In Animal Farm (1945), the British George Orwell, in a shredding satire, tore into the humbug of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Each major character in that work depicted the humans that not only made the revolution inevitable, but also, its eventual abuse, absolutely predictable.
Mr. Jones, the brutal original owner of the animal farm, was the grim Czar Nicholas I. The “animals”, humans treated as mere beasts of burden, were the Russian working class — those the Hausa would call the Talakawa; and the Greeks, the hoi polloi.
The animals got rid of Mr. Jones, as the Soviets got rid of Nicholas I.
Old Major, pristine and idealistic, with eternal dreams of a more egalitarian society, was the ideologue Karl Marx; and Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who, with comrades, tried to press Marx’s idea to birth a mint-new Russia.
Napoleon, the pig that grabbed power for unfazed personal and clique use, was Joseph Stalin. Snowball, exiled for daring to differ; but still hunted to violent death in Mexico, was Leon Trotsky. Squealer was the propagandist-in-chief, who spread a new socialist slavery as the new heaven, milking the naïveté of the new Talakawa!
Still, Orwell was no disinterested intervener. Though a social democrat, he was wary of a new communist order, hawking magic cures for the old capitalist (dis)order!
But this is no tutorial on 20th century literary battlegrounds for contrasting European ideologies! It’s rather applying Animal Farm to the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), trying to graft a non-defection clause into its party business.
But again, from Animal Farm, this roaring renunciation: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”!
Yet, political parties, enshrining pre-poll non-defection clauses in their nomination forms, are highly welcome. Indeed, it’s a noble idea. Political parties now seem cynical tanks to ride into electoral battles, but to be junked no sooner than victory is won.
It’s good that politicians themselves are cringing from their own high immorality. Not a few have bluffed by the sheer hollow legality of it all: the Constitution has given clear grounds for which elected officials could defect.
That is true. But what stinks, from that cant, is glorying in the law as nothing but codified emptiness, without the guiding morality that, ab initio, prompted its making.
An elected person joining another party, without surrendering the mandate of his old party, is political prostitution pushed too far. But what chafes even more is that such has become so routine, as to approximate some rogue received wisdom. Sad!
Still, what gores, in the NDC case, is the high hypocrisy of those claiming to impose a corrective order. The party’s most visible trio, posturing archangels of partisan rectitude, are soaked in that very same turpitude.
To be fair, though, you must cut Seriake Dickson, the NDC national leader, some slacks — at least for his sense of moral outrage.
Two-term Bayelsa governor on the PDP platform and sitting senator by the grace of the same party, he shunned jumping ship into the ruling APC, as his Bayelsa successor, Governor Duoye Diri did, taking his PDP mandate into the APC.
But neither did Dickson vacate his senatorial seat too, after he successfully got NDC registered. Instead, he kept his seat, self-declared himself an “NDC senator”, mouthing the same legalistic crap other defectors use to justify their treachery.
At that point, moral outrage segued into self-serving opportunism. National Leader Dickson cannot decree and impose what himself does not have, can he? Again, it’s back to crass legalism minus the high morality that ennobles the law!
A report in The Nation Sunday of June 21 claimed both Peter Obi, the NDC-adopted presidential candidate for 2027; and Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, his running mate, both food-is-ready, election-season ticket hunters, had been exempted from signing the non-defection pact, as a precondition for their joint ticket.
If that is true, it would be unfortunate. Again, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than the others!
Who, more than other members of the party, deserve a tight leash, more than Obi and Kwankwaso? By this time in 2023, Obi, the unfazed capitalist, was strutting off the PDP, into the loud embrace of LP, the socialist party! The PDP’s presidential ticket had become a mirage, and he would rather make hay whilst the sun shone!
By 31 December 2025, Obi had plodded off the same LP, with starry eyes, towards Atiku Abubakar’s ADC, in search of that same Golden Fleece. As at the last count, Obi is a peripatetic veteran of many parties: APGA, PDP, LP, ADC, and now NDC!
Kwankwaso’s story is a tad less dramatic, but his wandering disease is not without a doubt: PDP to APC (to-and-back, between 1999 and 2019), before in 2023 hijacking the New Nigeria National Party (NNPP) for his Kwankwassiyya Movement, which romped him as the NNPP national leader!
Then, from NNPP to ADC, before he and Obi — forming the Obi-Kwankwaso (O-K) opportunistic ensemble — left to try their luck with Dickson’s NDC.
Still, a caveat: the same mutual opportunism that made the NNPP yield “national leader” to Kwankwaso — in exchange for his Kwankwassiyya Talakawa Kano votes — also drove his entry into NDC, to grab his vice-presidential ticket.
Besides, in all good conscience, how can Dickson subject Obi and Kwankwaso to any non-defection pact, when Dickson publicly begged the duo to join his newly registered party?
Also: how can Dickson walk his talk when he did not himself renounce his PDP senate seat, contest a new election, win it on the basis of his popularity on his new platform, and come back, as national leader to crow: “it’s signing the NDC non-defection pact or nothing!”?
Besides, when Hajiya Aishatu Dahiru Ahmed aka Binani, a passionate eyer of the Adamawa Government House, stormed and huffed off Atiku’s ADC, Dickson was the first to scramble to her hurt camp.
“Come join the NDC,” the national leader coaxed, “and everything would be sorted!” Binani has since joined; and has since grabbed the NDC guber ticket for Adamawa. Is she signing the non-defecting pact too — at the risk of losing her ticket?
Besides, which should be more binding to Binani: the Dickson sweetheart pitch to join? Or this latter-day pact against defection, should she become Adawama governor?
Or would all depend on the individual candidates the party can squeeze, not unlike the Chinua Achebe bully that hungers for a fight, only when he sees anyone he can maul?
That’s the neo-Animal Farm the NDC is entering, with this hardly enforceable pact. Maybe it’s for only those weak enough they can’t call the party’s bluff?
“In all honesty, we (NDC) are beneficiaries of cross-carpeting,” Cletus Ohamara, an NDC member in Abia State, declared rather starkly. “We were all members of other political parties before joining the NDC.” True talk — as they say in pidgin!
So, who will bell the cat? Yet, every party needs similar anti-defection clauses to stem this high prostitution, now ruling the political roost.
