Tag: PDP

As they prepare for their national convention in November in Ibadan, Oyo State, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) last Monday fatefully but controversially took steps to reposition their party into winning ways. At their 102nd National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting in Abuja, the party considered the report of the 44-man zoning committee headed by Bayelsa State governor, Douye Diri, and without much ado agreed to zone the party’s presidential ticket to the South. They had learnt hard lessons from a similar exercise before the 2023 poll when they threw the ticket open and almost immediately came to grief. What they didn’t say before the last poll, because it was obviously impolitic to voice it, was that they didn’t think they had a viable presidential candidate from the South competent to give battle to the entrenched All Progressives Congress (APC) whose leader, Mohammadu Buhari, had a cultlike following, and whose presumed presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, combined the pugnacity and wiliness of a political avatar.

What they were uneager to contemplate in 2023, they have now embraced cheerfully, hoping that in the 2027 presidential election, their main and obsessive focus, they would deliver to themselves a brilliant and salutary outcome. As usual, their calculations are a little skewed, and their preoccupations with pursuing just one goal at a time a little misplaced. Regardless of the hysterical reaction of former Rivers governor Nyesom Wike, not to say the self-justification he bandied around after the presidential poll, the PDP didn’t lose in 2023 because a northerner picked the ticket; they lost because their standard-bearer, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, miscalculated badly. Therefore, using their 2023 electoral experience to project into the 2027 race may be a reflection of their sloppy political calculations and strategy.

The PDP has resisted every entreaty to rebuild and reform. By refusing to follow that reformist path, they have consequently been unable to discover where their strengths and weaknesses lie. The fact is that the party is fundamentally flawed and needs deep structural reengineering. It has never had a candidate it built and promoted to the national stage. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo was a self-made man coarsely hewn by the military. He was dragged from retirement and propelled into the State House, his path perfumed with lavender. The PDP did not have the independence or even political ethic to discover him, let alone turn him into a statesman. A product of military imposition, he in turn imposed his successor, Musa Yar’Adua, in the most brutal and abrasive fashion. Goodluck Jonathan, who was the third PDP president in 16 years, rose from being a deputy governor for four years to governor for two years, and was then catapulted by Chief Obasanjo’s fiat into the vice presidency for about three years, and finally on to the presidency. Unlike the APC, the party had been robbed of the expertise and due process needed to produce a presidential candidate.

Alhaji Atiku, the political nomad, had to return to the PDP when he needed rehabilitation, and the party also needed a financially loaded weapon they could deploy in 2019 against the APC candidate, the late President Buhari. Despite his being positioned by circumstances to win the 2023 poll had he played his cards with the dexterity the moment called for, the party’s awkward abridgement of due process and its infantile desperation to profit from other people’s misfortune combined to thwart their ambitions. Barely two years after the 2023 debacle, the PDP now appears poised to repeat the mistakes of the past. It has refused to address its major weaknesses, including not mastering the art of producing winnable presidential candidates, and also refusing to structure itself in such a way that its platform, ideology, and apparatchiks form a coherent whole able to reproduce its kind. Months ago, speculations were rife that Oyo State governor Seyi Makinde might give the presidential race a try. Then stories drifted towards Bauchi governor Bala Mohammed, despite his obviously delinquent appeal to antediluvian politics.

But after the PDP last week resolved its zoning conundrum that cost it so much in 2023, it jettisoned the idea of fielding any northern candidate and has shifted focus to a southern candidate. Because it is fixated on the next presidential election rather than rebuilding everything the party represents, it is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past by drafting mercenaries as their champions and standard-bearers. All its previous candidates, without exception, had been mercenaries, from Chief Obasanjo in 1999 to Alhaji Atiku in 2023. Now, the party is actively considering Peter Obi, the same peregrine who clumsily and opportunistically hoisted the LP flag in the last election and etched on that flag the emblem of the Christian crusader. Mr Obi had jumped from the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to the PDP, and then on to the LP, and is now making sheep’s eyes at the PDP. The Bauchi governor confirmed that the party was mollifying him. He also confirmed that they were speaking with Dr Jonathan, who has been more stable in the party than the flighty and precarious Mr Obi.

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Whether the PDP will be able to endure the extreme cautiousness of their skittish targets remains to be seen. Mr Makinde’s ambition will not fly. He neither has the charisma nor the money to be a serious contender. It is suspected that he knows his limitations. Dr Jonathan will be plagued by doubts as to whether he is qualified to run or not. But there is simply no way to know this until he enters the race and is buffeted by litigations. Mr Obi is the archetypal Teflon politician. He will not commit himself to any party until he is sure he will get the ticket. He has gallivanted around the political coalition leaders now coalescing in the African Democratic Congress (AC), but refused to fully enlist in the party, knowing full well that Alhaji Atiku is sitting pretty in the ADC. Mr Obi remains in the LP but has proved incompetent to grapple with the party’s complex situations and conflicts. Unfortunately for him, no one in the PDP can give him the ironclad assurances he craves. In the past decade or so, the PDP needed Dr Jonathan to stand strong for the party and offer it the guidance the party sorely needed. Instead he had sulked from the sidelines, angry, he claimed, at the way he was betrayed. Bereft of any lodestar, despite the half-hearted presence of the former president, the party has again begun desperately fishing for a standard-bearer, an opportunist and defector from anywhere.

In the weeks and months ahead, the PDP will face many twists and turns. It has refused to build a candidate from the bottom up, preferring instead to steal fruits from other people’s trees. In fact, it may already be too late for the party to engage in the careful political cultivation needed to produce a winner. They will, therefore, simply close their eyes at a point and pick somebody, no matter how unelectable. Like the ADC hopes to do and has probably begun a dress rehearsal for that purpose, they will then go on to deploy ethnicity and religion to destabilise the ruling party in order to knock it off its confident perch. They will also hope to elicit the interest and help of the meddlesome Chief Obasanjo whose judgement over the decades has been nothing short of the disastrous, and whose vitriol and sanctimoniousness has produced no equal anywhere, no, not even in Donald Trump’s America.