It all started like a rumour. Or an expensive joke. And so, when a showman called Donald Trump formally declared to vie for the presidency of the United States on June 16, 2015 in the iconic Trump Towers in New York, not many took him serious. Seventeen months later however, that rumour became reality. It was no longer a joke. The man many around the world felt did not have the requisite qualities to lead even a third world country became the 45th president of the United States. And what many see rightly or wrongly as America’s romance with perdition began. In just eleven months, and still counting, Trump has dismantled most of the things that make America the undisputed leader of the free world.
Credible opinion polls have continued to indicate that Americans are regretting electing such a character as their leader. But it is too late to cry over a spilt milk. What Americans refused to accept was that the world had a stake in the choice of who becomes their leader.
Just like the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Its members and leaders must realise that the rest of Nigeria has a stake in who becomes the party’s national chairman. It simply does not have the right to continue to do things the way it wants, even if it wants to experience a second successive defeat in the forthcoming general elections.
This is because the PDP is the biggest opposition party in the country. Those who know the meaning of democracy and are serious about its survival know the important place of opposition in the sustenance of any democracy. In this connection, therefore, even members of the ruling APC, as well as other non-aligned Nigerians, are interested in seeing a PDP that is mindful of its important role in the survival of our democracy, and which takes that responsibility serious.
The opposition forces the government in power to as much as possible not to take the people for granted. When the PDP took Nigerians for granted, after ruling the country for sixteen uninterrupted years, the opposition had to organise a kind of gang-up to force it out and show it that there is a limit to which a ruling party can shortchange Nigerians. In a similar vein, as disorganised as the PDP has in most case been since it lost power in April 2015, it has forced the ruling APC government to wake up to some of its responsibilities, reminding Nigerians that in it lies an alternative platform for a better Nigeria.
But as we all know, talk is cheap. But let the PDP hear this and take it from me: no serious Nigerian will take it serious in its avowed mission to regain power and build the Nigeria of our collective dreams if it cannot get it right in the choice of its leader. At the state levels, the PDP is lucky with the crop of governors it has produced in the current dispensation. From Dr. Ibrahim Hassan Dankwambo of Gombe to Barrister Nyesom Wike of Rivers, all of them are showing that societies need effective leaders to move to the next level and achieve their manifest destinies. The unprecedented achievements recorded by those governors continue to elicit hope that the PDP still has in its fold, some of the best and the brightest that could move Nigeria out of the woods.
In politics, perception matters a whole lot. Though we all know the anti-graft agencies are being used to achieve political ends, which in any case was started by PDP’s Obasanjo, those aspirants being investigated for corruption, or those who were even convicted by a court of competent jurisdiction on account of corruption should be kept miles apart from the contest. Without doubt, their right to free association is guaranteed by the nation’s constitution. Sadly for the PDP, the rival APC has succeeded in painting it as being the godfather of corruption, even though more than 80 percent of APC leaders and political office holders were influential PDP members, who played key roles in making the PDP the monster that it is perceived by many to be.
Still on the matter of perception, it is necessary for the PDP to operate from the position of strength. We all saw how the party, even when it had the power of incumbency, was routed and disgraced in states where many of the aspirants hail from. You cannot give what you don’t have. And so, it will amount to an exercise in serious self deceit if the party allows characters who don’t even have the support of their immediate constituencies to become its number one officials.
Of course someone could argue: why then, did the PDP zone the presidency to the North, where it made perhaps its poorest showing at the last general election? The answer to this could be seen in the fact that the party used to be the darling of most parts of the North. And a rebranded PDP with a national chairman that cannot be blackmailed still has a chance to regain some, or most of that love.
The reality is that without the south-south, and the south-east, the PDP will have long been dead and buried. It produced only two governors in the entire north, and presently only one in the whole of south-west. It must hold on to its stranglehold on the other southern regions of east and south. Failing to do that will make the people of those shores with no option than to feel they are being taken for granted, and that their loyalty to the party is not appreciated. The battle for 2019 is not for the feint-hearted. It is going to be very tough, and definitely the PDP must consolidate on its areas of strength and fight it out in the battleground states. I do not belong to the PDP or any political party, but as a stakeholder in the Nigerian project, I know very well that our democracy can only be nurtured to fruition when there is vibrant opposition. And as things stand, only the PDP with Uche Secondus’s leadership, can provide that kind of opposition.
Gaya wrote in from Abuja.
