In what appears to be a desperate move to salvage whatever remains of it, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has decided to race against the tide. In a bold gambit, the umbrella association openly told Nigerians in 2023 that its presidential ticket was for “whosoever will.” It denied that there was anything like zoning in its books. Today, something seems to be shifting, and the question is, “Is it not medicine after death?
PDP’s castrated courage
The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) last Monday announced the zoning of its presidential ticket to the southern part of Nigeria in preparation for the 2027 general election. The party took the decision at its 102nd National Executive Council (NEC) meeting in Abuja.
The PDP may have done well by coming to such a decision, but this appears to be medicine after death.
The party may have found the courage to decide to rise from the ashes of self-inflicted injuries, but it is a castrated courage!
The party bungled its chances when the zoning mattered most in 2023.
It has remained incontrovertible that the party made one of its greatest mistakes before the last general election by choosing a presidential candidate from the north to succeed another northerner after eight straight years.
Although the party defended its decision at that time, citing precedents, the choice ran against the grain of fairness.
The party had a good chance of doing something good and of winning the 2023 presidential election, but because of a lack of capacity to assert itself as a party, it chose to satisfy individuals’ ambitions over and above the interests of the party and of the country.
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When Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president, picked the party’s ticket, some party members from the south insisted that the then national chairman, Iyorchia Ayu, should relinquish his position for a southerner to step in. But the powers that be in the party insisted he must hang in there.
It was that resistance that deepened the crisis that was birthed following the acrimonious presidential primary that produced Atiku as the flagbearer.
As if some extraneous powers were working against the party that prevented it from heeding the voice of reason, as soon as Ayu, who hails from Benue State, North Central, stepped down at the tail end of March 2023 after the disastrous loss of the party at the poll, he was replaced by Umar Iliya Damagum, deputy national chairman (North) from Yobe State, North East.
Since then, the party has continued to oscillate from one crisis to another, and Damagum has remained the chairman despite protestations. In short, he was confirmed as the substantive chairman of the party at its last NEC meeting.
The return of saboteurs
One of the major problems that has been rocking the PDP’s boat is its inability to wield a big stick against errant members who were directly responsible for the defeat it suffered in 2023.
Apart from former Governor Nyesom Wike – the current minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) – who openly declared he would be a thorn in the flesh of the party for rejecting him when it mattered most, the four others who teamed up with him in the “G-5 Governors” he floated went without their hearts.
Today, Governor Seyi Makinde is sitting pretty in his office in Ibadan and also nursing a presidential ambition on the platform of the PDP. Makinde was one of the G-5 gang that terrorised the party but secured his seat nonetheless. He is also calling the shots at the party at the moment.
Read also: APC gains ground as Wike–Makinde rift deepens PDP cracks
Samuel Ortom, a former governor of Benue State, overtly exhibited his anti-party under G-5. He did not work for the PDP in the 2023 election but assisted the APC to win Benue and defeat the PDP at the national level. In fact, reports had it that he defected to the APC shortly after the election. He is back in PDP as a member of the Board of Trustees (BoT).
Okezie Ikpeazu, former governor of Abia State, flaunted his dalliance with the angry Wike against the party in 2023. He was always in Wike’s company in their ‘big boys’ rendezvous outside the country, the clips of which they mockingly used to upload on social media in the manner of “As e dey sweet us, e dey pain dem.”
After dancing the “Awilo” and supervising the trouncing of the PDP both at the state and federal levels, Ikpeazu has remained in the party without open reprimands from the leadership of the party.
Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, former Enugu State governor, popularly known as “Gburugburu”, was among the “Wike Boys” who fraternised endlessly with the former Rivers governor. Ugwuanyi is also pretending to be in the PDP. He even attended the party’s recent NEC meeting.
Once in a while, the G-5 still meets. Their bodies may be in the umbrella association, but their hearts may be far away from it.
Observers believe that some of these individuals parading themselves as PDP members in the day may be arch-enemies of the party in the dead of the night.
By the way, many of those who still grandstand as chieftains of the party are serial defectors who have at one time or another tasted strange water from the enemy camp. To that end, when they speak these days, it is difficult to swallow their words hook, line and sinker. Their smiles in PDP and to PDP could be likened to the smile of a vampire.
Too late
The PDP’s chances of reclaiming the presidency that it lost in 2015 were brightest in 2023. Too many factors made it an easy pick for the party.
Nigerians were already feeling the heat of the Buharian administration that brought everything from “top to bottom”. The naira redenomination project introduced by the administration, using the Godwin Emefiele-led Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), which nearly drove the citizens to the brink, and the worsening insecurity across the country raised some insinuations in some quarters that the then president must have had tacit support for the perpetrators. So, many Nigerians became sufficiently angry with the APC that they thought that something could give.
Now, instead of riding on that momentum, the PDP bungled it by pushing individual interests above the greater good of the country and the people.
The party openly and brashly jettisoned the gentlemanly rotational presidency agreement that power should oscillate between South and North. It threw away its own principle that had determined its zoning since 1999.
In the 1999 general election, the then freshly founded PDP fielded Olusegun Obasanjo from Ogun State, South West, as its presidential candidate.
After serving eight years of two terms that ended in 2007, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua from Katsina, North-West, emerged as the party’s presidential candidate. He won the election but could not complete one term of four years. He passed on.
Although many PDP members of the northern extraction had contended that it was the turn of the north to field a candidate from the region to complete eight years following Yar’Adua’s death, Goodluck Jonathan went ahead to contest in 2011 and won.
It was wrong for some PDP stalwarts to openly say that there has been nothing like zoning in the party. Those who trumpet that do so for selfish reasons.
Charles Louis de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu) (1689-1755), a French philosopher, said, ‘The destruction of every government (political party) begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”
While I am not a Nostradamus to determine what happens tomorrow, it may not be difficult for me to draw a conclusion that the PDP was stronger in 2023 than it is going into the 2027 election.
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The exodus of many stalwarts of the party is the greatest reason to support my projections. The party is not gaining new entrants as fast as it is losing quality members. The stark reality is what is happening at the National Assembly, where the PDP has receded so badly in numbers.
When the 10th National Assembly was inaugurated in June 2023, the APC held 175 seats in the 360-member House of Representatives. The opposition is led by the PDP with 118 seats, the Labour Party (LP) with 35, and the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) with 19. With a handful of smaller parties collectively controlling the remaining seats, giving them a slight numerical edge over the ruling party. Three seats were left vacant.
That arithmetic is changing fast. Through a mix of defections and recent by-election victories, the APC’s caucus has surged up to 220 members—just 20 shy of the two-thirds majority mark, the constitutional threshold for overriding presidential vetoes, amending legislation, and, perhaps, most importantly, altering Nigeria’s Constitution. The story is not so much different in the Senate.
Again, the party has lost Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Delta States.
At the moment, what is happening in Rivers State ahead of Saturday’s local government election shows that the PDP is just existing in name. Wike is perfectly in control of the party while still calling the shots in the APC. Reports emanating from Rivers indicate that candidates of the PDP in the council election are dropping their umbrellas and picking up bunches of brooms. They are withdrawing from the election. These are all evidence of a party that has since lost its power to bite.
It has yet to convince Nigerians that it is ready to function as a serious party, as it was known for years back.
Banking on former president Goodluck Jonathan or Peter Obi as presidential flag bearers has its consequences.
While many Nigerians do not believe that Jonathan is the messiah that the country needs and may be forced to turn their backs permanently on the party, some others may reason that Obi’s return to the PDP may be tantamount to a dog returning to its vomit. When the coast was clear for Obi to sweep the victory if he had been given the ticket, he was denied. Now that the soul of the PDP seems to have gone, bringing him back may be medicine after death.
Well, it is said that in politics, a second is enough for a dramatic change to happen. That dramatic change is so much needed if the party hopes to stage a comeback in the reckoning of Nigerians.
Russell Wayne Baker, 1925, an American columnist, said, “The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.”
