The new sheriff in PDP

The new acting Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Ali Modu Sheriff, had barely settled down to his new job when he promised President Muhammadu Buhari that he would not get a second term. Sheriff swore, by his long cap, that he would lead the PDP back to Aso Rock in 2019 and served notice in Aba that the journey had already started. I don’t know where Sheriff is going in 2019 or who will follow him. And we’re still miles from a decision about Buhari’s second term. But I guess we know where Sheriff is coming from.

Modu Sheriff is the most frequently mentioned name on Boko Haram. He is a grassroots politician with extraordinary contacts. He has a cult following and is feared and loved in equal measure. He is probably Nigeria’s most dangerous politician with a survival instinct that is second to none. Not that he carries an axe under his babanriga or that he has horns under his long cap. He is simply an indescribable menace.

To be fair, he has not been found guilty or even charged with any crime in relation to Boko Haram. But it was on his watch as governor of Borno State between 2003 and 2011, that the terrorist group took root and grew to become the single deadliest security threat to the country. He has spent the last seven years fighting off allegations that he had a hand in the making of the Frankenstein monster, but the ghost is not going away.

And now, in the midst of its dreadful woes, PDP has decided that Sheriff, who himself is in need of salvation, is just the man the party needs to save itself. Choosing a party chairman is not the job of bystanders. The party is perfectly entitled to choose its leader even if it finds one in Kuje where the PDP fold has quite a few. But you would think that after a crushing defeat in the last general election the PDP would take its time to mend its ways. That it would take a long, hard look at itself and go back to where the rain started beating it. It says something about the current state of the PDP that while a number of its notable leaders, including a former chairman, are standing trial for corruption, the party has also been locked in a fierce battle for what is left of its soul.

Now, see who’s got it.

By jumping ahead to 2019, Sheriff has just shown that he’s the wrong man for the job. And this is why. Anyone who has been in this country in the last 16 years, especially the last six, should feel insulted that the new leader of the party largely responsible for our current misery does not think we deserve to know why we have been brought this low and still sinking. There’s a complete absence of feeling in this obsession for power.

Sheriff, a two-term senator, two-term governor and an ex of all the parties since 1999, thinks that all that matters most to us at this time is the promise of a new president in three years? He thinks we do not deserve to know exactly what his relationship with Boko Haram is, how and why the group mutated after the death of Yusuf Mohammed, and what, if anything at all, he did to save nearly 12,000 people from being murdered? He thinks we do not deserve to know why his party, the PDP, shared billions of dollars set aside for the war amongst its top members and non-members including prayers warriors and fashion designers?

If Sheriff is getting three years ahead of himself to escape accounting for the horrendous past of his party – and to deny remedy and restitution – he is making a big mistake. I honestly cannot help agreeing with Femi Fani-Kayode that the party needs prayers. More than that, PDP must account for its past.

Here was a party that spent $16billion on power only to produce more darkness and public misery. A party that budgeted N300billion for petrol subsidy in 2011 and ended up paying out N2trillion mostly to its cronies. A party that diverted billions of dollars voted for war to private pockets while soldiers on the war front were left to buy there own medicines and seek help from hunters and neighbouring countries. This is the party that Sheriff now leads and which, without any hint of reform or repentance, he is promising to return to power in 2019.

The combination of Buhari and Osinbajo is the best ethical team we have had in decades. Yet, we need opposition. That is the only way to keep the governing APC from sleeping at the wheels. But for the vigilance of the press and the opposition, pork barrel would have passed as appropriation bill 2016. We need a strong opposition to hold Buhari’s feet to the fire on his election promises and to constantly remind the APC that it would get a taste of the PDP medicine if it becomes wayward, incompetent and corrupt.

But we need an honest opposition. Not one that will start by telling us what will happen in 2019 but one that will come clean with its horrible past, and tell us exactly how it hopes to chart the future. Even if Sheriff spoke with talisman in his mouth, someone should tell him that 16 years of PDP misrule has put us beyond a charm.

My only comfort is that even in its sordid, chequered state the PDP has the curious legacy of outlasting its bad leaders. Sheriff will not be an exception.

Ishiekwene is the managing director/editor-in-chief of The Interview magazine and a manner of the board of the Paris-based Global Editors Network