LAST Wednesday, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) formally began its campaign for the April general election by presenting its agenda and manifesto to the Nigerian public. It was a colourful and well attended function by party men and women, one of the few occasions, if any at all in this dipensation, when a political party made an effort to do some basic intellectual work to back its field operations and politicking.

It was a departure from the ‘jankara’ and motor park brand of politics we have witnessed in the last 12 years during which voters were fed with deafening propaganda from a public address system at a rally, promises that never got fulfilled. The ACN came that fateful Wednesday with a positive difference and every person present, who had wanted a politics of issues, seemed satisfied and happy. The only point of dissonance in the minds of people was how to reconcile those beautiful speeches and articulate programmes with the manifest undemocratic imposition of candidates by the same party during its recent primaries.

First to speak was Mr. Boss Mustapha, deputy national chairman of the party, as the national chairman, Chief Bisi Akande, was abroad. He (Mustapha) stated that the party was committed to deepening and defending democracy through politics of ideas and programmes. Then came Chief Audu Ogheh, chairman of the manifesto committee, who left no one in doubt that he was deeply involved in the drafting of that document. He said the ACN had come to realise that the current politics in Nigeria was unlike that of the Second Republic when political parties had ideologies and key programmes with which they were identified.

According to him, the defunct Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was known for its programme of free education, while the then National Party of Nigeria (NPN), to which he (Ogbeh) belonged, was known for its aggressive programmes on agriculture and housing. As a concrete proof that the ACN would return Nigeria to the politics of issues once again, Ogbeh went into details of what the party stood for and its programmes for the people.

On ideology, Ogbeh said “the party is founded on the ideology of social democracy and a contract between the people and their duly elected leaders in the context of a genuine democractic system in which the government is always responsible and accountable to the people. It is irrevocably committed to providing exemplary leadership by offering selfless service to the people to ensure their happiness and wellbeing at all times. In governance, it will be guided by the objective of promoting social justice, equity and fair play in the society.”

On the core values of the ACN, he said “for the realisation ot these fundamental objectives, the ACN fully subscribes to the core values as enshrined in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantee the right to life, property, freedom, happiness and respect for human dignity. ” The party, he said, was committed to equity and justice and would “develop a society in which all the people will have equal opportunities.”

This, according to the ACN manifesto, would help in addressing the crisis of development facing the country. The party paints the gloomy pictures of the Nigerian challenges this way: “With an estimated 154 million people, literacy rate is only 45 per cent , unemployment is as high as 33 per cent, while per capita income was below $350 in 2009.

‘’The country’s federal structure, designed to be a mechanism for mediating the competing interests of its ethnic, religious and regional groups, has all but crumbled, leading to agitations for self determination in the East, true federalism in the West, Sharia in the North and resource control in the Niger Delta.

“Out of sheer absence of trust and confidence among its peoples, political power in the country has been reduced to a commodity which must rotate between its constituent parts. The nation’s wealth, on the other hand, is cynically described by citizens as a cake, the sharing of which has become an embarrassing spectacle, representing one of the most interesting studies in how not to forge an enduring fiscal arrangement in modern times.”

Ogheh, a former national chairman of the PDP, said, “the current situation has not always been the case. A succession of bad policies and bad governance over the past few decades may be held responsible for this.’’ He pointed out that “it is imperative that we address the major sources of our political instability. These include the mass poverty in our country, the conflict generated by the unhealthy competition for the control of the nation’s economic and financial resources, massive public corruption, the high rate of unemployment, the high rate of illiteracy and rural neglect.”

He lamented that poverty had created many frustrated and disgruntled youths in Nigeria who resorted to crime and violence to vent their anger on the system, and that soldiers were now being drafted to contain recurring violence.

On the country’s budget pattern, the ACN, according to Chief Ogbeh, would ensure that the present situation whereby 75 per cent of the national budget is used for recurrent expenses would be reversed, thereby placing emphasis on capital budget so as to create infrastructure, which in turn would create jobs. The manifesto committee chairman also said that the party would implement a foreign policy based on reciprocity, while education would be treated as the right of every Nigerian.

Agriculture and housing, according to the manifesto, would be one of the jokers of the ACN administration. The party hopes to build one million houses every year and in the process created three million jobs.

In essence, the ACN would have created 12 million jobs in its first four years in office at the federal level. This sounds pretty good. Ogheh was emphatic that a functional agricultural and housing policy would wipe out unemployment and the rascals, who, in the opinion of the party, were resorting to crime and violence in the country due to their frustration and joblessness. The ACN manifesto calls them “the new army of disenchanted, angry bombers, anarchists, kidnappers and armed robbers who now make life unsafe for ur country.”

These are the hoodlums which the party’s presidential candidate, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, promised to wipe out together with corruption if he becomes the president of Nigeria. He has a reputation for fighting corruption and he promised to rid the nation of the social malaise. He also promised to provide the change that the country needed which, he said, must manifest in the form of transparent and accountable government. For school children, Ribadu promised to provide an egg and a cup of juice per day.

On parade was Lagos State governor, Raji Fashola, arguably the best product the ACN is marketing in its campaign because of his good performance in Lagos. In his speech, Fashola advised that both the president and state governors must carry civil servants along if they wanted to make progress. It was the absence of this, he claimed, that had hindered the PDP Federal Government from performing well.

The nation waits for the ACN to see if the manifesto, most likely written by those who will never be president or governors, would be implemented by the elected politicians who may have different interests from those of manifesto writers. It has to show that its internal democracy is good and that godfathers and powerful party chieftains would not control its governors and the meager resources available for them to serve the people. Even while the ceremony lasted, tongues wagged, and are still wagging, on why a party with such a beautiful manifesto would launch its presidential campaign without a vice presidential candidate. In any case, most of the gladiators in the party came from the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and the PDP that the ACN is vilifying.

Written by Okey Muogbo Tuesday, 22 February 2011