Tag: PDP

Far from confirming the claim of the incurably deluded spokesperson for Goodluck Jonathan’s doomed re-election campaign that his principal had conceded defeat out of patriotism rather than because he lost irredeemably, last weekend’s gubernatorial and state assembly elections show dramatically just how diminished, how washed-up the “biggest political party in Africa” has become.

One of its chieftains, who would later stand trial for criminal embezzlement (he was cleared by the courts) had declared that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years “in the first instance.”

More recently, as she barged from one campaign stop to another, hurling coarse abuse at her husband’s opponents and inciting rented crowds to stone anyone demanding a change from   the status quo, Dr Jonathan’s wife had stamped her ample personal authority on continuity:  60  years of PDP power, nothing less.

In the event, the PDP’s reign, which has drawn far more tears than cheers, is mercifully set to expire after just 16 years.

An obituary notice to that effect, a spoof on the standard Nigerian fare, has been doing the rounds. With due acknowledgement to its anonymous author and high praise for his or her creativity, I quote the epitaph in part:

“With gratitude to God and total submission to the will of the Nigerian Electorate,  we announce the death of our party, grand party and great-grand party, PDP, on March 30, 2015, after a prolonged illness from corruption, impunity, arrogance, bomb blasts, etc.

“Funeral services will be held on May 29, 2015, at Eagle Square, Abuja, at 10 a.m”

To be sure, the reports of the PDP’s death are somewhat exaggerated.   However, persuaded that it has served its time and now faces a bleak future, many of its hardiest denizens are bailing out as if it were a ship on which an outbreak of Ebola fever has just been confirmed.  The PDP, they have now realised, with their own Iyiola Omisore, is nothing without the Presidency.

Sic transit gloria.

As things stand now, the APC has, in addition to winning the Presidency, racked up comfortable majorities in both houses of the National Assembly, and all the principal officers of that body will come from its ranks.  It also has some 20 gubernatorial chairs and the same number of state assemblies under its control.

Not bad for an opposition party that Dr Jonathan’s wife derided endlessly as an “expired drug”’ that has undergone so many name-changes that it might yet call itself “Ebola” — a party against which her husband who was only last week being hailed as a statesman for merely doing the decent thing, re-launched a vile, divisive, money-drenched campaign in a desperate but ultimately futile bid to supplant in Lagos, its stronghold.

Oba Rilwan Akiolu’s bellicose warning to the Igbo to vote for the APC gubernatorial candidate Akinwunmi Ambode or face the consequences may well have been his answer to Dr Jonathan’s dishonourable campaign. But that is no justification. Whatever happened to noblesse oblige?

Fears that Nigeria may become a one-party state, what with the rate at which members of the PDP are abandoning ship for the victorious APC bring to memory the aftermath of the 1983 general elections during which the NPN, inebriated with its stolen victories across Nigeria, declared that all other political parties had become “irrelevant.”   Three months later, it was swept into oblivion by the military.

The APC must not for a moment indulge in such hubris.  Nothing stops the PDP from re-building itself into a strong and credible opposition party the way a decimated Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) under the dynamic and committed leadership of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu had done before the merger that produced the APC

For one thing, even in those geopolitical zones where it is weakest, the PDP still has some diehard supporters, witness its entrenchment in the South East and South South where the plucky Rochas Okorocha and the much-persecuted but resolute Chibuike Amaechi are the last men standing, its tenacious grip in Ondo, its close run in Lagos, and its comprehensive sweep in all the elections held in Ekiti in the past two weeks.

At his inauguration last July, Ekiti Governor Ayodele Fayose had in a speech that sounded as if it was an entry in the diary of a mad man, had vowed to drive the ACN not just out of Ekiti but out of Yoruba land and Nigeria.

A delusion, to be sure; but he seems to have succeeded in driving it out of Ekiti.

In the June 2014 election that returned Fayose to power after a previous outing remembered mainly for high scandal, arbitrariness, brazen corruption and sophomoric stunts, he won a majority in every local government to defeat the incumbent, Dr Kayode Fayemi.

We now know, through damning documentary evidence produced by a competent witness, that the victory was procured, not by the so-called stomach infrastructure strategy, but by good old-fashioned skullduggery.

But the formula Fayose employed to deliver Ekiti to Jonathan in the presidential race, secure the election of three senators, six members of the House of Representatives and 26 members of  the state assembly, all of whom he had personally handpicked, without challenge  – how Fayose constituted Ekiti into a one-party state remains one the best-kept secrets of Nigerian politics.

Household per household, Ekiti is reputed to have the largest number of holders of advanced degrees not just in Nigeria but in all of Africa, and surely ranks high in the world league for that distinction, if it does not sit at the very top.

That a delinquent who parades his mother’s infirmity of the most intimate kind in the market square to score a cheap political point can hold them in thrall, pervert all they hold dear and block every recourse to justice and redress, is an affront and a standing rebuke to the learned and highly accomplished people of Ekiti, and the elders who won’t call him to order.

History will show that Fayose could not have done it without Dr Jonathan’s close collaboration or active connivance.  But how will the Ekiti people explain this tragic turn in their history to their progeny?

To return to what lies ahead, at this defining moment:  The task before the APC now is to transform a loose coalition into a focused governing party and translate slogan into actuality.  It must deliver change – change that Nigerians can feel and see in their living conditions and in the lives of their children.

Not change that will occur in a nebulous future, like regular power supply, but change with an immediate impact.

It cannot be business as usual.  Governance cannot be a jobs-for-the boys scheme.  In this data-driven age, it cannot be an encounter of the unprepared with the unforeseen.

Public expectations are high.  There is so much do, so much to fix.

During World War II, one American military unit had this as its motto:  “The difficult task we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer.”

That is the spirit that should animate the APC as it prepares to take power and guide it throughout its rule.

This must not be another false dawn.