Puppet quits, puppeteer remains. Open sesame: Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) problems vanish? Not by any chance!
Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, vanquished PDP national chairman, may be the ultimate fall guy in the 2015 presidential chess game. He has been sacrificed as any pun would.
But the game is far from over, for the puppeteer is still alive and well; and ready to tangle! So are his opponents: flush with Tukur’s unceremonious junking!
Still, you’ve got to feel for Alhaji Bamanga, the way he seems to make a hash of things. Sure, the cards are almost always stacked against him. But his Achilles’ heel would appear his political antenna, too blunt to pick up danger, even if his nose is on fire!
As 2nd Republic governor of defunct Gongola State (1 October – 31 December 1983), his three-month gubernatorial reign came with the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN)-confected electoral landslide, moon-slide, and space-slide, that left everybody, victor and vanquished, numb.
Sure, his political amorality of, in months, transiting from the boss at Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) — almost always the electoral cash cow of Nigeria’s federal ruling parties — to a winning opposition candidate in Gongola (now Adamawa and Taraba states), did not help.
Yet, perhaps only the likes of Tukur believed the house of fraud the NPN built was not about to crash. He would therefore go ahead, pretending to play “His Excellency”, on the basis of that “space-slide”. He lasted all of three comical months!
This same costly naivety (more aptly, happy opportunism?) would drive his PDP chairmanship odyssey, for the PDP house of fraud that Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, built was cracking and creaky all over. He lasted 18 turbulent months!
Indeed, since President Obasanjo decided the late Solomon Lar, first PDP national chairman, was no longer a Solomon the party needed; and PDP elders back then endured Obasanjo’s muscling by presidential might, the PDP national chairmanship had become one long, slippery “banana peel”.
“Banana peel” were the picturesque words of Chuba Wilberforce Okadigbo, late colourful politician and former president of the Senate, as he described the high attrition rate of Senate presidents of his era, in eternal feuding with an insufferable President Obasanjo, who made little secret of wanting to corral the National Assembly as executive sidekick and rubberstamp, despite the presidential system’s rigid separation of power.
Indeed, since Obasanjo stonewalled the late Sunday Awoniyi, the Kogi giant, for Barnabas Gemade, the Benue not-so-known, every Tukur predecessor had come to grief: Audu Ogbe, Vincent Ogbulafor, Okwesilieze Nwodo and, of course, Tukur.
The only exception, of course, was Ahmadu Ali, who proved a merry Obasanjo puppet just as Tukur proved a merry Jonathan one. He got away with his bully principal; but left his party dazed and stunned.
Mr. Ogbe’s own call was holy rebellion against presidential complicity in the Chris Ngige Police-aided kidnapping in Anambra, at which the Obasanjo presidency sided with the constitutional bandits. He got tossed out all right, but with his honour intact as the party’s smothered conscience.
In contrast, Tukur fell as wilful party collaborator in the Jonathan Presidency’s Police-aided serial subversion of the Rivers Government, issuing from partisan bile against Governor Chibuike Amaechi — unhorsed by PDP changing dynamics, which not even the manipulating hands of his principal and puppeteer could steady.
The pair of Messrs Ogbulafor and Nwodo — with all due respect to them, for excellent citizens they are — are no more than blips on a party consumed by its own hubris. Mr. Ogbulafor once blurted his “largest party in Africa” would rule the roost for 60 years! It is ode to hubris that Mr. Ogbulafor himself lasted just over two years (March 2008-May 2010) as chairman!
Indeed, the PDP conundrum would appear the real-politik equivalent of the Parmenides-Heraclitus philosophical see-saw. Like Heraclitus’s flux, the PDP chairmanship is a yo-yo. But again, not unlike Parmenides’ staid permanence, the constant change in PDP underscores how unchanged the party remains!
The Obasanjo-Ali pair is therefore no different from the Jonathan-Tukur pair. But while second-term President Obasanjo had the gravitas to muscle Ali a safe landing, first-term President Jonathan lacks neither the tact nor the balls to hand Tukur one. Besides, Jonathan lacks the brawn to maintain, without blinking, the odious, in-your-face-impunity as party subversion tactics, of the Obasanjo era.
Tukur, therefore, became an issue only because his principal was. He is gone now, but his principal is still on. So, those who suggest his exit will bring entente to the troubled party blow hot air!
It is, therefore, in the 2015 presidential sweepstakes that the post-Tukur pitch battles would be fought. Jonathan still makes a fetish of hiding, behind a finger, his 2015 ambitions. But his intra-PDP foes have already cut the chase, and are dug in at the battle zone.
Northern anti-Jonathan PDP elements have always regarded the president as some harbourer of “stolen good” — the presidency, on account of PDP’s aborted zoning, at the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua. And they chafe at the spectre of a Jonathan presidential encore in 2015.
That was the genesis of the not so incredible claim that, to assuage the “North’s” hurt, Jonathan had pledged himself to a one-term presidency. So is it, the root of the pressure on the president to oust himself from 2015, the refusal of which birthed the defunct “New PDP”, and inspired the defection, into the All Progressives Congress (APC), of five of the G-7 PDP governors, aside from the Rivers impunity mess, in which Tukur also played the zestful party collaborator.
In all of these Tukur, with his poise of a school headmaster taking no nonsense from uncouth urchins, did not help matters. Tukur was asked to jump and his uncritical question was “how high”? No surprise there, that he broke his back!
He probably richly earned his demonization as some Judas to some “northern” cause. But much of that derring-do must have come at the promptings of a president, probably only too happy to unleash him on his northern brothers.
But no tears for PDP. Its goose is cooked. The tears, rather, are for a fledgling democracy with a suspect party system.
No matter how visible the ruling party’s crisis is, it is only but a symptom of the disease: the fraud of electing a president on a platform, only to declare him supreme to, and untouchable by, the party on which he rode to power!
That is the fraudulent concept of “party leader”, that makes the PDP president some Leviathan over and above a party that made him a candidate.
That was what Obasanjo brewed and bequeathed. That is what Jonathan has spectacularly mismanaged. And that is what even APC, on the rise now it may be, must watch, if it is not to blunder into the PDP pit.
If this democracy must deliver development and prosperity — and not waste itself in the dissipative manoeuvres of intra-party war puppets and puppeteers — there is urgent need to fix the party system.
