WITH the affirmation of Ali Modu Sheriff, former governor of Borno State, as chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the future of the former ruling party that dominated politics between 1999 and 2015 becomes even more uncertain. For about 10 months, Senator Sheriff had been locked in a leadership struggle with former governor of Kaduna State, Ahmed Makarfi, a struggle that seemed as enervating as it was intractable. Despite earnest reconciliation efforts and court interventions, both politicians have since sustained their intransigence.
Now, with his hands strengthened by the Appeal Court ruling of Friday, Senator Sheriff, who has always been less inclined to conciliation, less disposed to intellectualising the party’s problems, but is more instinctive, spontaneous and gregarious, will find greater incentive to become much more inflexible than before. The party is evidently in trouble.
Senator Sheriff, party apparatchiks have long suspected, is a long distance runner. He is not wearied by war nor by its longevity, nor yet by its aftermaths. Emboldened by the Appeal Court decision, he will hope he can wear the opposition within the party down in a war of attrition he is peculiarly suited and gifted to fight. And by combining his wealth and aggression with his uncanny gregariousness, he will expect that, with time, famished foot soldiers of the party would eventually discard their resentment against him and rally behind his banner and tilt the scale against his chafing and restless opponents.
Whether he succeeds in his goals will, however, depend on just how resolute the mercurial Senator Makarfi can remain in the face of disheartening judicial reverses, and how well party bosses can keep their nerves steady as rumours of disaffection course through the party’s rank and file. But more importantly, the shape of the bitter war within the party and its outcome will depend overall on how party leaders can resist the temptation to bolt from the stable as the next elections loom.
To be sure, however, party leaders, including governors and national lawmakers, favour Senator Makarfi. They see him as a team player, a reasonable man who is guided by his intellect than his emotions or by any consideration of wealth, a face of the party they could turn to the rest of the country with pride and satisfaction, an uncomplicated, honest, principled, and dispassionate politician, with no baggage, and with no airs. He is not as beefy as Senator Sheriff, but party elite think him much firmer, more mercurial, and more reformist. If they are to stand any chance of turning Friday’s setback into some sort of victory, they will have to cobble together a coalition of fighters and strategists able to unhorse the now self-satisfied Senator Sheriff. But that, alas, will depend on how the Supreme Court rules in the weeks or months to come, and how quickly too. Otherwise, the country should steady itself for the greatest mass defection in Nigeria’s political history, for it is inconceivable that party leaders would swallow their pride and rally to the cause of a man who considers himself rich and independent, and whose motives and style they suspect and resent bitterly.
Weighed on the scale, Senator Makarfi enjoys the bigger support of the two combatants. But that support is tenuous, and will get even more tenuous as the months grind towards the inexorable 2019 polls, and as party leaders in favour of Senator Makarfi get desperate. Worse, party bigwigs face a far more dispiriting prospect of fainthearted party faithful withholding their support or even hawking it in droves to willing buyers because they are unsure which side their bread is buttered and because their mercenary instincts cannot be sated. Many PDP leaders have publicly announced where they stand, even as Senator Sheriff himself has determined those the party would not welcome and who, in his opinion, had become a pariah. In fact the pugnacity of the former Borno governor has prompted the suspicion that he is in the PDP as a spoiler rather than to actualise what many politicians believe to be his presidential ambition.
Senator Sheriff is unlikely to be a spoiler. He is too ambitious and conceited to lend himself as a willing tool in the hands of a puppeteer.
It is hard to tell how the Supreme Court would vote in the matter, or how quickly. But what is clear now is that because Senator Sheriff is supported by a minority, he cannot begin any serious planning or reorganisation for the 2019 polls. And because Senator Makarfi is on the other hand supported by the majority but denied by the courts, his faction cannot also begin any serious plans for the future despite their sanguine claims. Whatever modicum of progress they make will have to be eked out of the stalemate forced on them by the courts and their own factional intransigence. That progress, assuming it is noticeable, will pale into insignificance in the face of a resurgent All Progressives Congress (APC) which has mastered both the art of exposing the PDP’s 16-year underbelly of corruption and promoting the modest qualities of their ageing and sometimes infirm president, Muhammadu Buhari.
Except the Supreme Court can decide the matter very quickly, the PDP’s prospect of regaining its rhythm and verve is indeed very bleak. They are more factionalised than the APC, rudderless, poorly motivated, unable to atone for the massive corruption they inspired in public officers for more than a decade, and too fixated on the wrong things and priorities. The APC may have set a precedence in winning national elections after a short period of formation and planning. But that incredible political chutzpah, which the APC demonstrated between 2013 and 2015, is virtually difficult, if not impossible, to replicate. For now there is no opposition to the APC on account of the PDP’s obsession with internal bickering, while defections to the ruling party are taking place in trickles, with the distinct possibility that they could become a flood. And just as Senator Sheriff seems prepared to stand his ground, his opponents also appeared set to fight to the death, as they have gleefully announced.
No clairvoyant is needed to tell Nigerians that Senator Sheriff will eventually be undone, if not by the internal opposition within the PDP, then by his own excesses. But whether the new PDP that has just emerged from Friday’s pyrrhic victory is able to make a great showing in 2019 or fizzle away will depend not on how it continues to fritter away its modest accomplishments and whatever is left of its talents, but on how prodigally the APC squanders the humongous advantage gifted it by the unprecedented conflation of human goodwill and celestial sleight of hand in 2015.
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