The stalemated Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stakeholders’ meeting last Wednesday in Ibadan, Oyo State, showed clearly how difficult it is to resolve contentious issues in any big party. Instead of the party moving forward and constituting its army and coalitions to fight the 2023 presidential election, it is trapped in discord over calls by the southern wing of the party that Chairman Iyorchia Ayu, elected at a convention late last year to pilot the affairs of the party for four years, should resign and be substituted by a southerner in order to create a balance between the North and the South in the top echelons of the party. Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike has remained the most vociferous in calling for that balance. Last week, host of the meeting, Oyo State governor Seyi Makinde, also remained unrelenting in calling for Sen. Ayu’s resignation, while the party’s presidential candidate and former vice president Atiku Abubakar hemmed and hawed over the issue.

Newspaper reports of what transpired at the meeting were a little divergent. Indicating some kind of disingenuous thaw over the issue, a few newspapers suggested that the former VP had agreed that the resignation was achievable, even attainable, if the right things were done and an agreement cobbled among the party’s leading lights. Those right things, the papers explained, concerned adherence and fidelity to party rules and constitution. Other papers seemed to have quoted the former VP as ruling out the possibility of compelling Sen. Ayu’s resignation. Nigerians would distrust the party should it coerce the chairman to relinquish office, Alhaji Atiku reportedly groaned. It would also mean the reconstitution of the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) only after the party’s constitution had been amended. But glossing over that bottleneck, Mr Makinde saw the dilemma as an opportunity for the party to prove it had some honour and integrity.

It is not clear in what mood Alhaji Atiku left Ibadan, whether he thought he was persuasive and had made the southern antagonists, who seemed united in their demand for the chairman’s resignation, to see reason, or whether he left the state convinced that a meeting point was a chimera. Regardless of the tenor of the reports of the meeting, it seemed all but certain that party leaders appeared gravely aware of the irreconcilability of their positions. For a fact, there is no way what the southerners are asking for can be achieved without a constitutional amendment. Party delegates at the convention had shot themselves in the foot when they bucked the trend early this year by cajoling themselves to elect a northern presidential candidate after they had clumsily elected a northerner as chairman in anticipation of a southern presidential candidate. However, after perusing the list of aspirants for the coveted position and discovering that no southern aspirant had the beam and heft to win the presidential poll in 2023, they balked.

The PDP has, therefore, boxed itself into a corner. Theoretically they can amend their constitution through a special convention. But they are smack in the middle of electioneering as it were, and pursuing amendments now, not to talk of inescapably handing over the party to a man whose loyalty might not necessarily be first and foremost to the presidential candidate, may be trying. Alhaji Atiku has the confidence of Sen. Ayu, which probably explains why the latter was able to win a vote of confidence at the last National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting. A new chairman, who would in all likelihood be a south-westerner, could upset the apple cart and create a disharmony in the party’s presidential campaigns. This danger is of course not inevitable; but Alhaji Atiku probably entertains that fear. Worse for him and the party now perched dangerously on the horns of a dilemma is the fact that the man pulling the strings from the background is Rivers’ Mr Wike who is still sore from how he was characterised after he was twice spurned by party leaders.

Assuming the party surmounts the theoretically obstacle of organising a special convention to tweak its NWC in order to please the party’s vociferous southern wing, it will also have to scale the even more practical and treacherous obstacle of injecting instability into its constitution as alluded to by the former VP. At the moment, should Sen. Ayu resign, his position can only be taken by the deputy national chairman from the North, Umar Damagum, not a south-westerner. Hence the call for a constitutional amendment. That provision was supposed to inject stability into the system and into the constitution so that a region/geopolitical zone is not disadvantaged by resignations or impeachments. The question then will be whether the party would again amend the constitution after it had won or lost the election in order to return to the status quo? Worse, apart from constitutional obstacles, the former VP and his allies fear that a change in the upper echelons of the party would hand the party over to the cantankerous loyalists and allies of Mr Wike. That possibility appears galling to them.

The only possibility left now is for one side to the conflict to step down from its hardened position. Should Mr Wike conciliate, he will see himself gaining nothing, with the possibility, as he has voiced, of being treated even more shabbily should the party win the 2023 poll. He has fewer incentives to conciliate. The only choice left is for Alhaji Atiku to adopt flexibility, a position that seems to him completely appalling. If he is desperate enough, he will. But the more he hesitates, the harder it becomes to exploit any elbow room as the campaigns loom into view in about 10 days. Albeit, this wound to the PDP is not really self-inflicted. Had the party a great southern aspirant for the presidency late last year, ceding the chairmanship to a northerner would have been a non-issue. In the end, Alhaji Atiku was probably their most sensible choice, not Sokoto State governor Aminu Tambuwal, and not former Kwara governor Bukola Saraki. Now they have the former VP; but concomitantly, they also have chaos to contend with. If they do not close ranks in the weeks ahead, they stand the risk of becoming hors de combat even before the battle is properly joined.

Southwest not prudent on Amotekun

The shooting of Ayodeji Eweje last May by operatives of Ogun State Amotekun Corps has raised questions about the training, orientation and ultimate objectives of the state/regional security outfit. The shooting has become controversial, with the Corps insisting the victim was a cultist, and the family of the young man swearing that he was just an onlooker during the state governor’s inauguration of the Adigbe-Panseke road. The circumstances of the shooting, regardless of the alleged offence of the victim, indicate that there are question marks about the training and deployment of the Corps as well as the danger of the initial euphoria surrounding the Corps waning sooner than expected.

Conceived initially as a regional outfit, but later scaled down for legal and constitutional reasons to become state security outfit, primarily designed to counter threats by rampaging herdsmen and other cross-border attackers operating in forest redoubts, Amotekun Corps was expected in the hands of the polished and enlightened people and governments of the Southwest to set the pace in law enforcement. The region’s governments have perhaps kept their eyes on the initial objective, succeeding in a few of the states in countering the menace of attackers, but in a marked show of lack of discipline, some of the states have deployed the outfit for riot control and other tangential assignments.

Gradually, both the rule of engagement and effectiveness of the Corps are being eroded. If Southwest governments do not quickly arrest what is beginning to look like a drift, it is a question of time before the Amotekun is made to ape the methods and operations of the conventional law enforcement agencies riddled by graft, cruelty and imperiousness. The region held out great hope for the Corps; that hope is in danger of being compromised or even betrayed. If the Southwest with all its enlightenment and sophistication cannot make a success of Amotekun, and make the Corps an example for Nigeria and other countries to emulate, then perhaps there is no hope anywhere.