The PDP post-vice presidential pick crisis is getting merrier and merrier — or is it messier and messier? — with Nyesom Wike the Rejected getting more agony-prone; and Atiku Abubakar the Picker getting more obstinate.
Both seem to have embraced the zero sum game when common sense pushes for mutual accommodation and less posturing.
To support the Atiku-Okowa ticket, the Wike camp has upped the ante: PDP must sack Iyorchia Ayu, the national chairman, to balance the PDP national outlook. If Atiku, a northerner must remain the presidential candidate, Ayu must step down and let a southerner boss the party.
That itself is not unreasonable. Wasn’t the lure of presidential ticket the reason the PDP “South” kept off vying for party chairman? Why indeed should the North gross the presidential ticket and also corral the party chair?
But a more pragmatic Atiku, while not opposed to the idea, insists that Ayiu should only step down after the presidential elections next year. But what happens then?
Should Atiku lose, it would become a non-issue, for PDP is driven by nothing but raw power. Should he win, Atiku would become the sick party emperor Olusegun Obasanjo created: the so-called “party Leader” — and vicious power dealer — who could do and undo. By that that, Wike and co would be fair game!
Either way, the Wike camp, impassioned champions of PDP southern rights, would appear an endangered species — motivation enough, for them, to make between now and the February 2023 election hour the proverbial banana peel, from which Atiku’s presidential dreams may well slip and slide into the moon!
Why Wike, the political apostle of “no-retreat-no-surrender”, may even have elevated himself into some political divine, some tin god now finding it below its dignity to directly negotiate with mere mortals — or how else do you interpret Wike’s reported bluster that he wouldn’t meet one-on-one with Atiku, as not unreasonably suggested by a PDP top shot, but that Atiku could negotiate with Wike’s “strategy team” if he wished?
Did Wike ever think it was this same overbearing temper that cost him the PDP ticket and after, his Atiku rejection for Okowa?
Well, as this drama unfolds, Hardball is billeted at the theatre, enjoying a ringside seat. He invites the reader to this chilling ringside poetry:
Merrier and merrier, messier and messier, they who the the gods want to destroy, they first make mad …