Sheriff’s PDP and that 2019 dream

The Peoples Democratic (PDP) cuts the perfect image of a most pathetic organisation currently. Since Nigerians voted it out of power last year, the party has sauntered from one inglorious juncture to another such that no misadventure from its fold could distress us any longer. We just seem to have resigned to expecting the worst from them.

Curiously, the PDP seem to think that its greatest undoing was the loss of the general elections one year ago. I like to differ.  In my opinion, the crash of the party was foreseeable long before it came to pass. Stalwarts of the PDP were just too under the influence of power to see the signs.

That said, I do not even think that losing an election should be regarded as humiliating. What are elections after all? Shouldn’t they just be the celebration of a people’s decision to embrace democracy- the liberty to choose their leaders without interference or compulsion?

If elections are such therefore, should a party, rejected by the people who have given it their mandate for close to two decades, not take the message seriously, retreat into a review of what went wrong and prepare to rebound with ideas to retrieve the lost affection of the people?

But then, have the people ever really been on the top of the PDP’s list all the years it taunted us with being the biggest party on the continent and threatened to impose itself on us for five decades at the minimum? I do not think it was, neither is it now.

Consider the most recent in the “exploits” of the PDP.  Last week, members of the National Executive Committee, (NEC.), selected erstwhile chairman of the Board of Trustees of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP, and former governor of Borno State, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff as chairman of the party. That was after several weeks of actions ranging from the dramatic to the downright ludicrous on the part of many members haggling for a say in who becomes chairman.

Although members of the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the party initially rejected Sheriff’s emergence, he is said to be the choice of the most powerful blocs in the party namely governors, legislators, and the National Working Committee, NWC. The group disposed to Sherriff’s leadership eventually succeeded in splitting the BOT and get some people on their side. Again, that is the way of the party, just infiltrate the group and forget general consensus.

But apart from the BOT, other prominent members including spokesperson for the Goodluck Jonathan President Campaign, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode kicked against the selection of the new chairman principally because of his alleged contribution to the creation of the dread Boko Haram terrorist group and the procedure through which he emerged. Sherrif has denied links with Boko Haram, Nigerians are still largely unconvinced.

For me, this is not the sorest point in the decision to give the much sought after crown to the former governor.  What stops someone alleged to have supported Boko Haram from being chairman of a party when his kinsman, Ali Ndume, who is answering charges on the same matter before a law court, is majority leader in the Senate.  Ndume is invariably leader of the caucus of the All Progressives Party (APC) in the national assembly! Doesn’t the supreme law of the land enjoin us to regard accused persons as innocent until the otherwise is proven?

But a suggestion more indicative of the PDP’s depravity came from one of the interventions that followed the new chairman’s appointment.

In a widely circulated article, Fani Kayode insinuated, among other reasons for his rejection of the appointment, that Sherriff’s deep pocket may be the main incentive for those who supported him.

And I do not find that too farfetched. Now out of office and denied of the easy money that the national treasury offers, the PDP may be willing to sell its soul to the devil to mobilise  funds to fight the political wars ahead of it. So cash and the haughtiness that it brings could be the motivation for the choice that is now threatening to further decimate Africa’s self-acclaimed largest party.

Keen observers of politics in the country will however concede that the lust for money in addition to the excessive employment of power without consideration for the less influential have always been the bane of the PDP.

If leaders of the party have any inclination for retrospection, they should realise that even the loss of the 2015 elections was mostly due to the dependence on the power of money over and above exploring rapprochement For instance, without the human and financial capital of governors of Rivers, Kwara, Sokoto, Kano and Adamawa States who joined the APC before the 2015 elections, it is doubtful that the APC would have won those elections. But the PDP called their bluff!

That sense of entitlement and accomplishing by force has become a tradition of the PDP since the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo, who has ironically become PDP’s tormentor-in-chief.

Obasanjo it was who entrenched the tradition of self-preservation, intimidation and sometimes, expulsion of opposition that has found abode in the PDP.

For most of Obasanjo’s tenure, there was no separating between the legislative and executive arms of government. The office of the national chairman was also an adjunct of  Aso Villa.  Five years into his administration, Nigeria already had three Senate Presidents, each of them helped into and removed from office with the approval of the Owu chief. At the House of Representatives, there was a record of four speakers in the same period. The old man also forced the replacement of national chairmen of the party almost with the same frequency with which he changed his flowing three-piece Agbada. Obasanjo, it was who reduced his deputy to nothing more than the furniture decorating his office. He would later force this deputy and thousands of his supporters out of the party that they started together, all for nothing but personal vendetta.

On leaving office, the former president appears to have had too many people understudying him such that the PDP has been unable to wean itself from this undemocratic disposition until it was booted out of office in 2015.

The question to ponder on however, is how well this selfish emasculation of dissent and the inability to attain synchroneity will work for the PDP now that it is in opposition and the government in power is coming after some of its  most outspoken members?

It must be stated at this point though that even the ruling APC is beginning to battle with its own demons some of which manifests in the very challenges that we identify in the PDP. The APC, which promised democracy, cannot even be fair to its own members. And in their own case as is with PDP, these frictions are essentially not because the people will benefit from the hard postures but because some entrenched interests think they own us. That seems to be the way of Nigerian politicians.

We should hope that the ruling party and the leading opposition party in Nigeria will begin to see the people as pivotal to their existence and take decisions, including those that affect their parties, in the interest of the people.

But then, I do not think that much will be achieved until we decide to stop the commoditisation of politics. This is why influential elements in the PDP seem poised to impose Sherriff on the party.  The new chairman himself seems to get this hint as one his first comments was about the determination of the PDP to take back power in 2019.

But Sherriff, who isn’t speaking like someone ready to reconcile the party must realise that money does not solve all the problems that politics presents, there is a place of servant leadership in which his opponents and people like Dr Doyin Okupe who are waiting to inter the party  can see the sense in working together again.

Most importantly, Sherrif’s three month administration should position the PDP to given credible representation to Nigerians as the leading opposition party in the country before contemplating about 2019. PDP party needs to reinvent itself and earn the trust of Nigerians again before it can hope to get back into reckoning.

Twitter:@niranadedokun