecute Nigeria’s costly partisan democratic electioneering processes. That explains how Peter Obi, a foremost banker, capitalist and business entrepreneur could become the presidential candidate of a supposedly workers party.
Most Nigerians who have “something to do” are actually “self-employed” in basically subsistence enterprises like farming, petty trading, artisanship, manual labourers and those in the creative industry while the rest is unemployed. Unionized wage-earning workers in Nigeria are very few, not enough to make any electoral impact at national elections like their counterparts in other climes.
In 2002, the party promoters, the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, submitted “The Party for Social Democrats” to INEC and it was so registered. They were probably aware that in a country where only very few people belong to trade unions, it would be better to enlarge the membership recruitment pool to include all those people with ideological sympathy for social justice, equal rights and welfarism.
When after the general election of 2003 the party discovered that it could not make considerable electoral inroad, the NLC leadership decided to change the name from the Party for Social Democracy to the Labour Party, ie, the party for the working class. It eventually secured its first political berth within the nation’s political space after Olusegun Mimiko, a grassroots politician who cut his political teeth right from his student days at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, eventually evolved into a political bigwig was frustrated by the then powers in Abuja in his governorship aspirations. He then took his grassroots supporters and other conscientious protesters against the prevalent injustice along with him to the Labour Party which then merely existed on paper. Surprisingly, he won the Ondo governorship race twice, 2009 and 2017. Mimiko thereafter dumped the special-purpose-vehicle which labour provided him with and returned to the PDP.
Obi, like Mimiko before him, also arrived at the LP with tons of goodwill and he immediately became the symbol of a “revolution” that was brewing against the ancient regime. It is worthy of note that his emergence in the Labour Party coincided with the general frustration of Nigerians with the political elite and their corruption-ladened political parties, a feeling that was exacerbated by the woeful performances of the President Buhari-led APC administration. People wanted a change and Obi deftly latched onto the thirst.
Given the present organizational level of the LP, it can realistically win targeted subnational elections occasionally as we have seen in Ondo with Mimiko and recently in Abia with Otti and it would require substantial infusion of resources, logistics and men, to achieve a nationwide win in our circumstance. The financial account of the party as openly rendered by Peter Obi himself recently, if accurate, did not show enough support from the party’s teeming supporters both at home and abroad. We don’t know what the running mate, Datti, contributed but Obi’s personal contribution of about 800 million Naira is, by the current political spending matrix of Nigeria, far less than what some governorship candidates spend.
Yes, LP says it does not give “shi shi” but when you are in the same political market with other more ambitious parties, you do not have the luxury of setting your own spending parameters.
Right now in the US, there’s the active comparison being made between what the Trump and Biden campaigns are raising for the electoral battle ahead and they are doing it in multiples of millions. You can then image what would be the electoral fate of a “stingy” political party in Nigeria’s highly monetized politics.
The fundamental question however was whether LP was strong enough to carry any politician to victory in a nationwide presidential election, no matter his or her personal popularity. In other words, analysts doubted the structural wellbeing of the party which has really not invested much in building political networking structures that would necessarily announce its presence across the variegated and tricky political landscape of Nigeria beyond the rowdy echo chambers of Social Media.
Expectedly, people who were emotionally involved in the task of “saving Nigeria” from the vandals in power blatantly refused to countenance that critical question of structure by saying that the “Obidients” do not need structures because they are the human structures required to win elections. The reality is that the “structural” question remains very critical in view of the constitutional provisions (sections 221 and 222) regarding the inevitable roles of political parties in the electioneering process. A political party seeking power at the center must have both paid and volunteering operatives guarding its interests across the nooks and corners of the country because any “blind spot” could upset everything, electorally speaking. Sadly, in the last election, LP had many political and legal blind spots, especially its misconstruing of INEC’s thought process about “transmission” and “transfer” of results versus what the Electoral Act textually prescribes.
While it was true that both the APC and the PDP, judging by their abysmal performances in office have “forfeited their rights” to power again, the Constitution is however very clear about the fact that you can only contest elections on the platforms of duly registered political parties and not just any “association” or “movement”, no matter how strong; the same principle rules out independent candidacy from Nigeria’s electoral process.
So, it is practically impossible to downplay the utility of party structures operating from the ward level up to the very top in Nigerian elections. The results of the election ultimately vindicated the importance of structures in competitive elections in all competitive democracies. Instead of consolidating on the gains resulting from Obi’s monumental showing, LP leadership comprising of Julius Abure, the national Chairman, Ajero, the President of the NLC, (the parent body of the LP) and the Obidients who form the bulk of the party’s membership on the other hand, have further weakened the party’s electoral viability to go forward. There have been mutual allegations of fraud, forgeries and other backhand activities within the LP that have seriously portrayed it as unserious and incapable of purposeful national leadership.
With the recent disclosures that the party’s certificate of registration is in the custody of the NLC, it would seem as if the much-denied structural frailties of the Labour Party is finally coming into bold reliefs. It simply means that the Ajero/Abure/Apapa spats have a much deeper provenance and, inevitably, negative electoral impact than most people, especially the Obidients, think. That much could be gathered from Kenneth Okonkwo, Obi’s former campaign spokesperson, who recently spoke rather dismissively about the possible implications of the open face-off between the NLC under Ajero and LP under Abure on the party’s viability down the road on Arise TV.
In defiance of the counsel of other key stakeholders of the Labour Party, Abure stubbornly went ahead with the party Convention held in Nnewi where he was “unanimously reelected” as the party’s Chairman. The so-called Convention was shunned by the party’s presidential candidate and other party chieftains, a fact which renders it a practical nullity.
Obi himself recently gave the frustrated hint that he may quit the party in view of the oddities surrounding Abure and Ajero who are both acting in apparent cohort to destroy the party from within. There has to be an operational distinction between running a trade union per se, and managing a complex political party.
Only political parties can prosecute elections in Nigeria but the LP, as it stands today, lacks the requisite organizational cohesion and institutional capacity to effectively do so unless a miracle happens. LP leaders should know that those effervescent political talking points such as the decadence of the old political parties, nepotistic maladministration, the need for power to shift from the North to the South and possibly, to the South-South, which drove Nigerians, especially the youth and the educated urban elite to Peter Obi in 2023 may no longer be that persuasive in 2027 especially if the incumbent is able to deftly navigate the mess such as the widespread insecurity and grinding poverty currently devastating the polity.
That is why anyone hoping for political power shift in 2027 and beyond should already be strategizing realistically both at the personal level and at the party’s superstructure level because sentimental sloganeering and emotional denialism laced with acidic abusive name-callings have their place while party machineries that are established solely for winning elections also have their place in our electoral system as clearly prescribed by the nation’s operative constitutional order.