The PDP convention revisited

After all these years, I still can’t get it. I think I am still missing something about our politics and our politicians. Perhaps I am not alone. That is hardly a consolation for me though. The ways of Nigerian politics and politicians befuddle the best brains in the business of politics. And since I am […]

After all these years, I still can’t get it. I think I am still missing something about our politics and our politicians. Perhaps I am not alone. That is hardly a consolation for me though. The ways of Nigerian politics and politicians befuddle the best brains in the business of politics. And since I am not one of the best brains in the business, you can see why I have a double silencer befuddlement. 

The recent PDP convention makes for a case study in the politics of power for the sake of power. The much anticipated national convention was held on December 9. I expected the PDP to emerge from that convention wearing the halo of a born-again party. It did not. The day did not see a united party; it saw a disunited and fractured party. The convention now haunts the party. It, certainly, would re-define its future relevance in our national politics. I am sure the new national chairman, Prince Uche Secundus, needs no one to tell him that his ability to keep the party together would either save it or sink. Perish the thought – for the sake of our democracy.

With the emergence of the unity list the election of the national leaders of the party was clearly won and lost long before the delegates assembled at Eagle Square and went through the motion and the charade of voting. Losses are inevitable at elections. The problem usually is not the loss but the manner of it. When losers are smarting, you know it has less to do with their unpopularity and more to do with crass manipulation of the electoral system. Since the convention more members of the party have since ditched it for the APC. Such ditching is both normal and familiar to us. Being a big fish in a small pond has its own psychological wisdom. But the threat of continued haemorrhaging in the party was always a real and present danger. The party leaders are frantically trying to appease the disappointed and the aggrieved. Good. I wish them well.

Come to think of it, I am not sure now why I thought the PDP men would behave differently and put the interest of the party above that of individuals and the geo-political zones. The convention was not just the gathering of the party men and women. What was at stake was power, political power. I should have known that. 

Still, I had expected the leaders of the party to show that their party had emerged from its two and half years in the cold better organised, more united and better focused. I expected them to demonstrate by the conduct of the election that as leaders of the rump of the PDP they had learnt new lessons and forgotten old lessons that ill-served them in the past. I saw no evidence of that. Instead, they allowed corruption and the jostling for power to relegate the more urgent and critical challenges of re-making their party to the back burner. Mistakes of the head or the heart never fail to exact prices, light or heavy. So, it is not over yet for the owners of the political party that has since ceased to be the largest in Africa. I think it is now just bigger than a village political party. 

The PDP makes pitying it almost obligatory, not only because of the clumsy conduct of its recent national convention but more importantly because it has not found its voice or its feet since its comprehensive losses in the 2015 general elections. It is pathetic to see the party that ruled this country for 16 years flailing in the wind and trying to hug the wind.

Future generations researching into these times would certainly raise some fundamental questions about how the PDP lost it. They would seek answers to such questions as: How did the party that produced four presidents and five senate presidents as well as five speakers of the House of Representatives between 1999 and 2015 go so wrong? How did the party that ruled most of the states of the federation now find itself picking its way along the pavement rather than walking on the main road? 

The party dominated the political space by making the other parties irrelevant. But between 2013 and 2015, there was a steady outflow of men and women from the party, including the man who ruled for two terms on its platform, former President Olusegun Obasanjo. He made a public spectacle of his irrevocable parting of ways with the party by publicly tearing his party membership card. But the party leaders never pinched themselves. They slept and snored. No shaking.

So, they did nothing radical to stanch the haemorrhage. Perhaps they believed that the divine right of the party to remain in power was a given and that the steady desertion of the party would not affect its electoral fortunes. They forgot that conditions are less permanent in politics than anywhere else. The party was forced to dismount its high horse. And then the biggest party in Africa fell on its own sword.

But for the presence of President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu in the party, the APC would be correctly described as the obverse side of the PDP coin. Its leaders were the PDP leaders in the times before these: former governors, former national and state legislators, former ministers, former board chairmen and members, etc. Perhaps, this is why we have more of the same in the APC of what we had in the halcyon days of the PDP. I am amused when some former PDP members now in the APC blame their former party for our national problems. They forget, rather conveniently, that they were the movers and the shakers in that party. 

However, as I see it, it was not all bad news from the PDP convention. Something good came out of it. The South-South geo-political asserted its right to own and lead the party. I think this is a good development. Its ownership of the party makes compensatory sense. It is the only zone that survived the APC tsunami in 2015. It would be interesting to see what the zone makes of its leadership and ownership of the party in 2019. 

Let me caution those itching to write off the PDP. It is not over for the party. Given the fluid nature of our party politics, it may rise again perhaps sooner than we expect. We are not dealing with ideologies here; we are dealing with the promises of quieting the incessant complaints from stomachs crying for chicken peri-peri.  And so, the changing fortunes of the party could be guaranteed by the emergence of a Buhari. That was how the PDP dissolved into the APC; that is how the APC too would dissolve either back into the PDP or into a new political party tomorrow. 

Ye gods.