How are you'' Can we speak on phone''was a message in- boxed on Facebook by a prominent politician in the South West to a long lost colleague. Apparently the gap in contacts between them over the recent years had also robbed the 'Facebooker' of the telephone number of the other person. However, that he chose an unusual platform like the Facebook to reestablish contacts with the other person underscored the importance of whatever he wanted to discuss. The move proved to be the beginning of a renewed flurry of activities in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the South West. So many moves are currently being made at the same time, so many fences are being mended that show clearly that a battle for the soul of the party is at hand' And as cracks get cemented in some areas, chasms surface in others. From Sokoto, where a Senator Gada is brewing battle with Governor Wamakko, to Kogi where it took a court to invest one of the governorship aspirants with the party's flag, to Bayelsa in the Niger Delta where aspirants get blocked and unblocked, the ruling party is currently at war with itself.In the ACN, a party that controls five of the six South West states, managing success has proven to be as difficult as the very act of dislodging the PDP. From Lagos to Osogbo, Ado Ekiti to Abeokuta and Ibadan, restiveness of members has continued to unsettle the party, its various governments and governors. In Oyo, Ogun, Osun and Ekiti, the ACN has been severely weakened by the huge expectations which go with a party taking political power. Two very recent stakeholders meetings held in Osogbo by the ACN have not exactly pacified elements who feel left out in the running of their government. The alleged imposition of local government candidates and the autocracy of its leaders in Lagos robbed the ACN of a clean and clear victory in the last council polls. For the first time since 1999, the ruling elite in Lagos were racked by the effects of their own peculiar buccaneer politics. The party was hemorrhaged. At the national level, it took ACN several parleys, formal and informal, before frayed nerves were calmed over the sharing of posts, particularly at the National Assembly. The rebelling party members could be justified. Bernard Bosanquet, a political theorist, argues that while the community expects certain obligations from the individual, 'we are equally right to ask of the community what it is doing for this man.' To an average party man in Nigeria, you cannot demand loyalty and electoral support from a man in days of battle and then turn round to shun him in the 'sharing of the spoils of war.'Students of politics have always posited that it is a zero-sum game where one's success depends on the choices of others. It is an enterprise where one man's gain is loss to the other participants. As such, they reason, successful players of the game of politics are almost always those who have found or developed tactics that ensure their winning the game. And to win, you need ardent supporters who have their own needs and motives for following the leader.That is why managing political success has always been difficult for political parties, especially in the third world where office appointments are most times compensatory rather than service for public good. Even in the PDP with the enormous powers at its disposal, there are still forces contending for attention and patronage. In the South West where it is no longer in power, elements fight over spilt milk blaming their personal material failure or inadequacies on those who controlled the affairs of their governments. John Stuart Mill posits that the 'desire for one's own greatest pleasure is the individual's only motive. ' But he also spares a thought for the mass of the people as he adds that 'the greatest happiness of everyone is at once, the standard of social good and the object of all moral action.' However, in the Nigerian political space, today, what is in issue is the interest of politicians and their supporters. In all the struggles currently going on, the people are not in issue. Because man is inherently self-preserving and self-promoting, what one sees in the major political parties in all zones of the country, is the spectacle of those who are not in government seeing those inside as appropriating the fruits of their collective sweat. So, there won't be peace.Again, because parties exist to form governments, as they battle internal dissension, the parties also range to level those on the other side of the various political divides. Mill says 'government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands of whoever is the strongest power in society,' That is why a party like the ACN, despite its holier-than-thou posturing, continues to poach the PDP for membership with the right quantity and quality that could invest it with the required strength to get power.Other known parties, particularly Labour, APGA and the ANPP are seen generally as deriving their sap from the ruling PDP. Whatever problems they have are manifestations of the insidious machinations of those who would not let them be. The Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) has continued to maintain a straight face, pretending to be different. But it has not got over the debilitating migraine of its missteps in the last elections. Today, CPC's most visible apostle is Mallam Nasir El Rufai, who appears to have taken tweeting and retweeting attacks on the PDP and its government as a full time job.The reality is that from next month when a governorship election will hold in Kogi State, there will no longer be any breathing space for the laid-back in the turf of politics and politicking. This fact appears to be driving efforts in all parties and party camps into taking steps and measures designed to weaken the opposition. Even within individual political parties, rumblings are far louder, for now, than cries of the real battle with the enemy outside.Now, let us ask: Will these political parties pull through with their current troubles' St Augustine, in his book, City of God, argues that man by nature is both body and spirit with duality of interests. The parties as living beings, will continue to have problems if they lose their soul to self serving hedonistic principles of the ungodly.
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