Change your ‘ugly past’, APC tells PDP

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has advised the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to rebrand itself or face the risk of going down.

The party was reacting to a communiqué issued by the PDP national caucus in which the opposition said it had become of a victim of President Muhammadu Buhari’s government.

“It is time for the PDP to take a long, hard look at itself in the mirror and change everything that is ugly about the party, instead of wasting its energy and time on irrelevancies,” the APC said in a statement issued in Lagos on Friday by its national publicity secretary, Lai Mohammed.

The party said the PDP could not continue to do things in its “trademark old, crooked ways and expect a different result.”

“The PDP just doesn’t get it, despite being the architect of its own fall from power. The days of winning elections with the aid of slush funds, brigandage, deceit and rigging are gone forever, hence the PDP must return to the drawing board to fashion out decent and empirical ways of repackaging and selling itself to Nigerians, just like the opposition did when they decided to come together,” the statement read.

“The PDP’s ceaseless and ill-advised attack on the judiciary, now its favourite whipping boy, the endless put-down of government agencies and the demonisation of everyone but itself would fetch the party nothing but political grief.

“Instead of a blanket and unsubstantiated accusation against the judiciary over the election petition tribunal rulings in Rivers and Akwa Ibom, the PDP would have shown itself to be a serious party if it had provided statistics on how many of the cases filed at the various election petition tribunals nationwide, after the 2015 elections, have so far been decided in favour of the PDP and the APC, so that Nigerians can see whether the PDP has not won any single petition or whether all the cases have been won by the APC.

“The PDP has forgotten that the same judiciary that it is wilfully castigating today had decided many election petitions in favour of the party and against the APC, whether at the governorship, national assembly or state assembly levels, and the ruling party has not opted to bring the whole house crashing down on everyone just because of that.

“Going down the memory lane, when the PDP took itself to court in 2007 over the governorship election in Rivers, the same judiciary that has now become an apparition to the PDP awarded the governorship to a candidate who never even featured on the ballot because the party crookedly substituted his name. Then, the PDP did not see the judiciary as being used by the then PDP administration, neither did the opposition castigate the judiciary.”

The APC admonished the PDP “to stop yowling and engage in strategic thinking that could propel the party forward, rather than continue to be nostalgic about its past, which is neither dignifying nor enlivening.

“The 16 years of the PDP – which the party has continued to shamelessly celebrate – are nothing to celebrate, either for the impunity that characterised the party’s governance, the massive looting of the national treasury that is still being assessed or the bastardisation of all the values that the nation holds dear.

“Thankfully, President Muhammadu Buhari has brought sanity to governance even as the PDP has continued to try to distract him with their endless wailing.

“Our parting word for the PDP: Stop throwing juvenile tantrums against everyone, especially the judiciary. Stop wasting your energy on frivolous accusations. Learn how to communicate your thoughts to Nigerians in a more civilized way and put your shoulder to the wheel if you want to reincarnate as a force to be reckoned with in our country’s political firmament.”