Same Ol’ PDP

The first thing was that in many states of the federation, people were seen lined up and electing flag bearers. This had never happened in the history of the PDP. Secondly, the traditional meddlesomeness of governors and the President on who must and must not emerge as candidates of the party for particular political offices […]

The first thing was that in many states of the federation, people were seen lined up and electing flag bearers. This had never happened in the history of the PDP. Secondly, the traditional meddlesomeness of governors and the President on who must and must not emerge as candidates of the party for particular political offices was also minimal and the traditional pattern of failing members of the National Assembly by their governors was to the best of my knowledge minimal even if less than 25% of the current membership of the two houses of the National Assembly are eligible or reelected to contest in the forthcoming elections.

I still hear a lot of people blame the governors for that, but this time around, it wasn’t done through the crude manner of simply not fielding a particular aspirant because he is perceived as an enemy of the governor, but rather, the governors and their hatchet men might have gone through the delegates who were statuary party officials at various levels and removed serving members from contesting in the next elections.

The lesson in point here is that for the first time in the history of the PDP, we saw party members lining up and at the end of the process, certain individuals including incumbents at both local and national levels were returned either elected or unelected. This is a feat that some of us thought was a sign of the new things to expect in the PDP until when the governorship and presidential primaries were held.

It is no news that none of the governorship aspirants of the party who is an incumbent lost in the primary elections including Jonah Jang who is superintending over the bloodletting on the Plateau and Alao-Akala, the retired police officer who has reduced the very rich ancient tradition of Oyo politics into something very dirty. They all won and did keep their promise as well to return President Goodluck Jonathan to power, but that just for one term. Those of us who are not politicians but observers know very well that the governors are just clever by half and unable certainly to restrict the president to only one term once he accidentally makes it in the April polls, except of course if something serious happens.

The governorship primaries were better than the mockery called presidential primaries. The first rigging that took place was that the Presidency having failed to get the parliament return what is called the super delegates into the party congresses, succeeded in deceiving the legislatures to return the national convention back to Abuja where the voting was clearly rigged.

I am not surprised that the chairman of the electoral panel was Professor Adeniran, a supposedly sound political scientist whose nomination to serve as Nigeria’s Ambassador to the United Sates was turned down by the American government on grounds of impropriety. The voting system where states were made to ballot in separate boxes is another very serious infraction of the secrecy component of free, fair and credible elections.

With the president sitting and all other apparatuses of state in focus including live national television broadcasts, it was difficult to defeat a sitting emperor no matter how weak he may be, aside from the fact that large sums of money went round the delegates and their leaders in form of incentives to vote for a particular candidate. I hear that the President personally distributed money in hard currency to the delegates for their votes.

No wonder in the last few weeks the price of the Dollar shot up astronomically. From a price of N151 to a Dollar to about N158 to a Dollar on the week of the presidential primaries. Immediately after, the price again began a downward slide. No wonder the nation’s foreign reserve has been depleted from a relatively huge level to barely 2 or 3 billion dollars. No wonder there is still no light, no roads, no schools and hospitals.

The actors are still desperate and desirous to hang on to power despite whatever the national situation may be. In summary, the presidential primaries of the PDP were as usual a charade. I thought that it was going to be different given the fact that the cry for free, fair elections is very loud. I thought the PDP with all the claims for reform was ready to begin the reform at home before sending it out.

What the lections indicated if anything else is that it is not yet uhuru and that Nigerians have a chance to either force free polls or remain condemned by the stupidities of the greedy politician who is  not prepared to account for how he or she managed very scandalously all the national wealth over a period of time. The primaries in my view were nothing but a sham.