PDP getting interesting again

These are interesting times indeed. When GEJ was chosen to be president in 2011, many were jolted by the decision. I said, in more ways than one, that I expected the president to choose the path of honour by adhering to the party’s zoning formula. Not that zoning is good, but that a man’s word […]

These are interesting times indeed. When GEJ was chosen to be president in 2011, many were jolted by the decision. I said, in more ways than one, that I expected the president to choose the path of honour by adhering to the party’s zoning formula. Not that zoning is good, but that a man’s word is his bond. GEJ indeed, being a party leader, had a great stake in the PDP, which Atiku did not have at the time and apparently still does not.
The PDP, however, banked on GEJ’s ties with a paradigm shift and his fresh-air popularity. His campaign was however short on moral rectitude, which is like having a racing car with an excellent engine but without wheels. A talented driver still needs tools, even if he or she is creative enough to use just about anything. In politics, the main tools are organisation and money. Now GEJ has the entire national treasury at his disposal, but a broken plate. So how does he serve the food?
How did things come to this? PDP under GEJ suddenly became a black and white narrative:
Party members hung between polar opposites without middle grounds. People were only allowed to hate or love but not debate. The options became limited to fight or talk. Nigerians with their strong interest in politics, as reflected by the vast amount of time they spend discussing it in offices, homes and social events, became somewhat apolitical. Some even wished the military returned.
That was the extent of repression in the PDP. Party chairmen were summarily replaced if they fell foul of the presidency, while those who were lucky to sit pretty were shut out. There were only two options, both mutually exclusive because GEJ behaved like the king of the forest who could change everything, anytime. It kept his challengers battle-ready.
Atiku’s come-back fitness is not the only reason I expected a challenge. All politicians periodically look at their party to see if it is a winning team. In weak circumstances there will be a challenge, just as in 2003 when Atiku challenged OBJ and the president had to go down on his knees and beg. Another reason for expecting a challenge is that, for the leader-centric PDP to survive it has to keep re-inventing itself. Dead woods don’t sell.
In the OBJ era, the organisational drawing card boiled down to an addiction “to-do-or-die”. OBJ ran a boot-camp, where a policy was agreed on by force, tactically called consensus— admittedly with Atiku and OBJ determining who gets what, where and when. If Umaru Yaradua was alive, he would have hung in there because he knew how to keep busy- bodies busy. He was able to keep Atiku at arm’s length, using a no-work-no-play strategy. And Atiku was happy, or so it seemed.
Under GEJ, no one was playing because no one was happy. IBB was hounded, Buhari was maligned, Nasir el-Rufai was abused, Ibori was jailed, Obasanjo was sidelined, Shagari was silenced and even the widely feared TY Danjuma was reportedly twice humiliated at the Villa. Of all the grievances, bigotry, tribalism and the subjugation of people based on dichotomy inclusive, worse was that incompetence was glaring everywhere.
The seven governors who struck only saw an opportunity to make a statement. After being in office for two terms most of them, there is no way they can be exonerated from blame. But it is all about the fox and the hen house. They saw a chance and they grabbed it. They also recruited others to ruffle the presidency, which they are achieving effectively because GEJs underbelly is in the open market. The seven governors also control a lot of votes and resources that determine the results of any election. So they cannot be wished away.
Governance gets better as the accountability of politicians to common people increases. In essence, it just means that people have concrete ways to force politicians to prioritise common people’s interests while performing their jobs. But voters evaluate and sanction politicians only after four years. Furthermore, voters, especially the poor and illiterate among them, may not have adequate information to evaluate politicians properly and finally, manipulations during elections may not let voters punish politicians.
Thus, politicians can ignore voter preferences while doing their job since they know that the ability of voters to evaluate and negatively sanction them is weak and infrequent. Obviously, that has governed the behaviour of the PDP until its implosion last week with the birth of the New PDP, even though, new or old, it is still the PDP!
What makes this interesting is that many have wondered why Atiku would want to destroy a party to which he is a founder. The answer is that while Atiku is hardly the founder of the PDP he is the architect of its consensus formula which has turned around to haunt him. And if you take a good look at those who are regrouping to fight the PDP things become more curious. True, the new PDP also added social policies as an attractive ‘flavour’ to its soup in the hope that it would be ‘bought’ by the voters. But the real drawing card in the PDP is to find who among them can kill their demons.