PDP fixated on business as usual

The party controls 13 states, but one of them, Rivers State governor Siminalayi Fubara, did not attend. He sent an apology instead of his deputy, probably a carry-over of the discord between ex-governor Nyesom Wike and the party hierarchy. The All Progressives Congress (APC) controls 20 states, while the remaining three states are split between the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) in Kano, Labour Party (LP) in Abia, and All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in Anambra. The PDP governors met over the state of affairs of their party, how to reposition their party, and the country’s security situation, among other details. But it was virtually business as usual, with no demonstration of the sense of urgency sorely needed to offer credible, innovative and effective opposition to the ruling APC.

On the surface, controlling 13 states is no mean feat, despite the nightmarish division that plagued the party before the last elections. The party brok into three main parts, but still made a good showing at the polls, particularly in the House of Representatives where it won some 102 seats to APC’s 162 seats. This showing, even if it is not a feat, may lull them into complacency. They were not humiliated in the Senate polls with 36 seats to APC’s 59 seats, while in the governorship polls they avoided disaster. They seem to recognise that despite their poor organisational culture, they do not have a glass chin, and can give as many punches as they take. But the statistics of their achievements, as indeed evidenced by the last elections, does not give an accurate picture of the distress they have had to endure in the past eight years or so. They have been defeated three times in a row in the presidential elections, and have been unable to regain both their general composure and the administrative and legislative boisterousness with which they inundated and entertained the country for some 16 years.

Their Abuja meeting showed their innate dullness and incapacity to inspire. If their failings are not a product of their being out of Aso Villa for eight years, it may be due to something more congenital, perhaps their natural lethargy or, more damagingly, because they had been imbued in their first eight years in office with the offensive overweeningness and superficiality of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo. Something kept them going for 16 years; but that something was probably ephemeral. At their first encounter with electoral adversity in 2015, they wilted very badly. At the second adverse encounter in 2019, especially having not learnt any lessons from the first debacle, they again melted like a worm on a hot stove. Desperate and dazed, they staggered into a third defeat in 2023, their ranks badly sundered, and leadership numbed. Three defeats in a row should lead any normal person or organisation into self-appraisal. Instead, the PDP has maintained such perfect equanimity or indifference that it is impossible not to believe that they had become desensitised or fatalistic.

The chairman of the PDP Governors’ Forum, Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed, spoke to the media after their four-hour meeting. He talked of the country’s poor security situation and the need for the federal government to maintain strict neutrality in the off-season polls coming up later in the year. There was nothing about what they thought about their electoral losses, nor anything about reforming and repositioning their party. The only faint light from their meeting came from their tangential reference to mandating their 13 governors, assuming Mr Fubara needed any sermonising, to restore the vitality of their state chapters working in league with the party’s state hierarchies. It seemed, however, that they were more concerned with winning polls the traditional way, or retaining the political status quo of their weaning years. There was also nothing about how to present effective opposition to the ruling party which is at the moment engaged in a cloak-and-dagger fight with its scheming chairman, Abdullahi Adamu.

In 2019, when it was obvious that the Muhammadu Buhari presidency had reached its wits’ end, Nigerians hoped the PDP would rise to the occasion. It didn’t; nay, it couldn’t. In 2023, when the APC had become embroiled in self-immolating politics actively engineered by the presidency, party leadership, and a coterie of colluding political and financial cabals, there were fears the APC would be drubbed at the polls. Instead, the PDP, encouraged by conniving presidency officials and frazzled by internal rifts, barely stirred itself. It groaned under its own contradictions, and PDP top hats exulted under the illusion of securing unequivocal victory against the run of play. The hope turned out a chimera. Yet, in the past two election cycles, the APC had presented itself a stationary target for any archer of average competence to take a pot shot. But the ruling party had not contended with the PDP’s appalling and woeful lack of target practice. In 2023, the APC in fact presented itself a target twice the size of an elephant. No amateur archer aiming with one blind eye could conceivably miss. PDP not only missed by a mile, they even shot themselves in the foot.

It is incredible that PDP governors met last Tuesday and the press had to struggle to find fitting headlines for their front pages. The more cantankerous APC couldn’t meet after an electoral debacle without burning the barn down. In fact, the APC does not need a defeat to claw themselves to tatters. Victory would serve just the same purpose. Yet, for all of APC’s morbid idiosyncrasies, the PDP never thought to take advantage of the ruling party’s self-immolating politics. So, what on earth did they discuss on Tuesday?

Why, of course, perfunctory ideas about insecurity and electoral morality; indeed, some asinine drivel about joining hands together with their equally dull, unambitious and distracted party state chapters. Years ago, after some electoral reverses, PDP leaders needed to rewrite their party platform and refine their ideology. But they were too disconsolate to care about such aesthetics. If focusing on themselves was too tiresome, they could easily train their guns on the APC under which insecurity became aggravated, under which debts ballooned to the point of peonage, under which religion became a divisive tool, and under which faceless cabals became éminence grises. More, since assuming office in 2015, the APC has exploded a depth bomb of policies on the heads of Nigerians in a bid to rein in inflation, arrest and reverse slow growth, and tame the weakening naira. Were the APC to be dealing with a stronger and more focused and ambitious opposition, those delicate policies would have long been smashed to smithereens.

More damaging to their reputations, PDP leaders seem to have a loathing for low hanging fruits. It is true that they decided at their meeting to ginger their states to give a hell of a fight to the APC in the states. But how is it that they have circumvented the farce unfolding in Kwara State, where a Dual Mandate involving the emirate and the state government rules over the state? In a country governed by constitution and laws, the emirate and its foot soldiers have farcically sought to undermine the rule of law by seeking to turn the state into a theocracy through hamstringing the rights of traditional religion worshippers. And the governor has kept mum. Could the PDP not attempt to expose and fight the anomalies in that state? And what of Kano, where demolitions orchestrated by the new administration have taken on inquisitorial frenzy?

But if they could not rein in their own Edo State’s Godwin Obaseki from governing for much of his second term with an improperly constituted House of Assembly, how could they hope to take the beam from the eyes of the small offender, the APC? Until the party reforms itself and realigns its operations to conform with the highest ideals of democracy, until its apparatchiks find the brilliance and structure to organise a tight-knit party not beholden to a few powerful groups, and until they inspire their support base and give them a sense of belonging, they will be unable to challenge the APC. Their Tuesday meeting, going by their timidity in squaring up to the ills that plague them, is nothing more than tilting at windmills.

Peoplesmind