It is difficult to be sanguine about the current state of politics in Nigeria. Just when Nigerians thought they had ejected the shambolic and out-of-touch People’s Democratic Party (PDP) from power after 16 years and put in its place the “change-agent” and “people-oriented” All Progressives Congress (APC), the sad reality is that nothing has changed. For instance, barely two months as Nigeria’s new governing party, the APC is in disarray. Its leadership is paralysed by oligarchic rivalries, and party discipline is being sacrificed on the altar of the personal ambitions of APC legislators. Yet party discipline is an essential element of any modern democracy. So, permit me to address this concept in the context of the National Assembly crisis.

Party discipline refers to the ability of a party’s leadership to control its members in the legislature and get them to support the party line. This is important for all systems of government, like ours, that allow parties to hold political power. The Nigerian Constitution accords primacy to political parties in the electoral system. For instance, no person can be elected as a lawmaker unless “he is a member of a political party and is sponsored by that party”, and any serving legislator who decamps to another party must vacate his seat unless his original party is divided or merges with another. The constitution thus puts party discipline at the heart of Nigeria’s party system.

However, in truth, there is no absolute party discipline anywhere, except in China and North Korea. Dissents and rebellions are common in modern political parties. Often, these arise because of disagreements on matters of conscience or the individual ambitions of legislators. Most Western political parties tolerate internal dissents on matters of conscience (such as the legalisation of gay marriage or abortion). But few would allow dissents motivated by personal ambitions, such as voting against the party’s candidates for offices in the legislature.

To be sure, political parties normally meet before the elections of presiding officers for a legislature to decide on their candidates. There is nothing unusual about that. Of course, it’s the prerogative of the legislators to choose their own presiding officers. But every party is entitled to expect its members to vote for its candidates. However, there could be dissents, even in the West. Take one example from the UK. In 2009, the Conservative party decided that Sir George Young, a senior Tory MP, should be its candidate for the Speaker of the House of Commons. But another Conservative MP, John Bercow, also wanted the job. The Tory leadership didn’t want Bercow for the role, but the Labour party backed him. So, in the election, Bercow relied on Labour bloc votes to beat Sir George, his party’s candidate.

That was exactly what happened in 2011 when Aminu Tambuwal defied his then party, PDP, and relied on the bloc votes of then Action Congress of Nigeria to defeat his party’s choice for Speaker of the House of Representatives. And it’s exactly what happened recently when, in a tit-for-tat, PDP senators and PDP members of the House colluded with a few APC lawmakers to vote for Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara as Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives, respectively, instead of APC’s preferred candidates.

What Tambuwal, Saraki and Dogara did is therefore not without precedent even in advanced democracies. Self-interest and personal ambitions often drive politicians to breach party discipline. Elsewhere, however, such rebellions would attract consequences. For instance, in the UK, any MP who rebels against his party may never be given a ministerial position. And in the US, a member of Congress who votes against his party’s candidate or, even worse, for other party’s candidate may lose his seniority. In 2000, for example, one Democratic Congressman voted for a Republican. He was stripped of his seniority and lost all of his Committee posts. So, let’s be clear: in other climes Saraki and Dogara would face serious consequences for their breach of party discipline.

Saraki’s case is even more reprehensible because of the flawed process of his election. Those who hide behind a quorum to justify his election regardless of the absence of 52 APC senators, including his main opponent, ignore the wider question of propriety. If forming a quorum is all that matters, then let’s consider this scenario. The quorum is one-third of 109 senators, that is, 36 or 37. PDP has 49 senators, which is more than the quorum. Now, assuming that only the 49 PDP senators were present at the Senate session, would the clerk still go ahead with the elections just because a quorum was formed? He could in theory, but in practice, considering the political context, a wise and politically neutral clerk would not hold such a crucial election with all or most senators from the governing party absent, purportedly attending a political meeting with the president. With the governing party in crisis over its choice for Senate President, the clerk should have been more politically sensitive. It was thus wrong to elect Saraki “unopposed” when he had an opponent who would have wanted to participate in the election. The clerk of the House of Commons or the US Congress would not conduct the election of the Speaker with more than 90 percent of lawmakers from the governing party absent or with only one of the main candidates present, notwithstanding that a quorum is formed.

The election of Saraki was tainted by the perception that his group and the PDP were in cahoots with the clerk to wrong-foot his opponents. That’s not how the country’s third most important political officer holder should be elected. Rather predictably, but unfortunately, the clerk described Saraki’s election as “divine” and Saraki himself attributed it to “fate and destiny”. This was an attempt to use God to justify an act of impunity! Instead of hiding behind the technicality of a quorum, Saraki and the clerk should have insisted on a fair and transparent election. Nigeria’s Senate President, the head of its legislative arm, should not have been elected under such a cloak-and-dagger operation!

Then, there was the emergence of Ike Ekweremadu, a PDP senator, as Deputy Senate President. Now a bi-partisan Senate leadership is not a problem in a non-partisan setting. For instance, in the UK, the combination of Speaker and three Deputy Speakers are drawn equally from the Government and Opposition Benches, so that if the Speaker is from the Conservatives, two of his deputies must come from Labour. But this is a system where the Speaker must resign from his political party after election and be politically impartial. The Nigerian system, like that of the US, is adversarial and partisan. So, it’s not prudent to have a PDP senator as Deputy Senate President in an APC-controlled government and legislature.

My concern is that the ‘end justifies the means’ politics of Saraki and Dogara undermines the party system that underpins Nigeria’s fledgling democracy. Let’s recap the story: Saraki received the votes of only 8 of the 60 APC senators and Dogara those of 40 of the 225 APC members of the House of Representatives. Lacking the support of their party, but driven by self-interest and personal ambitions, they ran to their former party, PDP, and did a deal, which, in Saraki’s case, resulted in a PDP senator, instead of, legitimately, an APC one, becoming the Deputy Senate President. Furthermore, to consolidate his position, Saraki rejected his party’s choices for principal officers and, with a winner-takes-all mentality, put his loyalists in those positions instead. To some extent, Dogara is doing the same in the House of Representatives.

I repeat. No serious political party would condone these anti-party activities. The fact that the APC leadership balked at sanctioning Saraki and Dogara for their blatant and repeated breaches of party discipline shows how utterly weak and divided APC is. But how is it good for democracy and governance that a governing party is weak and dysfunctional? The main beneficiary, of course, is PDP, which will exploit the APC’s crisis and schism in the National Assembly for maximum advantage, as will powerful external forces. This will complicate matters for Buhari’s reform agenda. Without strong party discipline, the APC National Assembly crisis could cause serious political problems for the president. And the road could be bumpy indeed!