THE Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is a deeply maligned political party, both in office and now in the opposition. It was maligned for all of its 16 years in office, and deeply scorned for the five or so years ex-president Goodluck Jonathan sat on the golden stool. But regardless of the opprobrium in which it is held, and notwithstanding the amperage with which the All Progressives Congress (APC) spokesmen vilify the party, it reserves the right to exult over its just concluded national elective convention. The convention was billed as the gingerly first step in rehabilitating and forgiving itself of the monstrous leadership it offered the country in the past one decade and a half. That first step reassuringly did not miscarry, despite APC spokesmen’s strange conclusions that it was a futile and undramatic first step. The convention went rather well, indeed as the APC chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, acknowledged, with the opposition party now, importantly, producing a new national chairman, Uche Secondus.
Those crying more than the bereaved over the Southwest’s loss of the chairmanship position have spoken of deliberate and orchestrated spite of the Yoruba in the party, including making hoary cultural whispers about a supposed disrespect to former president Olusegun Obasanjo. Their grumblings are misplaced. Not only is the PDP entitled to make its permutations as keenly as their leaders like in terms of the effect on their future electoral chances, there is nothing fundamentally tragic about the Southwest not playing its cards well nor its being schemed out of that important office. The party’s chairmanship has gone to the South-South, its presidential slot is zoned liberally to the North, and its vice presidential ticket is believed by some sources to be allotted to the Southeast. By some estimations, the PDP is thought to have given up on the Southwest. Whether that is a sensible option or not is not immediately clear.
As this column suggested before the convention, the PDP, notwithstanding its fratricidal and sometimes suicidal tendencies, should be encouraged to get its act together and offer a strong opposition to the monarchically inclined APC. While it is necessary to continuously cajole the ruling party into stepping up its game and operating as a strong and democratic party, it is also necessary to coax the opposition party into overcoming the dispiriting existential crisis it has battled with since losing the 2015 polls by a wide margin. In a country where political parties operate in a winner-takes-all environment, it is nevertheless a tall order to counsel losing parties to exercise restraint, and winning parties to celebrate in moderation. And in a country where institutions are not strong, but nearly always easily acquiesce to official dictations, winning becomes an obsession, and losing worse than a tragedy.
It is important to celebrate the PDP’s first tentative step at rehabilitating itself and putting behind it the deserved loss it experienced in 2015. There are indications party leaders themselves see the convention as a fillip to both the party’s reorganisation and revitalisation. The PDP fought a bitter battle to extricate itself from the unrelenting hold of the former interim chairman, Ali Modu Sheriff, a boisterous and implacable former governor, lawmaker and kingmaker. That battle almost ended in a Pyrrhic victory, with the more cerebral rump of the party barely winning by the skin of their teeth. Senator Sheriff is virtually now neutralised in the calculations of the PDP, but the party has managed in the process to acquire a few new demons it must sate in its perilous march towards the next polls.
However, some party leaders see in the party’s first tentative steps more than what neutral analysts are reading into the convention outcome. As if wars are won be evacuations, as former prime minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, disdainfully remarked during World War II, and as if elections are won by one successful convention, PDP leaders are already visualising a return to the presidency just because, by all accounts, they managed to pull off a successful convention. The reality is, however, much more staggering. While it is true that the party’s reconciliation committees will make a success of placating estranged and fractious members and leaders, since many of them really have nowhere to go and are not as peripatetic as the former vice president Atiku Abubakar, some potentially destabilising variables, some human and some operational, have already been surreptitiously introduced into the mix.
In place of a powerful, probably dogmatic and highly opinionated president calling the shots in the party, there are now a number of governors holding the bits and steering the party in various predetermined directions. The party has won a convention battle; it must now have to grapple with the nihilism and mystifying ideologies and worldviews of influential and obviously obtruding governors like Nyesom Wike of Rivers State and Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State. Their views counted in the convention, but those views were not undergirded by stirring principles, coherent ideologies and great moral underpinnings. The party needs them, for they are indomitable fighters, and can give the ruling party blow for blow, and not yield an inch, let alone a yard; but they need to be guided by persons with far more restraint and deeper philosophies than the PDP has been accustomed to in its 16 chequered years.
Far more than a successful convention, however, the party still has two great hurdles to scale in their longing for the throne. One is the all-important need to produce a fitting presidential candidate; and the other is their extremely reluctant desire to atone for their serial misdeeds. It was easy for them to decide on a zoning formula they think would be a countervailing match for the ruling party. The APC, it cannot be gainsaid, will present President Muhammadu Buhari for the 2019 poll. Any show of opposition in the fight for nomination will remain nothing but a show. No one, not even the president himself, has offered any convincing argument as to why he and his aides ostracised his party leaders and bulwarks, but in any case, he has embarked on a rapprochement, and seems willing to bend his reedy and ungainly frame, including his tenuous philosophies, to accommodate his angry party men. He will be successful, not because he is persuasive or eloquent, or even sincere, but because the PDP still remains a poor alternative for the powerful APC men.
The PDP has noisily announced it is expecting significant defections from the APC in droves. It probably anchors that wish on the ruinous defections it suffered in 2014 that crippled their party. But times have changed, and the political environment, not to say a distressed economy, has made it suddenly perilous for anyone but the hardy and reckless to jump ship. Ex-vice president Abubakar is not the typical, calculating politician anyone might wish to emulate. For all his brilliance, accessibility and mentoring spirit, Alhaji Abubakar is first of all a fighter than a schemer, a brutal jouster not averse to biting in the clinches than a fencer adept at delivering daethly thrusts to the aortic valve. The country will in short not witness the kind of defections that hobbled the former ruling party. There will be a few movements here and there, one significant politician already fated to lose, and another fated to self-destruct, moving with their supporters perhaps cheek by jowl to the PDP. But beyond these minor tremors, nothing of any seismic proportion will occur to embarrass the APC led by a president unafraid to deploy the country’s enormous monarchical power to his advantage.
By the middle of 2018, the APC will almost certainly have concluded its campaigns and scheming, way before electing its standard-bearer or affirming his coronation. The PDP on the other hand will struggle to find an acceptable candidate, even if they fearfully cede that responsibility to the meddlesome Chief Obasanjo who is already so flattered that he is anxious to lend a helping hand. Would it be Alhaji Abubakar, the stoical ex-vice president, or Ahmed Makarfi, former Kaduna State governor? Would a choice between the two not be playing too safe when they should really be seeking ways to cut the Gordian knot and look for a bright, charismatic and visionary young politician? Despite the seeming impact of progressives in Nigerian politics, particularly taking into consideration their noise and braggadocio, Nigerian politics is at bottom conservative and even reactionary. The APC knew this, and did not wince at producing the conservative Buhari, even if it meant embalming the rubric of their ideology. The PDP knows this as well, and may be disinclined from experimenting with the revolutionary breaking of the mould necessary to take the country by storm.
Second, the opposition party needs to atone for its 16 years of ruinous politics. They have said little about this so far, and are unlikely to say anything even if they privately contemplate it. To come to terms with the disaster they created is to them, it seems, an acknowledgement of guilt, and, worse, incompetence. They will be loth to make any gesture in that direction. So far, they have equated their own dismal performance with the APC’s lacklustre governance. Incompetence, not to say savagery in governance and defilement of the constitution, is obviously not the exclusive preserve of the PDP. But whether taking consolation in the general spread of incompetence is a wise option, when the APC argues persuasively that it is bogged down undoing 16 years of PDP’s orchestrated damage, is a different thing altogether.
For now, however, the PDP can only hope that when the APC finally holds its belated convention in the first quarter of next year, it will make very heavy weather of it. It will also hope that the defections to be engendered by disagreements flowing from the convention will be of such magnitude that the PDP could profit from them. And finally, the opposition party will also hope that by organising a successful elective convention after many months of bitter wrangling, it can take that goodwill and momentum to the far bigger and more salient issue of persuading the electorate to give it a second chance.
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