SHORTLY before the May 21 elective convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Port Harcourt, it was obvious the opposition party was in a deep stupor. Court orders and judgements were flying everywhere; Lagos and Abuja courts were neck-deep in the crisis; the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party was groaning under pressure; the party’s Board of Trustees (BoT) was fulminating; and the terribly flustered and embattled acting chairman, former governor Ali Modu Sheriff, was pondering whether to flee in panic or display hopeless defiance. In the end, the convention was aborted, barely managing to dissolve the NWC and empowering former Kaduna State governor Ahmed Makarfi to head a national caretaker committee to plan another convention in three months.
First, Senator Sheriff stood pat, but not before vacillating between threatening the party with a lawsuit and offering them sop. But soon thereafter, a good number of the NWC began to queue behind the new caretaker committee. Then the parallel ‘pretender’ Abuja convention inspired by former minister Jerry Gana and Senator Ibrahim Mantu began speaking peaceably with the caretakers, at first dilatorily, and then more sure-footedly and briskly. And finally, the party’s BoT, which had plotted to take over the party’s affair in response to the stalemate, aligned itself with the caretaker committee. By yesterday, with the exception of some NWC members, there was hardly anyone left behind the pugnacious Senator Sheriff, whose betrayal in Port Harcourt a newspaper had described as a palace coup. Even the cantankerous duo of Governors Nyesom Wike of Rivers State and Ayo Fayose of Ekiti, both of whom had fiercely backed the interim chairman, had begun to sing a different and implacable tune.
Senator Sheriff shot himself in the foot in a maddening but fateful dash for glory. He had received popular support to become the party’s acting chairman. But almost immediately, he brazenly began to scheme to retain the influential office in substantive capacity. More galling to many party members, they thought he sent faint signals he would not even mind also bagging the party’s presidential nomination, a prize he could deploy his enormous resources and the party’s chairmanship to take peremptorily. At that point, the highly consternated party rushed at him with daggers drawn. In Port Harcourt, he was the sole aspirant for the chairman’s post. But the conspirators pulled the carpet from under him. Now, they have virtually inoculated him against any future ambition. He is no longer regarded as acting chairman; it is inconceivable he can become substantive chairman. And as for the party’s standard-bearer position, pigs can fly before he smells the post.
The PDP was pragmatic to have made Senator Sheriff the acting chairman. He is bold, rich, fearless and eager for a fight. In fact, in some ways, he seems the perfect counterpoise to the All Progressives Congress (APC) President Muhammadu Buhari, the laconic former army general whose suspect democratic credentials grate on the nerves of the opposition. Had the senator limited himself to the three-month tenure gifted him by the dispirited leadership of his party, his stock would either have continued to rise or at least stayed the same. But he spurned wisdom. Now he is out in the cold, alone, chafing and increasingly demoralised.
On the other hand, former governor Makarfi, who like Senator Sheriff is also a senator, appears an even sturdier politician than the former Borno State governor, of course without the flight of fancy and shenanigans of the latter. He is technically not the acting PDP chairman, but he will deploy the powers and goodwill of that office to conduct a new convention. He is more level-headed, more urbane, and more calculating. Above all, he is not bitten by the ambition bug that unhorsed Senator Sheriff. At the rate the party is coalescing around the former Kaduna governor, the PDP may be prepared to conduct a rancour-free convention, and possibly produce party officers without the restraining and enervating orders and judgements of the courts. More importantly, Senator Makarfi is unlikely to want to transmute into anything in the immediate future.
The stalemate being witnessed by the PDP may in fact be a temporary one. Once the party manages to transcend that paralysis, it will have to confront the task of rebuilding itself, first into a vibrant opposition, and then into a winning party. Those tasks will not be easy. Since it lost the presidency and many governorship offices last year, the party has been reluctant to embrace the fearful and radical measures required to reposition it to check the ruling party and offer the wary public a veritable alternative. One of those radical measures is the need to purge the party of its discredited leaders, most of whom are either being investigated by anti-graft agencies or prosecuted for corruption. By shunning that option, the party gives the impression it underestimates the deep public revulsion against the manner it rifled through the nation’s treasury and emptied it. Indeed, had the 16 years of PDP been probed, the stench would have been unbearable, if not truly asphyxiating.
In 2014, this column presciently suggested that the nation was waiting for the APC to fight and win the presidency debauched by the PDP over 16 years. Now, the country is waiting for the PDP to offer the right and beneficial opposition to the APC, if it can purge its leadership, recruit new leaders, and embark on the structural and intellectual re-engineering so direly needed at this time. It has put paid to Senator Sheriff’s ambition, and brought in new faces to plan another convention. But it has left undone all the greater and deeper changes that would stand the party in good stead not only now but in the near future. Yet the hope of a brighter tomorrow for the party, one which it desperately but awkwardly desires, is contingent upon how quickly and effectively the party actualises the changes.
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