FOR the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), it’s bad enough that failure arrived 44 years ahead of the party’s own projection. Death, it would seem, is coming very soon on its heels.
While that is a bit of a surprise for a party that prided itself as the largest in Africa, not a few people would say, just as well. And for good reason too.
If there ever was any doubt, given its poor performance in office, that the PDP was anything but a democratic party for the people, and its leaders’ oft-quoted boast that it would rule for 60 uninterrupted years was bombast fuelled by free champagne, its current pitiable decrepit state is the proof.
Even as a mere vehicle for grabbing power and all the loot that goes with it, PDP has proven such a terrible contraption which, with the benefit of hindsight, brings into serious question the character of a nation that put up with it for 16 years.
Only one election loss and the wheels are coming off so fast and so furiously with bodies being flung in unimaginable directions! Goodness!
To the more discerning though, this should compel little consternation. Power and money go together in Nigeria and government is the biggest automatic free cash-dispensing machine. Once its control is wrestled from one party, the thread binding such a group gets revealed as having strength far below that of a cobweb, which was why a few days after the 2015 general elections in which the ruling party was routed on all fronts, I told an old friend, a man who had once been ousted from Government House and therefore knew the taste of defeat, that it could be the beginning of the end for his party.
A few of its conscientious leaders, who had tried in the past to redeem the PDP, I said, would not stay if they were prevented from overhauling the party and setting it on a journey to rebirth.
Of course, the peculiarly Nigerian politician’s instinct to be on the winning side at all times would lead to defections from PDP into the new team in town, the All Progressives Congress, APC. And the PDP, shocked by its defeat, shorn of free money, bereft of principles as a party and stripped of the few men of conscience left in its ranks could implode sooner than later.
What to do?
It sounded idealistic but I told my friend that he and other leaders of the party should get together and convince the rest to turn the PDP over to technocrats and a few renowned professionals across all divides to run. I believed this would help in rebranding the party, endear it to otherwise hostile or apolitical citizens and also help in its mobilisation efforts. I even volunteered names, even though as examples. How, for instance, would Nigerians receive the news of a Pat Utomi taking over as director of organisation of a PDP under reconstruction? Femi Falana as its legal adviser? Professor Tijani Bande as director of policy and plans? What would be the reaction of Nigerians to Itse Sagay in the National Working Committee alongside Olisa Agbakoba? Wouldn’t there be an automatic benefit of the doubt for a party with which Hassan Matthew Kukah, Maryam Uwais, Obadiah Mailafia, Charles Soludo, Bello Maccido, Nuhu Ribadu, Ayo Obe and many other such Nigerians identify?
And if die-hard party types must be the face of the re-born PDP, I reminded my friend that the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, under Chief Obafemi Awolowo had a national secretary but the world knew Ebenezer Babatope as its director of organisation, a party man at heart and a technocrat who delivered. That party had a national publicity secretary, but we all knew only MCK Ajuluchukwu, as the director of research and publicity.
Of course, I was first to admit that my position was idealistic, if not just romantic, that greed and ego would hardly ever allow Nigerian politicians yield their special purpose vehicle to such romantic idealism, I still urged a trial in the belief that some genuine concern for Nigeria would prevail and compel the rebirth of a genuine opposition party. If its name would have to be changed in the process, so be it!
It may still be early in the day to start composing the elegy but the crises currently assailing the PDP are pointers to an end that may soon come.
Many have already defected to APC, as shamelessly as can be imagined.
However, when the likes of Ken Nnamani, former Senate President and a man renowned for the kind of decency hardly found in many politicians, chooses to leave PDP, it is obvious that redemption would be hard for that party.
Even though he claimed he was leaving without bitterness, his statement drips with regret: “How I wish the efforts I mounted with some of my colleagues (many of whom have left the party) to keep the PDP on the path of its noble vision and values had been supported by those who were privileged to be at the helm of affairs of the party.”
Nnamani’s resignation letter is indeed an apt diagnostic report on the party’s terminal ailment: “The virus of corruption of values and mission,” he says. And this was a virus he and some of his colleagues tried to cure through the formation of the PDP Reform Forum in 2010/11, with a view to drawing up a new direction for the party. “A direction defined by strict adherence to basic rules and morality in the management of party affairs.”
He also notes that cardinal among the values he sought in vain is respect for the people’s choice.
“With more than half a decade of championing such a fundamental but simple idea… the PDP leadership continues to rebuff internal democracy.” The party, he says, allowed itself to be blinded by hubris to believe that it will remain in power and influence for 60 years in spite of several gross missteps.
“We foresaw this ditch and prescribed how to avert falling into it. But we were dismissed as idealistic.” Today, he notes with relish, “the idealists have become realists.”
As though Nnamani was privy to my discussions with that old friend, he says that even after the 2015 electoral defeat, he felt PDP could still chart a new course and ‘retrieve victory from the jaw of defeat,’ urged the leadership of the party to believe that the time of defeat could be the time of renewal, with strategic thinking and bold actions.
He claims he urged the PDP to re-embrace internal democracy and principled leadership that the new times call for new tools, ethos and codes of conduct. “We need to become a party of technocrats and professionals.”
In frustration, Ken Nnamani has eventually opted out. Many more like him may soon follow suit even though the tone of his letter suggests he would be willing to return if there is a genuine movement towards the rebirth of PDP.
Unfortunately, however, the party is now assailed by a leadership crisis that has polarized its ranks and may sound its death knell.
President Goodluck Jonathan’s political adviser, Ahmed Gulak, citing the ruling of an Abuja High Court, says he is now the party’s chairman. The PDP Governors Forum, led by Ondo State’s Olusegun Mimiko, claims it has sacked Interim Chairman, Uche Secondus, and that he should hand over to the National Secretary, Wale Oladipo, pending the appointment of a replacement from the Northeast. But the Secondus-led National Working Committee would not budge. It has even set up a 50-man committee to review the party’s Constitution.
PDP’s crisis, of course, is what you get when there are no core principles at the soul of a supposed political party. Take power-for-its-own-sake from its hands and you have what the contraption really is: a special purpose looting machine with no decency even in managing its takings upon success or its dilemma upon failure and one which disintegrates at the slightest tweaking.
The 16 years of the Peoples Democratic Party at the helm of Nigeria’s affairs, characterized by poor economic management and various assaults on democratic values, are certainly not the best in the nation’s history and do not commend the party to such noble names as I suggested earlier. With this ignoble past and a fractious present, it may indeed be impossible for PDP to find redemption. But it can find resurrection, if it would die, with its old ways! Meaning: there could be life in its death!
Nigeria needs a strong, vibrant and principled opposition party. And PDP should be taken over, practically taken apart and then re-built into one, with whatever name.
In fact, that chance at resurrection is now being offered by the ruling APC, showing itself up as just another contraption, daily proving it was more efficient at fighting for power than it is adept at wielding it.
A mass infusion of idealists whose first love is Nigeria and her democracy is needed in the polity now. PDP has to be overrun by conscientious men and women who can seize the initiative, compel the APC government to straighten up and, eventually, give Nigerians a delightful choice.
GUARDIAN
END
Be the first to comment