For PDP, a silver lining on the horizon

The very first title which crossed my mind when I was chewing around this piece, was to be borrowed from a recent television outing of my good friend and professional colleague, Okey Ikechukwu. A notable scholar, journalist, public affairs analyst and good governance advocate, Ikechukwu on that occasion, undertook a dispassionate, pathologically brutal dissection of Nigeria’s contemporary sociopolitics. Among my other takeaways from the thread of his responses to questions in that appearance, was his new (to me) and most fitting labelling of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP). Ikechukwu described the party as “an incompetent opposition”. This branding was in obvious reference to PDP’s failings, failures and foibles, in the face of minimum expectations of a party momentarily consigned to the outer perimeter fence of the seat of power. For me, nothing can be more apt.

I have myself been very concerned about developments in the administration of the PDP since its ouster from the State House in 2015. Its response to the calamitous blundering and serial ineptitude of the successor All Progressives Congress (APC) has, at the very best, been notably tepid, unpardonably inept and disappointingly unflattering. I was in the process of wholesale appropriation of Ikechukwu’s most fitting statement as a trigger for this treatise before my thoughts were tempered by certain recent developments on the nation’s political platform. Hopefully, these developments will engender the resuscitation of a presently limpid and potentially vanishing specie, the once vibrant PDP.

Struck as though by a tornado in the mass movement which characterised the clamour for regime change in the run-up to the 2015 elections, the PDP was virtually shattered to smithereens, thereafter. From the very peak to the basement of the political pyramid, the PDP was substantially dislocated and decimated. At the end of that electoral cycle, the erstwhile ruling party was shrunken in the numbers and spread of its parliamentarians at all levels, as well as in states under its control. This is not forgetting its exit from the nation’s exalted number one office.

The APC ran a campaign whose core message was predicated on holistic change. Picking holes in the several slips and missteps of the previous government, the APC built virtual castles in the air for Nigerians. At least now we know. And they set timelines for the attainment of their agendas, for added effect. Insurgency, which festered in the north-east of the country in the concluding years of the Goodluck Jonathan-led PDP administration, was to be spontaneously extirpated. The successor government would be led by a battle-tested general, with the resolve to extinguish the anomaly. The lingering power problem passed on from one administration to another, would be fixed within six months. Petrol queues will cease to be recurring features of street scenes in our cities.

The ogre of corruption and malfeasance in the body politic would be decisively decapitated. There was to be a radical reduction in the cost of governance, which was to be achieved in part, by the mitigation of political appointments. The nation’s economy would be boosted and diversified to ensure the sustenance of its profile as the largest economy in Africa. School children would be fed a free meal a day, just as the new dispensation would take millions of youths off the streets by providing them with sustainable employment. The dilapidated healthcare system will be resuscitated and developed to global standards, to stem medical tourism. Decrepit national infrastructure, notably roads, drains, culverts and bridges, will be completed, reconstructed or built afresh as the case may be. We can go on and on rehashing the high falutin goals of the loquacious APC.

To surmise that the ruling party has holistically fumbled in a most prodigious manner, will be most patronising. The APC has so very spectacularly disappointed Nigeria and Nigerians across departments and sectors, that its “exploits” are topic for discussion at conferences, seminars, retreats and workshops across the world. With specific regard to the much-mouthed “three-point” agenda of the APC government, the party has humiliated itself with an admirable flourish. Buhari had promised to defeat terrorism, fight corruption and fix the economy. This tripodal problems have, rather, taken the fight to Buhari.

From the initial consignment of security complexities to the north-east of the country, virtually every geopolitical zone today is traumatised by some manner of hitherto unknown and unheard security challenge. I recall one of the initial press interviews granted by my colleague, Femi Adesina, media adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari, in the initial days of the administration, concerning the security dragon. He had said inter alia, on that occasion, that whatever Nigerians were experiencing by way of security flashpoints, were “the last kicks of a dying horse”. Seven years after Adesina’s proclamation, the dragon has metamorphosed into a subsisting Dracula. The proverbial horse has indeed rejuvenated, so much that it has left the trails of its hooves on the sands of the north-west, north-central, south-east and south-west, among others.

Corruption has gained so much tirage under the superintendence of the APC, that the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) wrote Buhari in 2021, drawing attention to un-investigated corruption cases approximating N1 trillion recorded since 2015. The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), last month, observed that federal ministries, departments and agencies, (MDAs) in 2019 alone, could not account for N323.5 billion that year alone. The United States in April 2021, described the scale of corruption in Nigeria under Buhari’s address as “massive, widespread and pervasive,” at all levels of government, including the judiciary and security services. Last May, the accountant general of the federation (AGF), Ahmed Idris, was arrested by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), for fraud totalling N80 Billion. What a way to fight corruption.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), has only just released the inflation rate for May 2022 which is put at 17.71%. Unemployment numbers for the first quarter of 2022 was a staggering 33%. The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) has mobilised an average of 300,000 graduates every year since 2017. Only an infinitesimal percentage of this number is retained by the organisations where they underwent the NYSC or have secured engagement elsewhere. Several millions of educated, skilled, able and available young Nigerians, including holders of first-class and second-class upper degrees, are on the streets pounding blazing hot pavements in the quest for elusive placements. Nigeria, by the way, has also just been displaced as the continental leader in crude oil production by Angola; deepening the freefall of the nation’s socioeconomy.

Sadly, the PDP which is supposed to hold the APC to account every step of the way seems to have slipped into perpetual sedate inertia. It took the APC a whole seven years, since 2015, to host a national convention earlier this year amidst palpable fears about the possible implosion of the party. Within the same period, the PDP held its national convention to elect the leadership of the party in 2017 followed up by a special convention to choose its presidential flagbearer in late 2018. The party also effected a democratic change of its leadership at the national convention in December 2021. The PDP equally beat the APC to the actualisation of its recent special presidential primary convention, among others.

Conversely, for over seven years now, the APC has run without a board of trustees (BOT) as provided for in its operating manual. For nearly two years after the ouster of the Adams Oshiomhole national leadership of the party in 2020, the APC was run by a caretaker chairman, Mai Mala Buni, governor of Yobe state. Within the period, the party was administered like a parastatal of the State House with press statements and rebuttals on behalf of the party emanating from The Presidency. In its apparent unpreparedness, the APC kept rescheduling the dates of its national convention and the presidential primary, respectively, ever looking over its shoulders for inspiration from the PDP.

At every turn, the APC has privileged the PDP with appropriate “cooking oil” with which to make tasty barbecue of its brazen ineptitude and incapacity. Unfortunately, the PDP has always baulked when it should have grabbed such opportunities freely dropped on its laps. The PDP has repeatedly allowed the APC to get away with virtual blue murder. It has not held up the barometer of grinding interrogation, against its principal opponent. Where is good governance, for instance, when the president himself is in perpetual motion hovering between hospital beds and foreign engagements? Many of such external engagements can be delegated to other officials of the state. With notable figures like the president himself and party leaders like Olusegun Osoba, Abdul Yari and so on, preferring medical facilities in Europe and America, who will fix our degenerate healthcare system?

Who is in charge when criminal novelties like yet-to-be tamed “unknown gunmen”, kidnappers, cannibals, ritualists and bandits among others, ride roughshod across the land? Who is in charge of an economy where bales of currency notes are barely able to guarantee a plastic bag of household items from the market? Who should query the central bank governor when he abdicates his responsibility and sets up shop to vie for the nation’s presidency? Who should Nigerians hold responsible where the nation’s electricity grid has broken down almost irreparably for the fifth time within the first six months of the year? Who should we ask when the exchange rate of the naira to the United States dollar (USD) is a mind-boggling N610 to one USD? Who will explain to us why the cost of the poor man’s kerosene has leapfrogged the price of diesel which has crossed well over N800 per litre?

Who is asking questions when the president predominantly populates important government positions and offices with his kinsmen and members of his faith? Who demands answers to the neo-colonisation and subtle subjugation we have allowed to blossom under the incumbent administration? Who is investigating the recent purchase of Toyota Landcruiser jeeps for the Niger Republic at the cost of N1.2 billion? Each public university whose teachers have been on strike for two months now needs just about N1 billion to offset their immediate needs.

The PDP must move beyond its stereotypical, predictably boring and toothless press releases in response to issues and developments. It must proceed outfield, and not ever remain in the dressing room, to robustly engage with the ruling party, in the marketplace of issues and ideas. A party in opposition must not, and cannot adopt a siddon dey look approach when its head is practically being shaven in its absence to borrow from the repertoire of the immutable Moshood Kasimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola.

Irrespective of the poor showing of the PDP in the just concluded Ekiti state gubernatorial election, a number of recent developments seem to inspire a degree of optimism in party faithful and Nigerians. People have this deep-seated positive outlook about the capacity of the PDP to reinvent itself. Something points in the direction of a party that can bolster its resources as rugged opposition, and a real contender for Aso Rock ahead of May 29, 2023.

Principal amongst these is the fact that the PDP controls 13 states in the country. The figure was higher before the installation of Hope Uzodinma of the APC as governor of Imo state, in place of an Emeka Ihedioha-led PDP government in the state, ostensibly by a Supreme Court ruling. Three erstwhile PDP governors, Bello Matawalle of Zamfara; Dave Umahi of Ebonyi, and Ben Ayade of Cross River, defected at various times from the PDP to the APC. But for these developments, the PDP had narrowed the pre-2019 difference between it and APC to an almost par 17 states vs 18, the 36th state is the All Peoples’ Grand Alliance (APGA) ruled Anambra. The PDP, therefore, is battle-tested and can put up a good fight.

The recent elections in the six area councils of the federal capital territory (FCT) posted results suggesting an even contest between the PDP and the APC. Both parties won three area councils apiece. Instructively, the PDP edged out the APC in the Abuja Municipal Area Council, (AMAC), the host of the federal bureaucracy including the presidency. PDP is in court challenging the results of the election in at least one area council with credible evidence, which may yet tilt the scales in favour of the party.

Equally noteworthy is the quality of contenders for the presidential ticket at the last primary. True, the old war horse and veteran of many debacles, Atiku Abubakar, Nigeria’s former vice president triumphed at the primary. The aggregate depth of human political capital which was contested at that presidential primary gives a hint about a party capable of rebound and resurgence. Notable national figures like Bukola Saraki, former governor and senate president respectively and Anyim Pius Anyim, also a former president of the upper parliament and secretary to the government of the federation (SGF) contested the presidential ticket.

Nyesom Wike, of Rivers state, who was once a minister; Udom Emmanuel, governor of Akwa Ibom state and his Bauchi state counterpart, Bala Mohammed, also demonstrated interest in flying the presidential flag of the PDP. Despite Atiku’s victory at the primary, these PDP greats have variously restated their commitment to the broad vision and pursuit of the PDP, in the run-up to the 2023 general polls. Individually and collectively, they have the capacity to add value and fresh vistas to the rediscovery of the PDP.

On the sidelines of the APC presidential primary, there was a remarkable development from the northwestern state of Kebbi, which has the potential to buoy the fortunes of the PDP, in the coming weeks and months. Senate majority leader, Yahaya Abdullahi and his counterpart from the same state who is also a ranking senator, Adamu Aliero, both decamped to the PDP. Both senators representing Kebbi north and Kebbi central respectively, cited lack of internal democracy, “incompetence, imposition and the violation of democratic norms, principles and practices,” in the running of the APC, as reasons for defecting. That such high-profile political figures could defect to the PDP at a time like this presupposes their belief in the mechanisms and operations of the prime opposition party.

Nigerians eagerly anticipate the redoubtable resurgence of the PDP to provide desired alternative to the stifling, suffocating rulership of the APC, as witnessed these seven long years. Many have dubbed Nigeria’s pitiable experiences a modern-day regime of “King Pharaoh”. The PDP must dispense with its penchant for inertia and sloppiness to seize this moment with every seriousness, commitment and resourcefulness, to bestow upon Nigeria, a long-desired new dawn. Public sentiment is on the side of the PDP, the oldest and most rooted of present-day political vehicles, to lead the march to the proverbial Canaan.

Olusunle (PhD), poet, journalist, author and scholar, is a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE)