…Bowing to the wishes of Nigerians, General Abubakar unveiled an eleven-month transition programme, which will terminate on May 29, 1999. The “five fingers of the leprous hand”, which operated as “political parties”, namely, the UNCP, CNC, NCPN, DPN and GDM were dissolved. Nigerians were now free to form genuine political parties to compete for political space without the suffocating tailoring by agents of the state. The G-34, which was now established as an embodiment of the hope and democratic aspirations of Nigerians having demonstrated courage when it was convenient to show docile acquiescence became the rallying point of a blossoming trans-ideological movement willing to offer leadership to Nigerians.According to Chief Solomon Lar, the first elected chairman of PDP, the G-34 captured the excitement of Nigerians “because of the quality and integrity of its members”. To him, Nigerians were no longer willing to gamble away their future to fortune seekers who dominated the failed politics of the Abacha era. As a consequence of sustaining the momentum of democratic struggle, the G-34 attracted several political associations that shared the vision of a truly formidable national political platform.On August 19, 1998, several political associations including the All Nigerian Congress (ANC), Peoples Consultative Forum (PCF), Social Political Party (SPP) Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM), Peoples National Forum (PNF) and twenty-five other associations resolved to form a political party known as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The overriding goal of the new party was to bring together all patriotic and like-minded Nigerians into a single formidable political party capable of organising and making productive the energy of the people.’
Obviously not many of them, members of the largest ‘rally’ in Africa, would ever know that the above extract came from the official website of their party, the Peoples Democratic Party. And this is so for many reasons. For one, the venerated ‘quality and integrity’ Chief Solomon Lar spoke so glowingly about are long gone with the winds but much more importantly, the party and its original raison d’être have changed so fundamentally since former President Obasanjo’s entry into it that were the likes of Abubakar Rimi and Okadigbo to suddenly resurrect today, they would not as much as recognise the party they risked all to form.
Readers will remember that to mould the party in Obasanjo’s image, and, almost unprecedented in the annals of political party evolution, the maximum civilian ruler and leader of the party, as he then was, caused all members to be de-registered and decreed a fresh registration. So mystifying, but self-serving was it, that even Atiku Abubakar, his Vice President and, technically, the No. 2 in the party, was casually humiliated in his own village when he was refused registration only for the entire party leadership to later beat a retreat and head to his office, tails behind their backs, to present him with a membership card at Abuja, the federal capital.
All this history becomes relevant now that leaders of the leading opposition political parties in the country are, for the very first time ever, working seriously towards ending the reign of impunity by a political party that has, far more than the military, pulverised the country beyond the widest imagination of its enemies in its 13-year strangle-hold. It is heartening that for the same first time, these opposition party leaders have all verbalised their readiness to subsume all narrow interests, personal, regional, political or economic, in the larger service of the country we call our own.
Nothing confirms this seriousness more than the recent launch of the manifesto of the incubating merger, an event which witnessed the presence of nearly all the relevant leaders of the agenda. Those who could not make the occasion physically, were specifically represented. To understand the import of that event is to appreciate that without a manifesto, a political party is nothing more than a rally –read PDP- the clueless party that continues, unabated, the ruination of Nigeria with each of its leaders, as President, coming with either a 7-point Agenda which the current CBN governor, at his confirmation hearing advised should be reduced to one, or one nebulously called a Transformation Agenda but singularly devoid of any positive transformation.
Beginning from Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel’s address to his Tamworth constituents in preparation for the 1835 British general election, a political party manifesto has come to be known as the public declaration of the aims, objectives and policies of that political party, especially where issued ahead of a coming election and to which the electorate can hold it, in or out of power.
It will be recalled that all we can remember of PDP’s manifesto or that of the late Yar Adua’s campaign at which Nigerians could not quote him on one single subject was: PDP: Power!, as then President Obasanjo played the role of campaign spokesperson.
In my recent 3-part article on corruption, I drew attention to the fact that salvaging Nigeria was the duty of all and that the worst we could do is leave the country to continue its present path of retrogression under the lead of the PDP.As you read this, the party is again in the news for the wrong reasons; for jejune reasons completely unexpected of a ruling party in a country like ours. Whether at the Wadada Plaza, where the falcon can no longer hear the falconer, or in Adamawa State as in sundry other states, especially in the South West, where its one-time poster boys have since been banished to political Siberia, it is war; total and unremitting war, the very end of which none can predict with any measure of certainty as the countdown to the presidential roforofo unfolds. It needs be said, however, that the ‘casus belli’, this time around, is tied to Obasanjo’s unedifying marriage to impunity. Time and again, he has indulged in these thoroughly illegal and indecent ‘fehingbe pons’ –acts of impunity- until now that Kashamu, who though a party financier, is young enough to answer thrice to a single Obasanjo call, has decided that enough was enough and decided to fight him eye ball to eye ball. Unlike what happened elsewhere, Obasanjo had merely decreed who should be what, at the South West PDP zonal congress, but as is usual in his home state of Ogun, he is being told again that there is a limit to one- ups-man ship. The silly things he rammed through PDP governors then in Oyo, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti, he never dared try with governor Gbenga Daniel of Ogun State, and where he did, he failed signally.
Nothing any longer unfazes a PDP member, whatever his level in the party; not thieving of billions of pension funds, not stealing billion dollars voted for modernisation of roads or the power sector nor are they collectively averse to creaming Nigerians off billions of naira claiming that ships which never visited any port on the African continent, indeed, actually delivered petroleum products at Apapa.
But it gets far worse when a President, elected on the platform of such a party, looks askance, with such rogues left free to go about their illegitimate businesses and presidential aides eagerly trying to exculpate him with the spurious claim that the presidency is not the judiciary; conveniently forgetting the aphorism that the buck stops at the president’s table. Of course, it must be conceded that ours is now a poor caricature of the American president who knows that he occupies, not the coziest but the hottest, part of the kitchen.
In the weeks and months ahead the 2015 elections, indeed from now on, given the vacuity and the all-round negativity of the Peoples Democratic Party on Nigeria and its peoples, I intend, God willing, to do my utmost best in promoting the manifesto of the emerging merger in the full knowledge that it will provide the much- needed elixir for the hapless citizens of an abundantly resource -rich country which has, unfortunately, been more than blighted by a succession of rigged-in, soporific and inane, PDP governments at the federal level.
That much I promise.
