If Iyorchia Ayu were a god, he would make the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) his ritual space, the varnishing altar of his caprices. But to be a god requires an exalted persona; something deterrent yet divine, provident and revered, traits that manifestly elude him.

If Ayu personifies such traits, he’d do himself and the PDP a lot of good by asserting them astride the prick of strife rocking the party from the base to the rafters.

This minute, the PDP on Ayu’s watch, careens from side to side, from one embittered faction to another, like a vessel of feral personae clashing in dramatic space.

His protracted spat with Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike, has snowballed to worrisome proportions. It has become the party’s major albatross and likely own goal that could cost it the 2023 presidential elections.

Wike wants Ayu removed as the PDP’s national chairman. And Ayu fights to rebuff him. As the drama unfolds, their loyalists pirouette and pant in a storm of extreme poses, in solidarity with either man.

Wike’s loss to Atiku Abubakar at the party’s presidential primary has clearly set the party on the path to self-destruct; his grouse with Ayu stems from the latter’s alleged complicity in the 11th-hour horsetrading and conspiracy between Sokoto Governor Aminu Tambuwal, and Atiku, which cost him the presidential ticket.

From Ayu’s jubilant hurrah and acknowledgment of Tambuwal as the hero of the party’s primary to Atiku’s choice of Delta State Governor, Ifeanyi Okowa, as his running mate, Wike felt stabbed in the back and sorely demystified.

His subsequent bid to remove Ayu resonates at frightening decibels across the PDP’s mangled complex. And just recently, the Rivers governor described Ayu as an ingrate. He said this while reacting to a salvo by Ayu, who in an interview with BBC Hausa, described those calling for his resignation as children who didn’t know when the party was formed.

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“When we started PDP, these children were not around. They are children who do not know why we formed the party. We will not allow any individual to destabilise our party,” said Ayu.

Reacting to the comment, while speaking at the commissioning of a road project at Omerelu in Ikwerre Local government area of Rivers, Wike described Ayu as an ingrate and arrogant man.

“You can imagine what power can do. You can imagine the ingratitude; how people can be ingrates in their lives…Your business is not to show arrogance to your party. Yes, the children brought you to be chairman of the party. The children brought you from the gutter to make you chairman,” said Wike.

Ayu has reiterated his resolve not to resign but serve out his four-year tenure, adding that Atiku’s emergence as the presidential candidate does not affect his position as the party chairman.

However, Wike, backed by fellow governors, Samuel Ortom (Benue), Seyi Makinde (Oyo), and Okezie Ikpeazu (Abia), among others, insists that Ayu must resign out of respect for the party’s provision on power rotation, arguing that since the presidential flagbearer, Atiku, like Ayu, is from the north, it was only fair that Ayu stepped down as party chairman for a southerner to take charge.

The 2023 general election was meant to offer the PDP its much-vaunted resurgence as the party to beat in Nigeria’s political space, immediate reality, however, asserts a resonant threnody in the party’s wake.

On Ayu’s watch, the PDP dissembles and dissolves through storms of internal conflict – leaving it a cold, bare monolith of contending wiles and confounded politics.

Ayu’s fate seems sealed in the wake of a fresh plot by PDP governors to sack him. The governors have started mobilising members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) against him and broker unity ahead of the 2023 poll.

At the height of its power, the PDP was in charge of Nigeria as the dominant political party for 16 years producing Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo (1999 -2007), Umaru Musa Yar’Ádua (2007 -2010), and Goodluck Jonathan (2010 -2015).

Internal wrangling eventually led to its costly factionalisation and the split that cost it the 2015 general elections. Ever since the party has fought to regain its foothold.

To avoid further ugliness, Ayu may need to recoil from his hard defensive; the grisly calculus of his fate establishes his impotence against Wike’s searing offensive.

The duo’s recalcitrant posturing as war idols has left the party in painful disarray. The eventual winner may be decided by his capacity to power the party with the pillar and capital essential to its victory in the 2023 elections.

If spurned, Wike threatens a cloudburst of devastating vengeance. But Ayu simply promises to remake the PDP into a colonnade of defiant whim.

In his downward spiral subsists the humbling anecdote of a deadbeat idol fast becoming a spent doll.