PDP and crying wolf

Hardball

SEEING how the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Nigeria’s leading opposition party, joys and swoons (when stuff favours it) but yelps and frets (when it doesn’t), like a child ecstatic at receiving a lolly but woe-begotten at losing it, you can’t but think it shamelessly epitomizes crying wolf when there is not.

One thing is sure about PDP, as it languishes in opposition and making hash of it, just as it made a mess of its power years: it must throw a tantrum anytime it faces a setback, like some wild, wayward and uncouth child.

But as in that English saying, if you scream “wolf!” most times where there was no wolf, how do folks believe you, those few times, when actually there may have been an invading pack of wolves?

On Imo’s Emeka Ihedioha’s gubernatorial ouster, PDP is playing true to type, as hysterical and undignified as they come, howling injustice, threatening childish thunder and making a nuisance of itself.

Nuisance?  O yes!  What do you call a party that would appropriate injustice with relish when it suits it; but screech and screed, when the same “injustice” blights it?

On Imo it’s threatening, railing and cursing.  It is even instigating laughable street shows — against what exactly?  A verdict, by the apex court, which cannot be appealled?  But on Zamfara, it savoured the delicious menu, even if it came from the same “injustice” kitchen.

In Imo, PDP lost only the governorship.  In Zamfara, courtesy of the same Supreme Court, the ruling APC lost all it won, fair and square, on the electoral front: governorship, Senate, House of Representatives, State House of Assembly — the clean sweep of wins turned judicial loss, all swept into PDP’s plate!

What did the beneficiary back then plead?  Well, you don’t spew out manna spooned in your lucky mouth by benevolent spirits — this same Supreme Court!  Then, democracy wasn’t “murdered”; and one-man-one-vote wasn’t in danger.  Neither was the “international community” summoned to see how PDP was “chopping” the sweet morsel of “injustice”!

Himself Uche Secondus, PDP national chairman, was even trying to make a funny distinction between Zamfara and Imo, posturing about “truth” — what truth?  That Zamfara was fair and Imo was foul?

And the peripatetic Abubakar Atiku, former Vice President of the Federal Republic, at the peak of the PDP power years:  straight-faced, he claimed PDP bequeathed “democracy”, after ruling from 1999-2015!  That was why it lost power in 2015 — really?

What he conveniently forgot to tell his concert of mutual deceivers: that by 2015, even he, Atiku, had baled out of PDP, knowing that by its own iniquity, it had cropped a fair ship-wreck!  How politicians wish there was no institutional memory!

The earlier PDP abandoned its ill-advised brinkmanship as opposition strategy, the better for its collective health and survival.  If it thinks it can intimidate anyone by demonizing the Bench, the joke is on nobody but it.

At the end of the day, the psychologists are right: you can’t know the core of a person until he riles in crisis.  PDP is showing its essence.  Maybe it’s marvellous in its blighted eyes!