(The rise and fall of the PDP)
It was a messy and dismal end. There are some deaths that are dignified and ennobling in their calm fortitude and heroic defiance. But not this one. The PDP has died as it lived: beyond its means and probably beyond the means of the country as well. A presidential capitulation quickly snowballed into an anarchic retreat and a rout ending in an electoral massacre on the scale of a Homeric battlefield.
We will be counting the principal political casualties for many years to come. State orphans abound. The sixty year Reich has become the sixteen year wreck. There are no mourners in this Sambisa forest of the quick and the wounded; only rotund vultures and pot-bellied hyenas having a field day. It is an Eliotsian wasteland, and April is the cruelest month.
Not even the greatest political soothsayer could have foreseen this distressing disintegration and death of the greatest party in Africa. One of its shrewd and astute founding fathers, in a moment of embattled lucidity, had cautioned that this was not a political party but a rally. A rally is just a collection of different mobs on parade. If there is food, the mob will stay quiet. But if there is no food, the mob will quickly dissolve into its component units, all heading in different directions.
After the greatest party comes the great hangover and headache. An army founded on the principles and ideology of loot can never survive the removal of its feeding bottle. The same fate also awaits any political party founded on such nefarious axioms. But we cannot afford to gloat too much on the horrid demise of the Nigerian behemoth. Like a festering corpse abandoned by even close relations, the PDP has become a national and public health hazard.
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The methods, means, principalities and instrumentalities by which this maladroit mammoth met its timely end will be studied and analyzed by students of politics in multi-ethnic societies with self-cancelling pluralities of power fulcrums for years and generations to come. They are beyond the standard fares of conventional post-colonial Political Science. But it is also important for the Nigerian intelligentsia both at home and in the Diaspora to study and analyze what went wrong as a guide to the future in all its gripping immediacy. We are not out of the wood yet.
In the long run, the PDP was a child and victim of the circumstances of its provenance and progeny. It was an army arrangement. It was never conceived as a genuine and organic political party or mass movement. You cannot give what you don’t have. The army does not do mass movements, except in battle formations. That is a contradiction in terms and offensively pejorative of its constituting ethos. The army thrives on hierarchy and rigid differentiation. All animals are not equal, and some are even more unequal than others. This is the pecking order of nature itself. Democracy is a product of human evolution away from the state of nature, but even then for democracy to thrive there are certain undemocratic institutions that must be permanently in place.
Like its NPN forebear which met the same fate in a military putsch, the PDP was not conceived as a conventional political party, but as a gargantuan coalition of big people and power brokers whose influence and authority would be so all-encompassing as to guarantee national stability and ward off the centrifugal forces which have hobbled Nigeria since independence. In the event, the PDP was just a variation of an old theme by very much the same military aristocracy.
On the face of it, it was a patriotic and nationalistic move. You cannot blame the military for being unable to envision a society beyond its own regimental and ideological purview. The Babangida political experimentation with a two-party system threw up a wildcat and a political maverick that could not be relied upon to guarantee military interests which under the long gestation of despotic rule had become national interests. In an attempt to forcibly liquidate the contrary forces, Abacha almost ended up liquidating the whole country.
Under clever guidance and astute remote control, his successors were not about to make the same mistake. It is easy to forget that General Abubakar Abdulsalaam, in his first broadcast to the nation after General Sani Abacha’s demise, promised solemnly to see the Abacha transition programme to its speedy conclusion. But after being swiftly countermanded by those who put him there, a contrite general announced a new transition programme.
But just as you cannot step into the same river twice, no two historical conjunctures can be completely alike whatever their outward similarities. 1998 was not 1993. If the military hierarchy had bothered to take a peep into the political horoscope, they would have noticed that population-wise, Nigeria was becoming a much younger country and the demographic condition was about to change forever. The relentless forces of globalization had led to a radical democratization of the means of violence as well as the methods of mass enlightenment.
In the event, the logic that led the military to an Obasanjo also led to the eventual disintegration of the ruling party. Having exhausted its historical and political possibilities, the military hierarchy had to look for a safe pair of hands and a bluff retired general to cover its retreat to the barracks. The PDP opening convention was a classic case of a textbook military operation as the founding fathers of the party were muscled out by sheer military might. Obasanjo famously took his delegates to the convention in a sealed train and tellingly bivouacked outside the city.
In the circumstances, the organic growth of party and the deepening of the democratic process were left in the hands of a man who by training and temperament is an authoritarian autocrat who had no truck with democratic niceties. When the retired general famously asked the Turaki of Adamawa whether he could obey simple instructions, many thought it was an eccentric joke. Atiku himself would later find out to his political peril that the Owu warlord meant every word.
As for the deluded remaining founding fathers of the PDP, they soon found out that military khaki is not civilian brocade. As Obasanjo went for their political jugular, they began deserting the temple, one by one and two by two as the occasion demanded. The fiery autocrat next turned his caressing attention to the main opposition parties, engineering such momentous fissures that none of them survived the thunderous implosion.
If the PDP ever had a soul it fled at the Jos convention. In other words, the party died in vitro. It was a mere vehicle for demilitarization which quickly transformed into a fascist terror machine for maintaining a hegemonic stranglehold on the nation. As Obasanjo has brilliantly demonstrated, it takes two to play at the fascist game of hegemonic domination. The same logic of the despotic suborning of a nation which made it possible for a military cabal to impose Obasanjo on the polity also made it possible for Obasanjo himself to impose two successors on the nation without heavens falling.
The game could have gone on for quite some time, but for the dramatic intervention of hubris so overweening that it is beyond the ken of human comprehension. Yet it was a matter of time, with the PDP becoming a stalled behemoth unable to move itself or the country forward and with its monstrous proboscis sucking life out of the nation.
But only the bold and deeply cunning can call to the bold and deeply cunning. It took an inchoate and incongruous alliance to have the measure of the PDP in the remarkable political plot that brought the unflappable and wonderfully poker-faced Aminu Tambuwal to the speakership of the House of Representatives
At that point in time, political neophytes, particularly the traditional carrion feeders of the South West otherwise known as mainstreamers who did not know where the game was heading ,thought that the ACN had thrown away their pot of amala. But the PDP had been pole-axed and it was only a question of time before the mammoth would crash on the canvas with a resounding thud. As the end approached, even the wily patriarch openly tore his membership card.
There are great lessons to be learnt from the rise and fall of a party that constituted itself into a nuisance and menace to the Nigerian polity. Despite the national euphoria that greeted the dethronement of the ruling party, the future is full of dark forebodings. Unfortunately if care is not taken, the same fate awaits the now dominant party. This is what should concern all patriotic Nigerians.
As it was in the beginning, so it seems at the end of the beginning. Like the PDP, the APC remains an inchoate and incongruous alliance; a mere vehicle to capture power teeming with contrary characters and mutually contradictory elements all in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity. In trying to outsmart and outwit the PDP, it has had to be like the PDP; or at best its veritable doppelganger. In other words, there is no qualitative difference or deep ideological divergence between the two parties.
This is a veritable source of a coming anarchy. The ranking APC hierarchs must now find within themselves the deep reserves of strength and character to give the party a soul and a capacity for organic growth which will drive change and accelerated development for the country as a whole.
Luckily, they don’t have to look very far for a driving template. The APC already has their two leading chieftains as shining exemplars of the power of a missionary envisioning of a new society. The APC should fuse the pragmatic Democratic Welfarism of a Bola Tinubu with the instinctive messianic populism of a Mohammadu Buhari to evolve a left of centre party whose developmental strides will resonate with Nigerians and the Black Race for generations to come. This is the only way to avoid the fate of the PDP.
