I believe strongly that a combination of these failing factors are yet to come full circle to haunt the PDP out of existence. I have no doubt in my mind that the moment of mass exodus from the PDP will soon be at hand, not necessarily by people in search of greener pastures, but because the contradictions within the party will continue to expose the worst of the tenuous tentacles that held her together.
It is noteworthy that of all the political parties registered to contest elections and kickstart Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, only the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has survived thus far. The others, APP, AD, etc. fizzled out or were muscled out by the then ruling party. After a protracted struggle by various pro-democracy advocates, particularly Chief Gani Fawehinmi (of blessed memory), the political space was expanded, giving rise to second tier political parties whose registrations were Court ordered in a move that caught the ruling party napping. A notable survivor of these is the APGA, which emerged as the South-Eastern political voice in the growing democracy.
The rising discontent with the tendency toward closure of the political space, the pace of development and growing attempt by the PDP to stifle internal democracy within its ranks led to an implosion that was to see the unification of most of the Progressive political elements in Nigeria who had since independence struggled unsuccessfully to take power at the centre. This led to the birth of the APC and the eventual ousting of the then ruling party in an election that has rekindled some hope for the survival of democracy in Africa’s most populous nation.
The PDP, since losing power, has been through various stages of attempting to reinvent itself with varying results. Some have seemed like exercises in self-denial, while others involved the usual PDP arrogance that never accepts the picture of itself it sees in the mirror. The most potent effort at reinvention has fortunately come by the way of the growing impatience with PMB’s slow pace in handling what many consider an urgent national call of emergency proportions, requiring nothing short of a miracle. This was compounded in recent times by the exhibition of courage in the removal of the subsidy on petroleum products by the president, a political landmine which has defied all administrations so far. Added to the near collapse of the economy and rising inflation, you have a mix capable of raising even a dead political party to find a stringent voice. So the PDP has suddenly popooed the ruling APC with taunts of reversing years of national bliss!
Unfortunately, for the PDP, this coincided with a crisis that would have been the final dead knell on its own coffin. Unable to put it’s house in order, factionalised along bitter divides of old and new, governors Vs the rest, the party has virtually been cornered, like her other peers of the 1998 school, into the two regions of the South South and the South East, a fact she displayed unconsciously by hosting her national convention outside Abuja since it’s inaugural convention at Jos in 1999.
The PDP’s problems have again, more than anything else, been compounded by the heavy moral burden on its neck arising from the revelations of graft, misappropriation, and outright stealing that characterised not only the party’s management of the national treasury, but it’s sheer audacity in the misappropriation of funds voted for a national crisis of war proportion, which were shamelessly plowed into the party’s efforts at winning an election! This was nothing short of dancing on the graves of Nigerians who died as a result of the intractable insurgency, as well as soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the war effort. There is nowhere else that such a political party should not go into extinction because innocent members who still have some self-respect should make a roll call of honour in denouncing the party with a national apology offered to boot. What we witnessed in the National Assembly recently, with the crossing over of two PDP members to APC, should be an encouraging preface.
There are those who believe that with what they consider the inability of PMB to meet the emergency national “rehabilitation” to which he was called, the PDP will easily warm her way back to power in 2019! This assumption, of course, is coming from those bellicose beneficiaries of the decadent system that made it possible for people to become billionaires over night without any visible investment in anything apart from some tenuous relationships or the other with someone close to another in government. Or at its extreme, some affiliation with one militant organisation or the other. It is a national shame that for all the claims of a booming economy, a resuscitated agricultural sector, etc, there is nothing on ground barely one year after its departure to show that anything concrete and sustainable was ever achieved beyond propaganda and cooked up figures. It is no secret that the GEJ government had resorted to printing the Nigerian currency to pay it’s bills as a result of the near collapse of the economy, including that which was used to pay the ubiquitous fuel subsidy in 2015. I believe that beyond the expectation of magic, GEJ should actually be relieved that he did not win the 2015 General election after all, because to have managed the built up intricacies of his administration would have only led to unimaginable national chaos.
I believe strongly that a combination of these failing factors are yet to come full circle to haunt the PDP out of existence. I have no doubt in my mind that the moment of mass exodus from the PDP will soon be at hand, not necessarily by people in search of greener pastures, but because the contradictions within the party will continue to expose the worst of the tenuous tentacles that held her together.
As the PDP governors continue with the exhibition of their “franchise” of the party, in which Houses of Assembly are worse than puppets they grudgingly pay stipends to, party executives are mostly drawn from the households of governors, projects are tokens to communities that must “appreciate” their good fortune, salaries payment are touted as great achievements, political appointments are distributed amongst mostly family members, cultists are promoted to statesmen, one then asks oneself: for how long can this once behemoth hold together?
In all the talk about 2019, the PDP has not asked herself through this crisis what actually has changed in her operations and approach apart from rumination over a lost national treasury or the cookie jar! Can they utilise the same old methods and to beget a new system? Impossible! If there are people who still think deep enough in the PDP to accept the calamity of their circumstances, they should dare to accept that that franchise has been damaged beyond redemption and can only be reinvented in a reincarnation that may hopefully throw up a being completely different from its old self. And even at that, the new incarnation must learn the patience of growing it’s way gradually back into national acceptability and not be in a hurry to take over power again! This exercise will bring to an end political parties formed in the tradition of “franchise” and with military command structures, whose shadow seem to still loom large behind her inability to imbibe democratic norms. All political parties in the polity today were formed, struggled through and owe their existence to democratic struggles, unlike the PDP and she must give way as a closing tribute to all political parties formed in the military tradition in our political experience. The pangs of that death process is what we are witnessing now.
Venatius A. Ikem is a former National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party.
