Urgently needed: A new, reformed PDP

BY DON PEDRO OBASEKI

This is an honest opinion and I pray the leaders are reading or will listen.

The Edo State governorship elections came and went. The Ondo State governorship elections came and went. Now the Rivers State legislative rerun also came, but many of us in Edo didn’t need to read a “Mene Mene Tekel”. The script was familiar. The handwriting, same. All the Masquerades wore identical masks! And Nebuchadnezzar & his Chaldeans may well continue to have a field day!

However, I beg to disagree with those who opine that our Party Leaders are leading well. PDP needs serious rebranding. Presently, most PDP leaders, whether elected, appointed or acknowledged, have not done enough to wake up this “sleeping giant”. In fact, to many observers, the PDP Leadership appears comatose, disconnected and parochial.

In the Nigeria of today, the dynamics of power has altered tremendously, and not to acknowledge that is quite unfortunate. To this end, the brand essence of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as a party and political entity needs a structural overhaul. Anything less will be economic with the Truth. It is no longer Politricks as usual. The PDP must clean its Aegean’s Stable. Wishful thinking, nor mere sporadic complaints and whimpering on social media cannot do this.

The PDP requires a deliberate and structured re-engineering of self. A new, reformed and informed PDP. A bastion of hope; and not the mere sporadic ranting rhetoric of a wounded lion, lamenting its once glorious days. Those Day are gone!

The PDP is in crisis. And only the PDP can save itself. Since the 2015 elections, the APC appear to have subjugated the PDP to “the highest form of Generalship”: the Supreme Excellence of “breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting”, to borrow words from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”.

The ‘old’ PDP arguably fits the profile of an archetypal Greek or Roman Aristocracy; a giant bedeviled by self-inflicted woes, swarm in the tragedy of its our vanity. The Greeks called this “Hubris” or “Tragic Pride”. The consequences of an excessive hubristic disposition may take on psychosomatic proportions if not curbed, or at the very least, adequately managed!

The PDP must restructure itself or risk a monumental implosion. If this happens, it will be largely self-induced. With recent schizophrenics in the polity, the PDP’s finger is set on the self-destruct button! Losing the 2015 presidential polls and thus having its once-awesome stranglehold on the federating states reduced to just 12 states (or 13; if you include the obviously PDP-leaning, APGA-led Anambra State Government), was a paradigm shift of epic proportions. Apparently, all Nigerians know this (except, maybe the PDP leadership of course)!

Enter Ali Modu Sheriff! The mission to the PDP of Ali Modu Sheriff, a former two-time Governor of the Boko Haram-ravaged Borno State under the banner of the defunct ANPP, and a founding national leader of the APC, can only be left to the imagination. And the Modu Sheriff malady is not going away! Instead, it has turned out to become PDP’s Achilles heel. The signs are everywhere: two polar National Leaderships/Caretaker Committees, two factions parading different candidates until the last minute in the last governorship elections (in Edo and Ondo States). These are hallmarks of debilitating internal dysfunction. The Modu Sheriff saga is like the tale of Faust dining with the Devil. The Mephistophelian consequences may continue to dog the PDP, unless it submits itself to a needed surgical exorcising of the Modu Sheriff ghost! Or else, the Modu Sheriff syndrome will metastasize into the party’s brand personae. Something must be done, and fast! The PDP must encourage credible, transparent processes; while engendering a new, improved and inspiring leadership. The party must enshrine a clear sincerity of purpose, while demystifying the deity-status of many of its serving State Governors.

Upon achieving these objectives, the PDP must transmit and communicate its new brand essence to its frontline and base, as well as its army of followers at the grassroots, and of course, the generality of the Nigeria people, at home and abroad. This is imperative. Anything to the contrary will sound a death knell for the PDP. A final nail on its own coffin. If the current trend persists, the PDP might soon be singing its own ‘nunc dimitis colloqui’.

The PDP must re-brand and remobilize.

The perilous, near-callous and almost criminal practice of imposition of candidates in whatever guise must be eschewed. The ideas of “Consensus Candidate” as well as the dubious argument of “Party Supremacy” are undemocratic and akin to Sophism. In short, it amounts to a deliberate and diabolic emasculation of the mass majority of the party’s membership and followership.

A new, improved PDP will not only win back the love and trust of Nigerians, but it will also win elections, and convincingly too. Regardless of the barely veiled modus of the ruling APC to ‘buy votes’, skew election results in its favour to reflect pre-determined ends, while controlling the security agencies and INEC like puppets on a string, the PDP can win elections again! However, that will depend largely on whether the PDP can rise up to itself and admit to a glaring deficiency in its internal organogramic and self-perception quotient. The party must dismantle its own mindset; a near-psychosomatic disposition that cost it the 2015 Elections.

In the PDP, it is not uncommon to see party leaders in their sixties being paraded as “Youth Leaders”. An obvious aberration! It’s high time the PDP sat down and talk. Earnest talk. It is time for frank, sincere and proactive dialogue of all stakeholders in the PDP who must see the revival and survival of the party as salvaging their collective commonwealth from self-destruct. Egos must take a hiatus. The days of the voodoo puppet-masters are gone. The days when a few “Elders” will hide behind the sanctuary of locked doors to “anoint” party officials and candidates must be confined to the dung-heap of yesterday.

The PDP must evolve. It must allow itself a new lease of life – a true breath of fresh air. It is obvious to Nigerians that the ruling APC has failed largely to deliver on its campaign promises. The APC’s avalanche of failed promises dots the nation’s landscape like speckled dots on a leopard’s skin. Nigeria has slid from a struggling giant-nation to a leprous beggar-nation.

Bad as the PDP may have been prior to the 2015 elections, many Nigerians now know that the APC is a lot worse! But that realization may not be enough to make Nigerians return the PDP to power at Aso Rock. For Nigerians, neither a cosmetic makeover, nor some mere hideous window-dressing will suffice. We have become too aware and too savvy to be so taken for granted. Nigerians will see through the charade. Thus, the PDP must not merely repackage a discarded old ethos! Rather, like a soul in purgatory, the party must undergo a total overhaul. A self-mortification and transmogrification, if need be. To use a more common phraseology, the PDP must be “Born-Again”. Old things and Old ways must pass away.

In the twilight months of the Jonathan-led PDP government, Nigeria’s economy overtook South Africa’s as the largest economy in Africa, after a rebasing of the nation’s GDP. Today, barely 19 months into the President Buhari-led APC government, Nigeria is in a recession. The nation’s economy is battered and bruised beyond recognition. The country is broke. The nation’s Purchase Power Parity (PPP) against other currencies has nose-dived to an all-time low. The naira is almost N500 to a dollar (the worst since the Gowon Government introduced the Naira as our national currency in January 1973 at the exchange rate of Two naira to One Pound sterling). The pump-price of petrol is N145 per litre and further increase is rumoured to be in the horizon. A bag of rice which the APC met at N8,500 now sells for almost N25,000. Cement price has risen from N1,650 to N2,350 overnight. Even Dangote, the richest man in Africa, has lost more than Five Billion dollars ($5b) or a third of his total worth in just 8 months, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Inflation has hit double digits and GDP is in the negative. Over four million Nigerians have lost their jobs and have been thrown into the unemployment market as against the three million jobs per annum the APC Government promised to create. Elections in Rivers, Kogi, Imo, Bayelsa States, and most recently in Edo and Ondo states have been conducted in the most brazenly incompetent and inconclusive manners. Fulani herdsmen have technically replaced the Boko haram terrorists to unleash a new reign of Terror and mayhem on Nigerians. Petty crimes have shut up beyond comprehension owing to the economic downturn. The States that cannot pay Salaries and pensions are mostly APC States.

How do Nigerians (except card-carrying members of the APC and their serial apologists) perceive this reckless, unfeeling, inhuman band of negative change-bearers. Nigerians are tired. Almost two years into the APC-led administration, their actions do not show any trace that a single promise made by them would ever be fulfilled. Neither do Nigerians believe that the “Change will begin” with the leaders of the APC!

No voter in 2015 bargained for this “Change”. Nigerians thought they have found hope in the APC. But today, all we get from the APC leadership is an untoward body-language, reckless rhetoric, populist sloganeering, a near-satanic deployment of the media, and a draconian deployment of security agencies to hunt and haunt hapless opposition figures in ways reminiscent of past military dictatorships.

I stop to wonder: Why hasn’t the PDP seized the initiative? Why is the party “dulling” and drooling under the blanket of the Modu Sheriff shame? Why can’t the PDP throw up a new band of leaders – young, fresh, smart, ready and willing to make a difference? Why can’t the PDP rebrand and reposition itself as the better alternative?

The future is at the behest of the PDP. It is its lot to seize the opportunity. Or forever remain silent.

Obaseki, a former University Lecturer and filmmaker, is a media entrepreneur and broadcast consultant. He was a governorship aspirant in the 2016 Edo Governorship election