Of late, the issue of consensus candidacy has dominated our media and political landscapes. It started with the adoption of President Goodluck Jonathan, as the consensus presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party. He was offered the first refusal option, as it was called.
It is noteworthy that President Jonathan has not declared his intention to contest the 2015 presidential election. What his party seems to have done is to hand him a fait accompli, signalling their intention to field him and take advantage of the incumbency element in the upcoming presidential election.
Next was the adoption of Hon. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, the Chairman of House of Representatives Committee on Maritime and member, representing Udenu/Igbo Eze Federal Constituency, as the consensus governorship candidate of the PDP in Enugu State by the party’s stakeholders.
Since then, there have been issues, bordering on the propriety of endorsement and consensus candidacy, leading to the leadership of the PDP, issuing a warning to governors to act as umpires and not reveal their personal preferences. But have these endorsements negated the tenets of internal democracy? This question and some other related issues would be considered in this piece.
The United States of America is a veritable model of democracy and their practices and conventions of internal democracy have stood the test of time.  In this regard, President Gerald Ford was the 40^th vice president and the 38^th president of the United States of America. He held the distinction of becoming both the vice president and president without being elected into either of the offices.
Following the resignation of Spiro Agnew, then vice president over criminal allegations, President Richard Nixon, at the wake of the Watergate scandal, nominated Ford to fill the vacant position. Shortly after confirmation and inauguration, Nixon fell to the Watergate scandal and resigned, leading to the inauguration of Ford as president. He served out Nixon’s term.
At the Republican National Convention in 1976, then Governor Ronald Reagan of California, against better judgment, challenged incumbent President Ford at the Republican convention. In a highly acrimonious and divisive convention, Reagan was defeated with a very slim margin. However, as slim as the margin was, the lesson learnt is that he navigated against the current of the extant order then. That outing remains the last time till date an incumbent Republican president of the United States of America was challenged at his party’s primaries. The rest have followed the tradition of endorsement. For the Democratic Party, Jimmy Carter was the only post-1970 incumbent president seriously challenged at the party’s primaries. The spirited effort of Senator Kennedy expectedly hit the rocks.
Reagan, who defeated Carter in 1980 was endorsed in 1984. In his case, remarkably, there was not even a token challenge. He was simply returned unopposed. George Bush Sr., who succeeded Reagan in 1988, was endorsed by the Republican Party in 1992. He was nominated with about 2,163 votes to a miserable 18 by a token challenger.  Bill Clinton, who defeated President George Bush in 1992 was endorsed in 1996. His endorsement is particularly instructive because a lone opposition, who would not toe the party line was disclaimed in writing by the Democratic Party. He fought his case in court ending in an appeal, which was also dismissed, underscoring the right of the party to determine issues of electoral candidacy.
President George Bush Jr., who was elected in 2000, was endorsed in the 2004 primaries. Barak Obama, who was elected in 2008, was endorsed in 2012 by the Democratic Party. Three delegates who sought to be nominated by the Democratic Party were disqualified, one of who argued his case through the courts and lost.
Central to the issue of endorsements and party preferences is real politicking. Parties enter elections to win. To win therefore, necessitates joggling a variety of variables, chief of which is the electability of candidates, as is underpinned by geopolitics and other variables in our own situation. Whereas it is always convenient for public analysts possessed of romanticist ideals to appear to be championing antiseptic democratic practices, the hard reality is that in a competitive situation, what the real politician is after is victory, after which any leftover sense of imperfection, which is not in strict sense undemocratic, is straightened out through post election rapprochement.
The PDP is just surviving perhaps, till date the most life-threatening crisis of its existence. With over five state governors defecting to the All Progressive Congress, it knows it cannot afford to be exposed to further crises from which, in such eventuality it may not recover. This reality seems to be dictating their entreaties to President Goodluck Jonathan. In this regard, P.C.J. Adibe, a scholar and political scientist, in his seminal paper on endorsements, had indicated: “Because a political party is an agglomeration of various interests, it is quite normal for groupings and tendencies within a party to reach an agreement among themselves to present a common front on issues. In the defunct NCNC, for instance, the Zikist Movement represented an ideological tendency that was often at variance with the political inclinations of the party’s leadership.”
But beyond the foregoing, it is healthy democratic practice for individuals and groups to endorse candidates. To say that a governor is an umpire in the primaries of a state is to misplace facts and stifle free speech. The governor, like any other party member, is a party stakeholder and he is entitled to an opinion on who becomes the governor of his state whether in succession to himself or to any other. It will be proper for individuals, religious organisations, cultural organisations, students and all legitimate associations under the Constitution to be free to endorse candidates. Even the press endorses candidates through editorials. There is nothing to hide in a true democratic order. Endorsements help in perspectivising the trajectory of candidates.
Instructively, General Collin Powel, a Republican, in 2012 endorsed the candidature of Barak Obama, a Democrat. What appears to matter most is good faith and the disposition of contending interests to keep their differences within a manageable plane of order, after all elections are not war.
In endorsing this adumbration, P.C.J. Adibe further reminds us: “Consensus arrangement also played out in 1999 when prominent Yoruba leaders facilitated the emergence of Olu Falae as their preferred presidential candidate against the late Bola Ige under the platform of the AD. Similarly in 2006, Edwin Clarke and others formed what they called the South South Political Leaders Forum to present a ‘consensus candidate’ from the South South in 2007.  It is believed that pressures from the Edwin Clarke-led Forum partly influenced the choice of Goodluck Jonathan, who is from the South South, as the running mate of the late Umar Yar’Adua in the 2007 presidential election.”
There are other very compelling arguments for endorsement. Two examples will suffice here. The first is that elaborate party primaries are very divisive. They could be so acrimonious that the emerging candidate could be very gravely bruised leading to serious strictures that leave the party divided. A party emerging from this circumstance could suffer serious disadvantage against its opposition, which might be better strategically positioned as a benefit of a less rancorous process
The second is cost. Elections are expensive. Governments in advanced democracies bother about the cost of politics and are concerned to guarantee that the process of electing leaders, which should be liberalised to reflect the opinion of the largest aggregation of interests, is not turned into auction for the highest bidders. This is why the electoral authorities put a ceiling on individual donations.
It is worth noting that in these jurisdictions, individuals bear a large chunk of electoral cost and are prepared to pay for their beliefs. In Nigeria also, individuals and private interests also contribute to the financing of elections. Our practice here may not be as sophisticated as what happens in advanced democracies, but a lot of private resources are mobilised to elections. It therefore, amounts to double expenditure where they have to pay for long drawn-out primaries as well as the election proper for their candidates. This usually ends in unsavoury consequences like dashed hopes and crises of expectations.
Having seen from the foregoing that endorsements have become a legitimate part of the democratic process, let us consider the Hon Ugwuanyi’s case. Sometime last year, stakeholders of the PDP in Enugu State resolved unanimously to zone the governorship of Enugu State to Enugu North Senatorial District. That was a collective decision of the party, with the governor merely chairing the meeting. He neither moved the motion giving effect to the decision nor did he second it. Indeed it was Dubem Onyia, the former minister of state for foreign affairs who moved the said motion. This was followed by the meeting called by the governor of Nsukka stakeholders. At the meeting under reference, because Ugwuanyi is credible, humane, unasuming, self-effacing, charitable, popular and yet acutely pragmatic and effective, notable governorship aspirants, who have held high positions of responsibility in their own wisdom without coercion or pressure, withdrew for him. What the governor simply did was to call a gathering of stakeholders to commence the process of giving effect to the Enugu Plan of Action on transferring gubernatorial authority to a candidate from Nsukka Zone. This is a replication of the decision of the Peoples Democratic Party on President Goodluck Jonathan.
It is worth mentioning that the endorsement kick-started by candidates from Enugu North Senatorial zone acquired a life of its own and spilled over to the other two senatorial districts in the state and was wrapped up by a collective endorsement by the state party stakeholders. The decision last year as contained in the Enugu Plan of Action was to guarantee victory for the PDP. This was in response to the geopolitical configuration of Enugu State. It indicated that if the PDP wanted to win the 2015 governorship election, their joker is a candidate from Nsukka.
What, in my view simply, happened is that as a people whose collective instincts have long been primed to collapse individual interests to the common agenda, the Enugu stakeholders, simply behaved true to type: They opted for consensus. It is important to state here that consensus is not absolute majority. Any such initiative, which attains a two-thirds majority, suffices. But remarkably, in the Ugwuanyi’s case, what was seen was a super majority. This indeed, is on all fours with the Robert’s Rules of Order.
The goal of the Robert’s Rules is to structure debate and passage of proposals that ordinarily will win approval through majority vote. This process does not emphasise absolute agreement. What this means in effect is that once a consensus has been reached it will expect one or two dissenting interests to tag along.
This, however, does not foreclose their right to independent action. It happened with the late Abubakar Rimi breaking the zoning ranks and contesting against Olusegun Obasanjo in 2003 and may yet happen to President Goodluck Jonathan, even with his endorsement by the PDP.
In any democratic society, the dominant coalition of political interests prevails. Coalitions are an amalgam of a cocktail of interests. Some are religious, some are geopolitical, some are economic, and some are sociological. Any aggregation of the greater number of interest groups constitutes the prevalent order.
That is what is playing out in Enugu.
Never in the history of that state have so many individuals and interests converged in favour of a candidate.
Abiola’s case saw Nigerians, behaving as though they were under collective hypnosis. Historical prejudices and religious biases collapsed under a banner that made Nigerian politics look cosmopolitan, ushering in the most significant paradigm shift in our politics.
Ugwuanyi’s case could not have been a coincidence with people from all corners of the state, appearing to talk like praise singers. How many politicians will, on a good day, after dishing out bursary awards to law students in his constituency an hour earlier, and driving himself and this writer along the streets of Abuja, suddenly stop for a woman, a stranger who suffered a flat tyre and offers to help, ending up handing out money when informed that her problem needed a vulcaniser located far away?  Ugwuanyi’s case yet underscores the power of impulsive philanthropy, unpretentious humaneness and unvarnished humility. Let us accept this type of change when it occurs. It is the icing on the cake of our democracy.
• Agbo, a lawyer, writes from Abuja

Between Jonathan and Ugwuanyi