The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Karma

  • Karma, overdog, underdog

    Karma, overdog, underdog

    The Rivers power drama, hot and explosive, may thaw (or harden) on the wisdom — or folly — of two (or even three) elders, but not the bristling combatants: Nyesom Wike, former governor and overdog, and Siminalayi Fubara, sitting governor and underdog. 

    Karma looms between both.

    One key elder is Chief Edwin Clark, Ijaw leader by own confession since 1975.  From his take on the Rivers crisis, Pa Clark wears, unfazed, the stark conflict binoculars of an Ijaw irredentist — and the old man picks no bones about it!

    Compare and contrast his hard stand with Dr. Peter Odili’s — first Rivers’ elected governor from 1999.  Indeed, the warring camps can be rightly tagged Odili boys and girls, much as you’d dub the present ruling elite in Lagos, Tinubu boys and girls.

    Yet, not for the former governor some stark war envoy, booming a no-retreat-no-surrender Ikwerre-Ijaw combat (ala Pa Clark)! Odili has rather nudged his warring wards into some reasoned detente, from open but mutually self-destruct fracas.

    But there is a “third force” of influence in this Rivers “civil war” — Bola Ahmed Tinubu, President of the Federal Republic; and with his involvement, history beckons. 

    Very early in Nigeria’s 1st Republic, the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, took sides in the Western Region crisis.  It was a rogue intervention that eventually buried that republic, after less than six years (1 October 1960 – 15 January 1966).

    Now, 24 years into Nigeria’s 4th Republic — after decades-to-nowhere under best-forgotten military rule — the President has intervened in another regional crisis, this time in Nigeria’s oil-rich, often volatile, South-South.

    Now, is that intervention as rogue as Balewa’s? Or of compelling good faith to defuse a ticking bomb?  The jury is out.  Indeed, that is the violent contrast between the Clark and the Odili schools on the Rivers crisis. 

    Clark thinks Tinubu intervened to clobber his Ijaw ward in Governor Fubara, so the old man feels obliged to bawl Ijaw power, and bark Ijaw nationalism.

    Odili adopts a more even-handed stand — neither jumping on the side of the volatile Wike, now Tinubu’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, nor on Fubara’s.

    Indeed, for Wike and Fubara, feuding godfather and godson, it’s a fierce pull from two ends:

    Wike, to keep the “structure” that subdued everything to gift Fubara gubernatorial power (even if that means junking the errant godson); Fubara, to keep his cherished “red biro” — read, remain governor (even if that means burying the over-bearing godfather)!

    The stakes seldom get higher!  Still, karma menacingly lurks!

    Karma!  That should be Wike’s gravest worry.  So, it’s understandable if the bruising godfather sounds more and more belligerent, even as his mild godson sounds more and more amenable.

    The harsh prognosis is that in Fubara looms Karma: a terrible ogre that could well do to Wike, what Wike did to own boss, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi!

    Yet, Fubara is no saint any more than Wike is a devil. 

    Indeed, to be fair, Fubara stands fairly docked for perfidy to the collective structure — and personal mentor — that suppressed everything and everyone to hand him power.  So, if Wike dismisses him as a grand traitor, he’s not just talking gas. 

    As for Pa Clark and other Ijaw nationalists, now trenchant on activating their Ijaw “Sim”, as some Ikwerre plot to suppress the Ijaw, where were they when Wike, the Ikwerre man, was shutting out fellow Ikwerres, to make Fubara, the Ijaw man, governor?

    But for all his amplified perfidy, Fubara has been a study in civility towards Wike, never tires to call him “my oga” (my boss), even as the governor holds his own and throws his darts!  Talk of the mouse biting and soothing all at once!

    Still, that’s way more polite than Wike’s own coarse-and-gruff savaging of Amaechi, his former boss and benefactor.  He would, with undiluted contempt, slam Amaechi as some never-do-well predecessor. 

    But that’s not true.  Amaechi was a fine governor.  Though Wike achieved fame as Rivers’ “Mr. Project”, he only built on the gains of the Amaechi years, just as Amaechi did on the gains of the Odili years — before the 2015 politics of APC versus PDP fissured the Rivers ruling elite, once united under Dr. Odili.

    But beyond karma, Wike and Fubara seem to have done enough in mutual crippling, though, as always, the overdog’s crash appears more crushing than the underdog’s.

    For starters, Wike made a tactical error for thinking he could, just like that, bounce Fubara off the governorship.  That was clear from the failed impeachment move. 

    Yet again, rash, raw power has proved its impotent worst.  Fubara dared it — and survived — and the overdog is condemned to cutting the underdog some slacks!  So much for the limits of raw power.

    Worse news: the Wike forces, by the near-wholesale defection of the Rivers parliament from PDP to APC, have put their neck on the legal chopping block. They can only hope the law is Damocles, whose sword never swishes down — or else they could be toast!

    Still, that hardly transforms Fubara from a scurrying rat into a roaring lion.  He himself has committed grave infractions against democracy and due process — faults that can put his continued hold on power in lawful jeopardy.

    One is rushing the 2024 budget through a rogue parliament in 24 hours!  Parliament’s non-endorsement of the money bill is about the gravest crime in a democracy.

    Read Also: Shettima woos more support for administration’s Renewed Hope Agenda

    Another is, in blind panic, bulldozing the temple of the first estate of the realm — the parliament building, for whatever sugar-coated reasons.  That bombs the letters and spirit of democracy — for Parliament, the bastion of the people, is conceived to hold the executive in check.

    It’s from this prism of mutual jeopardy that the warring factions must, therefore, see the Tinubu presidential intervention.  Viewed with less baggage, it’s simply for both camps to freeze, and withdraw from their mutual excesses, read outlawry.

    Neither the ethnic rage of the Clark camp, nor the “structure” ire of the Wike army, can wish away both sides’ grave constitutional infractions.

    That’s why the president must keep a tight leash on both, save them from one another, so that the Rivers people can breathe.  But the intervention must be even-handed, and transparently so.  It’s good that the president enjoys the confidence of both camps.

    The Rivers elders must play own parts too — which is why the Clark camp must tap into the even-handedness of the Odili school.  There’s nothing ethnic about the Rivers power struggle.

    And the lurking karma? Maybe a Wike-Fubara rapprochement can nudge the Wike-controlled parliament to be less rash; and the Fubara-led executive to undo its budget outlawry.

    Who knows?  That might break the karma cycle!  That way, Fubara won’t treat Wike as Wike himself had rubbished Amaechi.  Neither would any future governor maul Fubara!

    Rivers people will be the ultimate winners.

  • Karma and the parable of ‘Filadefia’

    So, after the mammoth burnt offering at the altar of greed, Rochas Okorocha will still end up with the bread of political sorrow?

    The Imo west senatorial seat meant to be a “consolation prize” after the defeat of his stooge in the governorship polls of March 9 has been withdrawn by INEC over allegation that it was secured at gun-point on February 23.

    Now, not only is the humbled Imo emperor left to mourn the defenestration of his son-in-law (Uche) and his daughter’s inability to succeed her mother as Imo First Lady in a failed aspiration at monarchy, he also has to endure the taunts of a gloating victor in his remaining days at the Douglas House.

    From the camp of the governor-elect, the cosmopolitan Emeka Ihedioha, came a raft of disturbing accusations. Suggesting Okorocha may have decided to help himself for the two months left of his tenure, the victorious PDP candidate has alleged a last-minute looting of Imo.

    Specifically, massive cash withdrawal amounting to N17b was allegedly made from Access Bank, Zenith Bank, Unity Bank and Skye Bank (Polaris Bank Limited).

    Expectedly, the official response to these grave allegations has not only been denial but a counter-accusation that Ihedioha is a busybody too impatient to grab power.

    Well, this is a political season when facts get twisted willfully and lies are dressed as truth or a little grain of truth magnified beyond the borders of logic.

    So, it might be very imprudent yet to crucify Okorocha or applaud Ihedioha here.

    But nonetheless, it is impossible to deny the shadow of Karma now engulfing Okorocha. Some eight years ago, he too barely waited for then Governor Ikedi Ohakim to write his hand-over notes before bombarding banks with letters from the “Office of the Governor-Elect” to dishonor cheques presented by the Government House then. So pathetic did the situation become that the State Accountant General reportedly absconded from work, obviously to ingratiate himself to the incoming governor. Throughout his imperial reign of eight years, Okorocha relentlessly pursued a policy of vendetta against his predecessor, even refusing to pay him his statutory entitlements.

    Alas, the wheel of retribution has turned full cycle. It is now Okorocha’s turn to taste the bitter portion generously administered on Ohakim with malicious pleasure.

    Seeking to rationalize Uche’s drubbing on a surrogate platform, Okorocha’s cited a gang-up by “those who “traded away the people’s mandate in Imo”.

    In the final analysis, let it however be admitted that Okorocha is no guiltier than the fawning hypocrites who, for the love of dollars, mortgaged APC interest away in Imo, thereby making the party forfeit its only foothold in Igboland. Were Action Alliance’s 195,364 votes added to APC’s 96,458, the aggregate would have dwarfed PDP’s 277,002.

    Instead, the visiting scavengers from Abuja were busy counting dollars while poor, unsuspecting party women sang and danced barefoot around Owerri streets.

    It is alleged that Okorocha also made a dollar bid for the party’s ticket, but apparently lost out to “market forces”, as the highest bidder carried the day. So, during the party primaries, the air literally stank of the aroma of dollars (or “Aromadollars” as the episode is now commonly remembered).

    Of course, everyone within the family knows the dark truth, but they have been keeping a sepulchral silence, perhaps only awaiting the swish of President Buhari’s acclaimed moral sword in a redemptive rite of propitiation.

    The tail of Okorocha’s serpent may indeed have been dealt a savage axe blow by Imo voters, but the reptile’s lips are still managing to twish, as he now lays boastful claims to the senatorial seat withheld by INEC, even while lamenting “the wickedness of man”.

    But elsewhere in South-west, the story is different. It is a case of funereal quiet in Abeokuta as hitherto loquacious Ibikunle Amosun still appears unable to comprehend what hit him. What we now see are furtive glances of the subdued, too shy to make eye-contact.

    By audaciously seeking to enthrone his anointed (Omilade) as successor on the surrogate platform of APM even while sitting as APC governor, Amosun undoubtedly wanted to prove some political omni-potence. But that dream was cut short on March 9 as Dapo Abiodun trounced Omilade.

    It is not only Amosun’s claim to invincibility thus invalidated; the stock of the fashion item he glamorized has also fallen. The usually impish social media has lately been agog with the shaming of Amosun’s trademark flamboyant, sky-high cap. “Fila” is Yoruba word for cap. To capture Amosun’s humbling, mischievous folks now whisper around “Filadefia” – a corruption of the popular Philadelphia city in the United States. It is the new onomatopoeia of mischief.

    Of course, Amosun’s now rumpled hat would henceforth be designated as a monument to hubris and self-demystification. Outside the governor’s family circle, it is doubtful how many would continue to proudly wear the Amosun cap once his tenancy expires on May 29. It is not unlikely therefore that many a perceptive tailor in Abeokuta would, in fact, have started offloading their huge stock of “Filadefia” at give-away price to cut their losses.

    All said, the supreme lesson should not be missed: power is transient. The message: humility.

  • We are all karma’s ‘bitches’

    Karma is our open secret. In Nigeria, it is our sacred, secret space ignored in plain sight. It becomes our temenos or ritual precinct of reward and comeuppance. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.

    In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe that bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they have done. The Nigerian society however, fights futilely to suspend the karmic laws of cause and effect, insulating individuals from the injurious effects of vice and poor judgment. Local gender activists, like their European and American role models, abandon more progressive causes to pervert birth control and abortion in duplicitous bid to detach sex from its natural results or consequences. Politics is equally rigged to reward greed, bestiality, indolence, illegitimacy and so on.

    Lest we forget the pervasive political and economic crisis bedeviling the country. The nation’s woes originate from her moral lapses. Endemic poverty, substandard healthcare and education, ethnic and religious bigotry, bribery and other forms of corruption manifest by the society’s poverty of morals and humane ethics.

    Hence those guilty of corruption escape the consequences of their wrongdoing in connivance with a bland, treacherous government. The karmic consequences of this anomaly are of course, better imagined – think Dasukigate, Mainagate, Diezanigate and so on. Until recently, there was no punishment for the wicked and no deterrence for the corrupt. On President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, Nigeria was pilfered silly. The country was persistently sodomized and defiled by rampaging hordes of moral perverts. There was no good or evil. The cult of moral grayness bloomed on Jonathan’s watch. Thus our karmic reality of chronic indebtedness and bankruptcy.

    Enter Muhammadu Buhari, incumbent president and leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Buhari suffers the flipside of karma – from his ascension to power and ouster by military coup in the 1980s, to his recent emergence as democratic president, the retired General from Daura is widely appreciated and denounced along bigoted shoals of ethnic and religious extremists. Base sentimentality and impoverished logic fostered by the ruling class and espoused by segments of the citizenry, afflict President Buhari and his bungling cabinet.

    In the presidential cabinet, subtle cues abound, establishing the workings of unforgiving karma.

    We have ministers whose appointments were hotly debated and questioned on basis of their shameful antecedents either as governors, commissioners and other capacities in public and private sectors. Two years after their appointment into the presidential cabinet, these ministers can only manage a hobble along the clogged, swampy corridors of the APC’s politics of “Change.”

    In Buhari’s cabinet, we have fabled genii asphyxiating in the stifling grip of intellectual squalor and the grotesque, institutionalised corruption plaguing the country. Nothing works. Contemporary political legend contend that some of the ministers are victims of hubris and karmic forces trailing their emergence through vile, subterranean tactics. President Buhari’s cabinet members in a nutshell, constitute impediments to his success – his personal and administrative inadequacies notwithstanding, if he has a formidable team, his shortcomings as an administrator and leader wouldn’t be so bothersome.

    Lest we forget the country’s Eighth National Assembly and its lack of character. Lawmakers in the country’s upper and lower legislative chambers currently constitute a great, shameful burden to national purse and pride. But groupies of the ruling class would have none of that. Left to them, their cronies and benefactors in the current administration can do no wrong. The absence of a critical electorate thus encourages the ruling class to persist in maladministration.

    In the karmic scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just desserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry through unjustly burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation and bureaucratic ineptitude.

    In the ensuing moral sepsis, the current ruling class treats equality as a moral baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts daily, to subvert the law of karma.

    The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation however, resonates Hedges’ apt commentary on Herman Melville’s allegorical portrayal about the American character in his literary classic, “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia, argues Hedges.

    In truth, Nigeria is likable to the fictional ship, the Pequod. The ship’s crew is a mixture of races and creeds which is reflective of Nigeria’s heterogeneous society. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like the Nigerian society’s mad dash for wealth, assures the Pequod’s destruction.

    While Ahab and his crew eventually gained awareness of their imminent doom, very few Nigerians appreciate from experience that our prevalent culture of acquisition, fostered by insatiable greed and based on cutthroat politics, corporate profit and limitless devastation of farmlands by oil exploration accelerates doom.

    Nigeria, like the Pequod’s crew, rationalizes madness, scorns prudence and bows slavishly before hedonism and greed. The society yields to the seductive illusion of unbounded luxury, wanton idolatry, limitless power and acclaim. Thus the country unfurls to degenerate forces and systems of death.

    Those who foresee the impending doom lack the fortitude to rebel. Thus moral cowardice makes hostages of all. This shouldn’t encourage Buhari and his ruling class to scorn the subtle nudge of tact. History offers timeless lessons in the fate of Napolean, Hitler, Stalin, Joseph Mobotu (Mobutu Sese Seko), Saddam Hussein to mention a few. These men rose to lead with positive intentions. In time, they did good but later got drunk with power, losing touch with reality, causing misery for many with their own fate sealed in the Karma of their actions. Moby Dick eventually rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one.  Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark. We are all karma’s ‘bitches.’

  • We will remember karma when it strikes

    Man’s karma travels with him, like his shadow. But karma is nobody’s bitch. The universe’s agent of cause and effect, deterrence and retributive justice, can neither be owned nor placed on a leash. Unlike life, it doesn’t suffer the affliction of mankind’s dubious acquiescence to daunting, menacing bestiality oft attributed to life and summed by the terse, intense statement: ‘Life’s a bitch.”

    Karma is our open secret. In Nigeria, it is our sacred, secret space ignored in plain sight. It becomes our temenos or ritual precinct of reward and comeuppance. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.

    In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe that bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they have done. The Nigerian society however, fights futilely to suspend the karmic laws of cause and effect, insulating individuals from the injurious effects of vice and poor judgment. Local gender activists, like their European and American role models, abandon more progressive causes to pervert birth control and abortion in duplicitous bid to detach sex from its natural results or consequences. Politics is equally rigged to reward greed, bestiality, indolence, illegitimacy and so on.

    Lest we forget the pervasive political and economic crisis bedeviling the country. The nation’s woes originate from her moral lapses. Endemic poverty, substandard healthcare and education, ethnic and religious bigotry, bribery and other forms of corruption manifest by the society’s poverty of morals and humane ethics.

    Hence those guilty of corruption escape the consequences of their wrongdoing in connivance with a bland, treacherous government. The karmic consequences of this anomaly are of course, better imagined – think Dasukigate, Mainagate, and so on. Until recently, there was no punishment for the wicked and no deterrence for the corrupt. On President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, Nigeria was pilfered silly. The country was persistently sodomized and defiled by rampaging hordes of moral perverts. There was no good or evil. The cult of moral grayness bloomed on Jonathan’s watch. Thus our karmic reality of chronic indebtedness and bankruptcy.

    Enter Muhammadu Buhari, incumbent president and leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Buhari suffers the flipside of karma – from his ascension to power and ouster by military coup in the 1980s, to his recent emergence as democratic president, the retired General from Daura is widely appreciated and denounced along bigoted shoals of ethnic and religious extremists. Base sentimentality and impoverished logic fostered by the ruling class and espoused by segments of the citizenry, afflict President Buhari and his bungling cabinet.

    In the presidential cabinet, subtle cues abound, establishing the workings of unforgiving karma.

    We have ministers whose appointments were hotly debated and questioned on basis of their shameful antecedents either as governors, commissioners and other capacities in public and private sectors. One year after their appointment into the presidential cabinet, these ministers can only manage a hobble along the clogged, swampy corridors of the APC’s politics of “Change.”

    In Buhari’s cabinet, we have fabled genii asphyxiating in the stifling grip of intellectual squalor and the grotesque, institutionalised corruption plaguing the country. Nothing works. Contemporary political legend contend that some of the ministers are victims of hubris and karmic forces trailing their emergence through vile, subterranean tactics. President Buhari’s cabinet members in a nutshell, constitute impediments to his success – his personal and administrative inadequacies notwithstanding, if he has a formidable team, his shortcomings as an administrator and leader wouldn’t be so bothersome.

    Lest we forget the country’s Eighth National Assembly and its lack of character. Lawmakers in the country’s upper and lower legislative chambers currently constitute a great, shameful burden to national purse and pride. But groupies of the ruling class would have none of that. Left to them, their cronies and benefactors in the current administration can do no wrong. The absence of a critical electorate thus encourages the ruling class to persist in maladministration.

    In the karmic scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just desserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry through unjustly burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation and bureaucratic ineptitude. In the ensuing moral sepsis, the current ruling class treats equality as a moral baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts daily, to subvert the law of karma.

    The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation however, resonates Hedges’ apt commentary on Herman Melville’s allegorical portrayal about the American character in his literary classic, “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia, argues Hedges.

    In truth, Nigeria is likable to the fictional ship, the Pequod. The ship’s crew is a mixture of races and creeds which is reflective of Nigeria’s heterogeneous society. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like the Nigerian society’s mad dash for wealth, assures the Pequod’s destruction.

    While Ahab and his crew eventually gained awareness of their imminent doom, very few Nigerians appreciate from experience that our prevalent culture of acquisition, fostered by insatiable greed and based on cutthroat politics, corporate profit and limitless devastation of farmlands by oil exploration accelerates doom.

    Nigeria, like the Pequod’s crew, rationalizes madness, scorns prudence and bows slavishly before hedonism and greed. The society yields to the seductive illusion of unbounded luxury, wanton idolatry, limitless power and acclaim. Thus the country unfurls to degenerate forces and systems of death.

    Those who foresee the impending doom lack the fortitude to rebel. Thus moral cowardice makes hostages of all. This shouldn’t encourage Buhari and his ruling class to scorn the subtle nudge of tact. History offers timeless lessons in the fate of Napolean, Hitler, Stalin, Joseph Mobotu (Mobutu Sese Seko), Saddam Hussein to mention a few. These men rose to lead with positive intentions. In time, they did good but later got drunk with power, losing touch with reality, causing misery for many with their own fate sealed in the Karma of their actions. Moby Dick eventually rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one.  Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark. We are all karma’s bitches.

  • Karma and the PDP meltdown

    Karma and the PDP meltdown

    President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan promised Nigerians transformation: in ways he, his supporters and opponents may never have anticipated, he is delivering.

    The ongoing war of attrition within the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) rather than being a tragic event, could ultimately lead to radical transformation in the way the business of politics is conducted in Nigeria.

    It may also result in reining in the monstrous, rampaging presidency constructed by former President Olusegun Obasanjo in his eight years in office. This was a presidency more committed to enforcing its will than upholding the rule of law.

    It was a presidency unabashedly given to using state apparatus to undermine constitutional institutions, emasculate elected officials and subvert the commonweal.

    But for a brief window when the late Umaru Yar’Adua was still trying to find his way and Jonathan as Acting President was coming to grips with exercising ultimate power, we have reverted to the Obasanjo years when a president’s wish was law and dissent well-nigh treasonable.

    One can be forgiven for dubbing this administration OBJ-lite. It has copied all the former president methods – especially in dealing with perceived enemies. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is ever ready to be deployed for sudden investigation of all who fall foul of the powers-that-be. Elected officials can be blackmailed with the sudden withdrawal of their security detail. Election outcomes are recognised only when they are favourable. Even throwbacks to the OBJ era are wheeled out of retirement to reprise their erstwhile attack-dog roles. You cannot run down the list without experiencing that strange sense of déjà vu.

    Unfortunately, those we are dealing with are not the sort to split hairs over originality. They are too pre-occupied with the struggle for survival, and for desperate men anything goes – as long as it works.

    The real tragedy for a party that loved to describe itself as the ‘biggest in Africa’ is that it has been so preoccupied with staring at, and admiring its image as mirrored by the water, it didn’t realise the moment it fell into the river! Even in its death throes some who should know better are deluding themselves that the party will emerge from the current trauma stronger.

    The only way that can happen is if there is genuine reconciliation in which the grievances of ‘New PDP’ elements are addressed and the rebels receive amnesty. But that is an unlikely scenario because what is driving the split is a cocktail of burning ambition, betrayal, broken promises and deep-rooted bitterness.

    Jonathan is committed to running again. His embittered foes are bent on holding him to commitments he made when he first sought the presidency under equally contentious circumstances in 2011. The other eruptions like the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) debacle and Rivers PDP crisis are all symptoms traceable to the disagreements over 2015 which are destabilising the party.

    Anyone who has followed the exchanges across the PDP divide in the last one week will not have escaped the old pattern of denial and looking for scapegoats. Rather than embark on some desperately needed introspection, party hacks have descended on the usual suspects. Predictably, some of Jonathan’s supporters now see in Obasanjo the Macchiavelian directing the drama. Never mind that the possibility of the former president and his erstwhile deputy, Atiku Abubakar, sitting together to cook up a conspiracy – given all the issues between them – just beggars belief.

    In reality the spiritual principle that you reap what you sow holds true in the PDP mess. Everything the ruling party and its managers have done in the last 14 years created the impression that with sufficient might you can get away with impunity.

    I have been amused to no end at the recourse by PDP chairman, Bamanga Tukur and elements in the presidency to legality as the means of fighting the rebellion. Tukur has been huffing and puffing about how he was properly elected by the special convention. He has even gone as far as threatening to declare the seats of rebels in the National Assembly vacant, and send security agents after them for daring to have a difference of opinion.

    Coming from party leaders who have encouraged this sort of unorthodox conduct in the past, the whole legal posturing is just risible. The PDP has 23 governors, but its national leadership was sacked by Atiku and a mere seven governors! What is wrong with that? Given what has been happening in the polity in the last few months the ruling party should not see this as a strange development.

    It is hypocritical for the president and his supporters to cry foul over ‘New PDP’. Without shame they recognised Plateau State Governor, Jonah Jang, as NGF chairman after he received just 16 votes in an election in which 35 governors voted. Jonathan used the power of his office to encourage Jang’s dubious claims. So why is he discomfited that a mere seven governors will topple Tukur and replace him with one-time Acting Chairman, Abubakar Baraje?

    It is rib-tickling watching the outrage of the same people who have been addressing the impostor, Evans Bipi, as ‘Speaker’ of the Rivers State House Assembly. This was a fellow who along with five others purportedly toppled the real leader of the 24-member assembly in the now infamous fracas where legislators assaulted each other with dangerous weapons while the police looked on like spectators at a boxing tournament.

    If Bipi and his Gang of Five can seize power in a 24-man assembly, what is wrong in seven governors overthrowing the leadership of the ‘biggest party in Africa’? In the PDP’s universe this should not elicit surprise. Over the last 14 years this party has sown impunity and injustice, now it is reaping a whirlwind harvest.

    This isn’t a beauty contest between Jonathan and Atiku or the governors and the president. This is about the underlying things stoking the crisis. This is about a system that has received too many shocks and now the absorbers have given way. This is purely a case of what has been going round finally coming around. So PDP deal with it!