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Tag: People’s Democratic Party

  • PDP’s roforofo fight

    PDP’s roforofo fight

    By Ray Ekpu

    The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was in power for 16 years (1999-2015) and even boasted that it would keep the power trophy for 60 years. Its rhetoric turned out to be an empty boast when it was trounced in 2015 by Muhammadu Buhari who had done the race three times unsuccessfully before then. Since it lost power, it also lost its direction and has been running from pillar to post trying to get back its sanity and soul. It hasn’t succeeded so far despite several attempts. That failure has led to the party being in tatters. A couple of weeks ago, a faction of the party met in Ibadan in a move to do some panel-beating and get its soul back. It expelled some of its important members including Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Samuel Anyanwu, national secretary of the party and several other persons that they probably thought were roadblocks to the smooth functioning of the party.

    The amazing thing here was that two prominent persons, Governor Seyi Makinde and Wike who were together in a rebel club called G-5 were now in separate camps. That was an early sign that whatever would be done in Ibadan, Oyo State, would, most likely, be countered by the other group that did not attend the Ibadan conference. That has now happened. Wike and his gang have also expelled some members from the opposing gang. So the crisis has now morphed into a conflagration. The two camps went to take over the headquarters of the party and a fist fight occurred and the police had to use teargas to disperse the unruly crowd of political heavyweights. Now that office has been sealed by the police.

    What happened there has been described by some media in a sexy alliteration as “Wahala at Wadata.” We saw this kind of roforofo fight in a different setting during General Yakubu Gowon’s era. An activist called Godwin Daboh had accused one of Gowon’s ministers, Joseph Tarka of corruption. The public had to force Tarka to resign. Friends of Tarka also went after Daboh and filed some corruption allegations against him. So the prevailing political jargon at the time was “if you Tarka me I will Daboh you.” That is what has just happened in the PDP between the Makinde and Wike camps.

    Both sides were simply obeying Dirkeen’s Third Law of Politics (a) Get elected (b) Get re-elected and (c) Don’t get mad, get even. The G-5 is now in shreds. Makinde who was with Wike is now without him. Each group is on its own and we are left to figure out which BOT is valid and which is not; which NWC is legitimate and which is not and which NEC is legal and which is not. What we now have is a rebellion within a rebellion, some kind of illegal republic within an illegal republic. As things are now it is only the Supreme Court that will sort out the mess.

    In this roforofo fight, the PDP leaders have put the courts in a quandary. Any keen observer must have noticed that the strategy was that each gang selects in a partisan manner the court in a state where he can hope to get favourable judgement. He goes and files a case there and does what he must do to get the judgement he wants. The other party does the same thing and gets the judgement it wants. That is the name of the game. And these are the same people who will turn around and accuse the courts of corruption when the courts of equal jurisdiction give conflicting judgements. For them leadership does not depend upon being right. It depends on acquiring power by hook or crook. That way they can justify what Henry Kissinger said namely that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

    I am sure that many right thinking Nigerians would be shocked that one of the PDP leaders had the temerity to ask America’s President Donald Trump to come and save Nigeria’s democracy. Isn’t that a foolish remark? It is. Is it not he and his irresponsible colleagues who are turning Nigeria’s democracy upside down? Is it not his responsibility to work with his colleagues to clean the mess that they have created in our democracy and governance? It is.

    By the way is Trump a global magician? He is not. Is he a global Mr Fix it? He is not. In his own country he has problems, enormous problems that he is struggling to solve. He is being challenged by his citizens from time to time in various courts. There are various groups of demonstrators parading the streets of various American cities, people who are vigorously opposed to his policies. He is grappling with those problems without calling on foreign leaders to come and solve them. The leaders of the PDP are those who have done considerable damage to our democracy. The party had the strength to be a viable opposition party but it failed to rally its members into one big tent for that purpose because of the greed for power. They lacked the morality that was needed for that assignment and the test of morality is what you do when you have power.

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    Now they are busy crying that Nigeria is becoming a one party entity. If it becomes a one party entity they must hold themselves responsible for it. If they had stood firm to build their party into a formidable organ their members would not be leaving in droves. Their members are leaving because the greed for power and vaulting ambition had prevented the managers of the party from bringing themselves into the path of reason. Instead of working for two solid parties to emerge they started creating micro parties that had no chance of being big enough to be convincingly competitive. And now some of them have decamped to ADC, a party that has been there but not there. That party is like a false pregnancy. All the signs are there but no baby. The ADC is just a gathering of the disgruntled, of people who have been moving from one party to another since 1999 looking for pepper soup, also known as stomach infrastructure. Those in ADC are just hanging in the air like birthday balloons; they are in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere except political perdition. Their feet are not on the ground. They have no tap roots. All that they have are fanciful flags. That’s all. ADC is not a new party. It has been there for ages and has achieved nothing or to put it kindly next to nothing. Which state does it control? None.

    One of the ADC leaders said recently that the people will vote President Bola Tinubu out in 2027; that their party doesn’t need to control any state before winning. This is evidence that he doesn’t know how people vote in elections in Nigeria. They do not vote based on issues. They vote because their leaders, governors, legislators, commissioners and local government chairmen tell them which party and which candidate to vote for. Any analyst who has watched the voting pattern in Nigeria’s elections can testify to this. So parties that do not control these institutions have very little chance of success in the 2027 elections. Mark my words.

    The other peg on which one of the ADC chiefs is hanging the possibility of driving Tinubu out of office is the issue of hardship in Nigeria. Yes, there is hardship in Nigeria just as there is hardship in many other countries in varying degrees. No country in the world has yet completely eliminated hardship. But the fact is that the federal and state governments are combating the problem with various strategies including giving cash or food items. This has been made possible by the fact that the removal of fuel subsidy by Tinubu has put more money in the pockets of all the governments who now take home almost twice the sum of money they got before fuel subsidy was removed. Now, three or four state governments have trillion naira budgets. Life has become a lot easier. We can get petrol without having to sleep and snore at petrol stations as we used to do for almost a decade when all our refineries were dead; they are still dead. And our politicians did nothing. They just allowed us to suffer interminably for years, while workers in those dormant refineries were being paid for idleness. And with the birth of the Dangote Refinery, our petroleum products palaver has been largely resolved. The Dangote Refinery is the greatest thing that has happened to Nigeria in decades, yes in several decades. And Nigerians, honest Nigerians, must stand up to defend the organisation against the corrupt antics of some corrupt marketers and some corrupt labour leaders.

  • PDP in denial as it disintegrates on self-inflicted injuries!

    PDP in denial as it disintegrates on self-inflicted injuries!

    Avalanche of PDP Leadership out of the Party:

    As the People’s Democratic Party’s (PDP) protracted toxic internal crises escalate, the party is unravelling, as Governors of the PDP-controlled states are moving en masse, out of PDP to the All Progressives Congress, along with their cabinets, members of federal and state assemblies, local government chairmen, and the majority of the PDP structures. Within this week, two PDP Governors, i.e., the Governor of Enugu State and the Governor of Bayelsa State, and the entire PDP team and almost all the party structure in the states, left the PDP. 

    Within the last two years, the PDP Governors’ forum membership has depleted from sixteen (16) to eight (8), and most likely, more PDP Governors will leave the PDP in the coming weeks. This development is a clear indication that the party is disintegrating.

    APC Governors Converting PDP leaders to APC- The Governor Uba Sani Example:

    For instance, three days ago, the APC Governor of Kaduna State, Senator Uba Sani was at the National Assembly to welcome the three members of the House of Representatives representing three Kaduna federal constituencies who defected from PDP to the APC. This further confirmed that at the state level, Governor Uba Sani is maintaining critical momentum while applying “politics without bitterness”.

     How Did PDP Get into this Situation?

    Could this be the beginning of the end of PDP? Certainly, the PDP will soon become another case study in Nigeria’s political history – A classic case of what happens if leaders of a political party are stingy with their money, short-sighted with their vision, greedy with their ambition, and. Most of its leaders, like many political leaders in Nigeria, feel entitled.  Something that is as mundane, yet profoundly telling as the inability to own a national headquarters, or ensuring that the ground rent of the building is paid for as at when due, tells you the kind of double standards that some political leaders in Nigeria, in this case, the PDP leadership, have been running the political party. The fact that political leaders cannot own a political party Headquarters in the 26 years of Its existence out of which the PDP produced three Presidents of Nigeria who served for 16 years, with the majority of state Governors across Nigeria and majority at the National and State Assemblies, is telling of how committed they are to the political party, which leaves much to be desired.

    Most members of the party are political “free loaders” (like many politicians in Nigeria) who did not and are not truly committed to the unity and progress of the party. The majority of the PDP have only been using the party as a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for achieving their selfish and parochial political interests. That is why they dump the party whenever it does not serve their interest, and return to the party when it suits them. By the way, this is how most Nigerian politicians use the political parties. 

    In addition, “lazy politics”, politics of entitlement, stomach infrastructure politics, and lack of internal party democracy, are also the reasons why the PDP has been unable to resolve the lingering internal crisis, which demonstrates the lack of capacity of the party to produce a President that will effectively lead Nigeria. The truth is that the PDP must rebuild the confidence of Nigerians and convince Nigerians that the PDP is the correct party that can effectively and successfully lead Nigeria.

     So far, the PDP has been bedeviled by internal crises for about fifteen years (since 2010), as a result of self-inflicted internal wrangling, and power tussles. The fault lines in the PDP structure started subliminally, in 2009 when the ailment of the then President Umar Musa ‘Yar’Adua got worse and the doctrine of necessity had to be applied (and rightly so) to save Nigeria from a power vacuum, by empowering the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to become acting President, the subsequent death of President ‘Yar’Adua, and confirmation of President Jonathan as President and Commander-In-Chief. The cracks started becoming visible during the 2011 Presidential primary and general elections, when some power blocs within the PDP felt that it was still the turn of northern Nigeria to produce the President that should complete two terms of eight years that was truncated by the death of President ‘Yar’Adua, especially with late President Muhammadu Buhari who was at that time, a frontline and popular opposition Presidential aspirant from northern Nigeria, who was to contest against the PDP Presidential candidate. Even though President Goodluck Jonathan went on to win the 2011 Presidential elections, the cracks and internal crisis continued to brew subliminally and were ignored by President Jonathan and the PDP party leaders. The continued, unperturbed enjoyment of the electoral victory and power of incumbency. By 2014, the internal crisis of the party had manifested to the extent that a splinter group of then PDP State Governors that called themselves the “G5”, broke away from the mainstream PDP to join the coalition that formed the All Progressive Congress (APC), which removed PDP from presidential power. Essentially, the PDP leadership ignored the telltale signs of the fault lines, cracks within the party structure, and the consequent crises. As most of the leaders sat on their hands, the PDP had begun to face an existential crisis as the party began to implode.

     What broke the camel’s back was the power tussle, built up to the 2023 Presidential Primaries, the powerplay and zoning arrangement that culminated in a full-blown political war between the 2023 Presidential candidate, former Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and the then Governor of Rivers State Nyensom Wike. The self-inflicted injuries of the previous years and the refusal of the PDP leadership to recognize the geopolitical dynamics and realities of the 2023 imbroglio dealt a deadly blow to the PDP.

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     In fairness to then Governor of Rivers State and now Minister of FCT, Nyensom Wike, he was practically funding and running the PDP for some years, while other active and former political leaders and office holders folded their arms and watched him as some of them were decamping from the PDP to other political parties at their convenience between election cycles, thinking that they could have their way all the time. Alas! The PDP has never been the same – it has been disintegrating. 

    PDP is Living in Denial:

    PDP leaders have been in denial and blaming all sorts of reasons for the PDP predicament. While I concede that propaganda is part of politics and war, propaganda can only be useful and effective to the extent you are doing all possible to reclaim lost positions, consolidate, and take charge. It is disastrous to think that propaganda alone will win your wars or competitions. In the end, propaganda is a bubble that will burst. It appears the PDP bubble is about to burst.

     Back in the days, the PDP was the party to beat. It was a party in charge of its structures and machinery at the federal and state levels. It was a party that was disciplined and entrenched. But complacency, greed, intoxication of the power of incumbency, and the slow but sure incursion of political jobbers and pretenders were the combined monsters that are consuming the party. Yet at this critical point of its existence, the PDP is living in denial and waiting for a magic or miracle to bring it back to power.

    It is ironic that the PDP is a party whose leaders bragged that they would be in power for 60years. Alas! The PDP could only crawl to reach the 16-year milestone of holding the Presidency of Nigeria. 

    PDP Never Prepared for when they became an Opposition Party

    Furthermore, one of the critical failure factors for the PDP is that they took Nigeria and things for granted. The PDP is living in denial, because they never prepared for survival as an opposition political party, and when the time came for them to be an opposition party, like the APC and other legacy political parties had been for 16years while the PDP held sway, they just got lost. When reality hits the party, the leaders of the party are not wired or prepared to unite, adapt, re-strategize, and collectively work to regain control and leadership of the party and Nigeria.  

    Indeed, any political party that wants to exist for long, must be prepared to be united, proactive, consistent, consolidated, financially capable, and effective, for instance, in the United States of America, power shifts between the Republican and Democratic political parties. In the United Kingdom, power shifts are between the Conservative Party and the Labor Party.

    Interestingly, the PDP will conduct its national convention in the next one month even though a group within the party is in Court in a bid to stop the Convention. The months ahead are crucial for the PDP.