The above headline is not to be interpreted to mean that the aforementioned politically exposed persons (PEPs) are destructive – far from it. As a matter of fact, by their personal and official inclinations, they are known builders of men, brick & mortar. Atiku was Vice President of the Federal Republic and remains a successful businessman and employer of labour; Wike was an action Governor and modernizer of Port Harcourt while Tambuwal, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives and two-term Governor of sokoto State, is a political engineer, who had been involved in political re-engineering of Nigeria long before now.
It is just that wittingly or unwittingly – I like to believe unwittingly – these VIPs’ acts of omission or commission, at one point or the other, have all combined to practically consign the nation’s former national ruling party to the political garbage heap. It is still inconceivable to many keen observers of Nigerian politics that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the party on whose wings Nigeria virtually flew back to democracy in 1999, would appear to have become such an undesirable political association that these days, its once proud members just can’t wait to jump its ship.
Here’s a political party whose leadership once boasted that it would lead Nigeria for 60 years before handing over to another party, if ever such a handover plan existed at all! Now, see what it has become – a self-destructive group only too willing to be dismembered by an ideology-less ruling political contraption called All Progressives Congress (APC), which has all but destroyed the very idea of Nigeria as a country united in its diversity. How are the mighty fallen! How could PDP, once in power for all of 16 years at the centre, have allowed itself to be reduced to such a pathetic, periphery, self-loathing political party on the altar of two men’s inordinate ambitions?
If we may recall, PDP’s troubles started with former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s confusion as to the role of a political party in a democracy. Weaned on the supremacy of the sword over civil political organization and order, Obasanjo, an army general, couldn’t understand or stand the idea of the supremacy of the party in a democracy. How could any other person or group exercise control, directly or indirectly, over him who was president? What an anathema!
So, his answer was to simply decapitate the party: he reduced the position of the party chairman to that of a throne without the authority of the crown. He rewrote the constitution of the party and made himself its ‘National Leader’ (and, the Governors, by extension, State leaders) with power to choose whoever pleased them as National Chairman and or State Chairmen, as the case may be. Even before the new party constitution came into effect, Obasanjo was to appropriate his executive power to quickly dispense with the services of the late Solomon Lar (1999-2001), who replaced the late Alex Ekwueme, the party’s founding National Chairman (1998-1999) and hand-pick the late Barnabas Gemade (2001 – 2005), as National Chairman.
In the game of musical chairs that the choice of PDP’s National Chairman turned out under Obasanjo, Gemade became the only chairman that served a full term (2001-2005) under Obasanjo. Audu Ogbeh served from 2005 – 2006 (reportedly forced to resign at gun-point) and Ahmadu Ali (2006 -2008).
And that, needless to say, was how instability was built into PDP’s national leadership and how, by 2016, PDP had had 14 national chairmen in 18 years and today, 18 in 26 years!
By the 2010 when the party’s pioneer National Secretary and first Governor of Enugu State, Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo became National Chairman and wanted to reinvent the party, it was already too late. One of Nwodo’s most important reforms was on-line membership registration by which he sought to make all members equal joiners and funders of the then national ruling party. This way, he sought to liberate the party from the stranglehold of the president and governors and return its control to its leadership and the rank and file. But the governors who had tasted the sweetness of the Obasanjo model of absolute control of government and the ruling party, fought back, leading to a conspiracy of false narratives that resulted in Okwesilieze’s ouster. For instance, the online registration project was thrown out by NEC after it was launched because members of the NWC “were not carried along.” How ingenuous!
Any wonder, then, that today, the PDP has neither a transparent funding pattern nor a well-established national, state, local government or ward leadership recruitment processes? In this state of atrophy, especially since its loss of national political leadership to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015, what the PDP should be, where it should be or how it should be, have, to all intents and purposes, been concessioned to the highest bidder.
Enter Atiku, Tambuwal and Wike
Let’s face it: the greatest existential threat to the Peoples Democratic Party PDP) is Atiku Abubakar’s presidential ambition. Nigeria’s former Vice President seems determined to match the record of a late American president, Abraham Lincoln who lost various elections eight record times before running for president once and winning in 1860. He was to be re-elected in 1864 as the 16th president before his assassination in 1865. Unlike Lincoln who ran once and won, Atiku has already run a record six times for president. Even then, unconvinced that human destinies are different and therefore, that he may not necessarily win like Lincoln who lost a record eight elections before running for president once and winning, Atiku appears determined to still realize his ambition of a seventh presidential ticket, even if on the carcass of PDP.
The former vice president’s huge war chest was steamrolling his presidential ambition until it ran into Nyesom Wike’s storm of defiant obduracy, also driven by a huge war chest, perhaps even a huger war chest, in the May 28, 2022 PDP presidential primary. Atiku did win in the end, to be sure. But he had to court his Fulani brother, former Sokoto Governor Aminu Tambuwal’s treachery to win, in what became, at that time and perhaps for all times, a clear indication of how blood ties would always intrude into Nigerian politics to counter the strategic importance of alliances, common causes and loyalty to party and country, in party organization and electioneering. Atiku won after Tambuwal broke the primary election rule of single appearance/speech by each presidential aspirant, and returned to the podium, after his first appearance, to announce he was stepping down for ‘brother’ Atiku in the tension-soaked May 28, 2022 Special National Convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), held at the MKO Abiola International Stadium, Abuja, the FCT.
Nor, on the other hand, would Wike’s victory have served PDP well: both Atiku and Wike ran for president in total defiance of PDP’s rotational principle. Since the constitution provides for the rotation of the presidency between the North and South, Atiku would have taken a Southerner’s slot had he won the presidential election, while Wike, if he had won the primary and ultimately the presidential election, would have been president barely eight years after President Goodluck Jonathan from the same South South zone as Wike. It follows that while Atiku was wrong in insisting on the PDP ticket and practically pulling out all the stops to get it, Wike was also wrong in his implacable dog-in-manger stoking of the PDP crisis just to get at Atiku.
Wike’s victory over Atiku’s tendency in the PDP would be served cold if its prize is the ultimate destruction of the PDP and vice versa. Both are biting the fingers that have fed them over the past 25 years, a worst form of social malady, especially in a cultural society like ours. For, the point must be made that but for the PDP, neither Atiku nor Wike would have enjoyed the prominence and prosperity they have enjoyed in political Nigeria the past 25 years of career politicking. But here they are, each insistent on having his way or, for all they care, the PDP could go to the dogs! Here is a political association that was once described as the biggest political party in Africa now at the brink of total collapse on the altar of two men’s inordinate ambitions!
The PDP situation becomes even more pathetic and sadder when it is considered that all the other party stakeholders, including 12 governors, dozens of senators and scores of Members of the House of Representatives and State Houses of Assembly appear only too content to stand and watch with indifference as the PDP is CKD by destructive forces that seem untamable. Many are hard put to understand how 12 State Governors and hundreds of senators, Members of the House of Representatives and State Houses of Assembly on the platform of the PDP are unable – or unwilling – to muster enough forces of good to neutralize the deleterious effects of the feuding, seemingly irreconcilable tendencies represented by Atiku Abubakar and Nyesom Wike, on the former national ruling PDP.
Still, Atiku and Wike’s tendencies must reconcile, or made to reconcile, for the sake of the PDP and Nigeria’s democracy.
The reconciliation can come in several ways. One is for Atiku and Wike to use back channels or whatever channels available to them to agree to fight no more in order for the PDP to live. As already observed, any victory achieved by either of them that results in PDP’s total disarray is a pyrrhic victory – both the victor and vanquished, in this case, are losers.
A second option is for the party elders and stakeholders to finally leverage their authority in the party to call Atiku and Wike to order. No matter how powerful or financially influential the two PDP chieftains may be, there is always a time – and that time is now – for all men and women of conscience in the party to say enough is enough and switch their individual and or group loyalty from either of the two leaders back to the PDP.
A third option – and it is, indeed an option – would be for all – leaders and rank and file alike – to continue to look on as the party is destroyed beyond redemption.
But this much should be clear: whatever the option, the greater beneficiary or worse loser would be the politicians themselves, not the electorate. Good or bad, other options exist for the electorate. For politicians, such options come at a price. So, saving or letting PDP die is a choice only for the politicians to make. And as the Good Book says, it is up to them to choose life or death.
A perfect commentary on the fate of the PDP.