But for the injurious effect of unipartysm on our democratization process, I am not sure many would weep for the impending death of PDP, aided in the main by its ignoble media enablers. We all remember its dubious beginning, its real and undeclared goal and how for 16 years the country was swindled as Obasanjo’s eight years roadmap failed to ‘provide stable electricity, attain agricultural revolution, end massive importation of foreign goods and end corruption”, just as both Umaru Yar’Adua’s “seven-point agenda” and Jonathan’s ‘Transformation Agenda’ failed.
And but for fear of putting our faith in the hand of APC whose difference between it and PDP is that of six and half a dozen, I am not sure many Nigerians would also lose sleep over the death of any of the 18 officially registered Nigerian political parties susceptible to use for state capture by gangsters.
For instance, not in any of them can we find a consensus of members on identified values and principles, under a party label (Jinadu). None of them seems to understand modern political parties as modernizing agents and tried to take a cue from our 100 years history of party formation dating back to 1923, the year Herbert Macaulay’s Nigeria National Democratic Party (NNDP) took off with defined objectives of seeking a “municipal status for Lagos, local self-government, compulsory primary education, non-discriminatory private economic enterprise and Africanisation of the civil service”.
Both the NPC and AG that followed had defined objectives. For the former, it was about ‘fighting ignorance, idleness and injustice’ in the Northern Region’ and for the latter, besides its unstated purpose of reducing the influence of Zik in the West, had a well-articulated manifesto which promised free education, free health, and full employment among many others.
Sadly, what we today have in the name of parties are factions of military-groomed new breed politicians with military mind-set of sharing spoils of war or spoils of office, supervised by an oligarchy of garrison commanders who routinely take elected governors hostages.
But PDP itself is anything but a political party. For John Campbell, former US envoy to Nigeria, it is “an elite cartel at the centre of power in Nigeria that came together for sharing of oil rents and political spoils’’. And empirically, the party validated Campbell’s thesis.
Let us start with documented facts about the fraud called the unbundling of PHCN, on which PDP’s leading lights including President Yar’Adua, who upon being rigged into office claimed “$10b was spent on the power sector by President Obasanjo, with little to show for it”, agreed on how much it cost them to foist darkness on the nation.
For former House Speaker Dimeji Bankole, it ‘was over $16 billion’; for the House power probe committee chairman, Ndudi Elumelu, it ‘was $13b’, while for Gabriel Suswan’s Presidential Review Panel on the NIPP, “the total project allocations/ estimates to NIPP was $10.231 billion inclusive of the $2 billion federal government counterpart funding for Mambilla Hydro Power project”.
On the fraud called privatization through which Nigeria’s total investment of over $100b was sold for about $1.5b, PDP’s aggrieved members provided all the facts. NITEL, a successful outfit that posted a profit of N53bn in 2002, recorded a loss of N19bn in 2003 shortly before BPE sold it to unqualified Pentascope, an alleged proxy company hurriedly registered only three months earlier with staff strength of six.
Folio Communications, buyer of the Daily Times had to sell Daily Times assets on Customs Street and in London before it could pay BPE N1.2bn, the entire Trade Fair Complex was sold to a company for as low as N10bn. ALSCON, built with $3.2b was sold to a Russian firm for $250m out of which it paid only $130m, and that NICON and Nigerian Reinsurance were allegedly bought through questionable deals by Global Fleet Oils and Gas Limited.
Officers of Bureau for Public Enterprises, BPE, provided level of culpability with revelation that sales proceeds were first kept in commercial banks before transfer to the CBN. Charles Osuji alleging ‘OBJ and Atiku killed the privatization dream’ and Ms Bola Onagoruwa, former DG of BPE alleging ‘Obasanjo concessioned the Ajaokuta Steel Company to Global Infrastructure without recourse to BPE’.
And to show fraud was a PDP family affair, government that claimed Professor Barth Nnaji was pushed out as a minister because of divided interest said little when Geography professor, Jerry Gana, a PDP stalwart, led a delegation of registered Independent Power Producers (IPPs), to plead with government for import waivers and government participation in their newly acquired private companies.
And there was no sense of shame among PDP big masquerades: Senator Bukola Saraki was both fuel subsidy scam whistle-blower and alleged beneficiary, VP Atiku Abubakar was accused by President Obasanjo, himself during the privatization policy; Obasanjo himself corralled governors and contractors to donating N7b towards building his private library and President Jonathan, following in his footstep , also collected N7b from the same set of people to build church and recreation centre in his rural Bayelsa.
Nigerians finally decided to vote PDP out in 2015 when ex-President Jonathan turned himself into an ATM without password word to share money to Obas, religious houses, ethnic militias, and even media houses.
Except those living in collective amnesia, Nigerians know PDP is responsible for today’s nightmares. Ten years after Nigerians stopped their planned 60 years of brigandage, they have not shown any form of remorse. Out of power, they have continued the war of attrition over sharing of our national assets.
Unfortunately as it has turned out, APC, another shade of PDP has failed to make a success of its own eight-point cardinal programme- viz devolution of power, accelerated economic growth and affordable health care, electricity generation, war against corruption, food security, integrated transport network and free education.”
And when APC controlled 65 seats in the 109 seat Senate, 190 of the 360 lower house seats and about 21 of the 36 state governors, it lacked the political will to address the nation’s crisis of nationality.
President Tinubu, from the lesson he learnt from his fathers is probably trying to use APC as a tool for elite mobilisation and consensus-building. But today he has three demons to conquer. The response to those who confiscated and mismanaged our national assets throwing millions of our youth out of work, many of his compatriots have argued, is Russia’s Putin’s approach.
Why are poor Nigerians being collectively punished for the sins of few AMCON debtors including those the body’s lawyers claim ‘live like princes while refusing to repay AMCON debts’? There is also the non-resolution of ‘the national question’. Nigerians want a return to fiscal federalism, the instrument exploited by current gangsters to engage achieve state capture.
As for the Labour Party, it is an all-purpose vehicle for fickle- minded pretenders to democracy without democratic ethos, shopping for political platform at every electoral season. Its current promoters are the unquestioning angry ‘obidients’, borne out of a hatred which by its nature destructive and unable to make positive contribution to society.
But back to PDP’s impending death. If PDP finally implodes, a section of the Nigeria media owned or controlled by PDP stalwarts who set up their platforms for less noble agenda should be held responsible.
Besides its constitutional duty of keeping the parties under surveillance to prevent their seizure of public policies, the media as agent of socialization has a duty to promote constitutional justice by drumming up support for institutions like INEC and the Supreme Court.
Besides setting political parties against constitutional justice, these self-serving segment of the media started back in 1999 by giving award after award to PDP and ANPP governors, 17 of whom EFCC found to be men with feet of clay by 2007; most of the bankers they celebrated have been indicted for deploying depositor’s funds to procure properties in and outside the country.
And their approach is often through ‘News commercialisation’, a strategy that allows information often determined by ability to pay’ is presented to the audience as a social public service news.
In the 2023 election, they tried to cover up PDP’s depraved past by diverting attention of the public to ‘Muslim-Muslim ticket. After the election had been won and lost, they tried to undermine the integrity of the Supreme Court. And when there was no more common foe to fight, PDP descended on PDP through PDP intraparty feud with an Ikenga Ugochinyere, a minor PDP shareholder, taking on Nyeson Wike, a major PDP investor, both calling for anarchy.
Of course the media is not an independent arbiter in the struggle for control over our minds. But as Ray Ekpu, veteran journalist once argued, “there must be a way to regulate the practice of journalism to earn the respect of the public”, while PDP and its media undertakers become history through their war of attrition.
