Antonio Gramsci, the Italian theorist who reshaped socialism with his deep insight and reformulation of orthodox Marxism, may be scandalised in his grave that a conservative element like Atiku Abubakar is accused of putting his insights into use in the war of attrition which he has been waging against his boss in the last few years. But Gramsci would have no need to be so scandalised for there are no guarantees that the former Customs boss would ever have heard of the name of the late cerebral hunchback at any point. There are no Gramscis at the borders; they are usually found at the barricades.
Interesting enough, this is precisely the point at which Atiku Abubakar can be said to meet Gramsci. Having left the borders behind many years ago, the Vice-President has now arrived at the barricades, the habitat of Gramsci. But in great historical irony, it is not a choice that Abubakar made. It was a choice made for him by a myriad of circumstances and powerful personalities, the most important of which is his boss,
President Olusegun Obasanjo.
What then has the power monger got to do with the theorist of power?
Gramsci is the quintessential theorist of hegemony, counter-hegemony and revolutions. In his seminal works, the Italian had sought to re-order the processes of revolution as envisaged by Karl Marx and re-formulated by orthodox Marxists. For him, rather than the perpetual and unyielding focus on some coming catastrophic rupture within capitalism, daily ideological encounters with the ruling class, he argued, should be focused on a ‘war of position.’ This means that the leadership of the working class party should build alliances with other social movements opposed to capitalism. Fortresses are eventually dismantled by such strategic alliances in which the working class revolutionary party provides leadership. However, he saw this strictly as a long process rather than an event, even though he did not preclude sharp or even violent struggles.
The Italian theorist insisted to his comrades that the revolution should not be simply pursued through frontal attacks that attempt to smash the state; that the final stage must be preceded by a long and difficult period of the ‘war of position,’ during which the working class should undermine the ideas and values of the ruling classes and prepare a new national-popular collective will.
Atiku Abubakar more or less launched this war before Obasanjo was alerted to it. It was indeed politically naive to expect that a man who had such leverage and role in enthroning his boss would not seek to become the boss quite soon.
In the messy deals that preceded the presidential primaries of the
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2003, Abubakar simply humiliated his boss. But he can claim that it was not totally his will. The man had always wanted to be the president of Nigeria, even when many believed it could not have been his turn by any yardstick. People often forget that in similarly messy deals that produced Moshood Abiola’s candidacy for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) a decade earlier, General Shehu Yar’ Adua’s camp which Atiku represented as presidential aspirant, had, after entering into a gentleman’s agreement with the Abiola camp, attempted to play a fast one on the latter. But the Abiola camp was not totally honorable towards the pact itself as it feared that its aspirant might be supplanted by the former. In the end, one of the camps bought a contraband good, but ensured that it paid for it with counterfeit currency.
Abiola prevailed and Atiku reportedly left the convention grounds in utter anger at the “betrayal.”
Could 1993 have been on Atiku’s mind as he contemplated 2003? No one is certain, but it was clear that after Obasanjo reneged on his “promise” to serve only one term, not a few Atiku loyalists insisted that the man must confront and humiliate a president, who they had suspected was going to do much worse. And with the benefit of hindsight, they were right. In his confusion about whether to press his vaulting ambition in a collision with his boss or to allow his boss to do a second term and then clear the coast for him (Atiku) in return, Atiku reportedly compelled his immodest boss to literally kiss the dust in appeasement. Perhaps you could say it is a matter of utmost political illiteracy for Atiku to expect that, even though his support gave Obasanjo the party’s ticket, Obasanjo would forgive and forget and allow the deputy to pick up the presidency four years later. But you will be wrong, because the VP is not given to political indiscretion.
Yet, there were two critical errors committed by Abubakar as he gave
Obasanjo his support for the second term: One, he assumed – gravely, as it has turned out – that Obasanjo knew, and would observe, decent limits even under the worst of circumstances. The president knows no such limits to, even immoral, power. Two, the vice president assumed that given his strength in the party – and even outside it – there was no way a president who hardly had the support of more than one or two governors would supplant the man who literally had the party in his hands. Again, he was fatally wrong. As the months rolled by, Obasanjo felled the trees of Abubakar’s ambition one by one. Those trees that refused to be dug out were set ablaze. By the time Audu Ogbeh, Atiku’s chairman of the party, was asked to resign at gun point, it was clear that all methods foul and filthy would be employed to ensure that Obasanjo rules forever.
The consummate politician that the vice-president is, he appeared unruffled, ensuring that things appeared normal. He too began a most methodical, tactical and strategic assault on Obasanjo’s fortress. First, he moved stealthily. But because he was under a most severe watch, he eventually had to fire the first salvo that would lure the President out of his own diabolical designs. When Atiku Abubakar granted that interview where he claimed that Obasanjo swore to him that he would vacate power as stipulated by the Constitution they both swore to uphold, he knew that Obasanjo could not have made such a promise in the inner sanctum of power - where he was beginning to execute his desperate bid for life presidency. But Obasanjo played into Atiku’s hand with his angry response. In a reaction that raised questions of logic, if not of honesty, the President said he never swore to Abubakar, because in any case he never swore in his life. At the same time, he said when he asked Abubakar to swear on his loyalty, the latter refused to do so. So, how could a man who said his word was his bond ask another man to swear? The illogic of it escaped the President.
If anything, Obasanjo’s angry reactions confirmed the suspicion of many that the man was set on a dangerous path. The VP must have celebrated his “moral victory” over his boss. From then on, Obasanjo moved from one error to the other in his attempt to perpetuate himself while he assumed that he was gaining ground. On his part, the VP raised all sorts of alliances surreptitiously against the bid and in support of his own ambition. Unknown to some, the political camp that produced Abubakar Atiku – the Yar’ Adua political machine - even though it may lack the muscular vision of social good that energized the Obafemi Awolowo political family, it was the most comparable to it in terms of perpetual optimism.
The journey may be long and tortuous, but the Yar’ Adua political machine is always ready to trek. It is not for nothing that the man was more or less made vice-president even in death!
As Nigeria entered year 2006, which may yet become another annus horibilis as the year of the annulment, 1993, was described, Abubakar went for the jugular of the despicable administration of which he is second-in-command only on paper. While Obasanjo’s hirelings continued to throw poisoned arrows the VP’s way, Abubakar continued to widen the network of his support, on either the regional or the national basis of opposition to the violation of the Constitution and democracy. In no time, he was becoming a rallying point for democracy. Disparate – and even desperate – interests began to coalesce around him: Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Abubakar Rimi, Bola Tinubu, even Senator Ayo Fasanmi’s faction of Afenifere, and many more individuals and groups opposed to
Obasanjo started openly or discreetly linking up with the VP. By the time
Obasanjo made his last-ditch effort to declare any form of gathering against its subversion of the people’s will illegal a couple of weeks ago,
Abubakar had found his public voice. He declared himself a victim for democracy and taunted his boss: He that is down need fear no fall. They had humiliated him enough, there was nothing worse they could do. He however didn’t stop there. He challenged the President. When he opens his mouth, Atiku declared more or less, Obasanjo’s edifice of immoral power will come tumbling down.
Despite the sheepish attempt to embarrass him in Lagos last week,
President Obasanjo’s pathetic attempt to capture history has turned Atiku
Abubakar to the unofficial leader – of the emerging pro-democracy movement. This movement is today, surprisingly, not led by an Anthony Enahoro or Wole Soyinka, the veritable war-horses and victorious generals of past social and political wars; it is led by Atiku Abubakar. Truly democratic forces may find that embarrassing, but they have to live with it.
Is the process of the radicalization of Moshood Abiola, which turned perhaps one of the most hated agents of atavistic and reactionary power in the 1970s and 1980s Nigeria, to a hero and the symbol of democracy and ultimately to a martyr, again afoot? Will the organic unity of interests which ordinarily should unite an Obasanjo and an Abubakar prevent them from sinking together? Are the two men jointly courting disaster, or is one of them singly the next victim of that unfathomable abyss called power? Will the social thuggery that pretends to party leadership in the PDP save or sink both men?
Benito Mussolini, the famous Italian fascist knew the dangers of versatile and radical minds left to flower. He kept Gramsci in jail and wished that Gramsci’s “dangerous” mind could be stopped from functioning for at least twenty years. Inside jail, this man, who had all the physical disadvantages that a man would not hope for, wrote The Prison Notebook, which became his most celebrated, and perhaps, most painstaking, work.
He argues that, “(A) final stage of revolutionary struggle must be prepared for by a long and difficult period of the ‘war of position’, during which the working class should be able to undermine the ideas and values of the ruling classes and prepare a new national-popular collective will, in which it will be the hegemonic force.”
Gramsci is being trivialized in Nigeria. Ask Atiku Abubakar…
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