Saraki, Dogara, Ekweremadu and PDP redivivus

Three weeks ago, a few Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) officials had defiantly, and with rousing, prescient confidence, announced that their party would be readied on time for the reclamation of the presidency in 2019.  Against an aggressive All Progressives Congress (APC) party, President Muhammadu Buhari’s cult following, APC’s near total dominance of the National Assembly and the states, and pushy, sometimes cantankerous APC propagandists and publicists, it was felt that PDP’s sanguineness was both far-fetched and gaseous talk. Last Tuesday, after the PDP almost single-handedly determined the outcome of the NASS leadership positions, and in the process grabbed the coveted post of Deputy Senate President, few still held on to the belief that PDP’s 2019 hope was a chimera.

In both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the PDP made the difference. Two years after its founding, the APC had still been unable to accrete power brilliantly and elegantly or crystallise its essence. Formless, quarrelsome, and self-satisfied, the new ruling party recklessly opened its flanks for external exploitation and manipulation. Gifted by political circumstances with the unique opportunity of insinuating itself into the confidence of APC’s legislative leaders, the PDP hungrily appropriated the chance and immersed itself in the internal politics of the APC, accentuating the divisions and distrust festering within the ruling party. Former Senate President David Mark relished the primal role of thrusting the dagger deeper into the back of the neophyte ruling party by masterminding the Machiavellian humiliation of the APC as a ruling party.

Suddenly, the ignominious defeats suffered by the PDP in March and April do not seem to matter much anymore. They were embarrassed in November 2013 when some of their governors defected to the then opposition party, the APC. The PDP has repaid the compliment in an even more painful and malicious manner. When the PDP began to fracture, it had ruled for nearly 14 years. The APC on the other hand appears to be fracturing barely two weeks into its first presidency. In addition, when the APC aggravated the divisions within the PDP in the lower chamber, it never succeeded in claiming any of the top legislative positions reserved for the ruling party. But last Tuesday, the PDP had no reason to worry anymore about its survival, as one of its own, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, will preside over the affairs of the upper chamber in the absence of the APC’s Senator Saraki, moderating, modulating and sanctioning the programmes and policies of the ruling party. No repayment is as bitter and distasteful.

Now, the PDP can begin to rebuild in earnest. The psychological trauma left by the March and April defeats, which would have hamstrung the rebuilding process, has been dissipated. The party had been seeking a fulcrum for the rebuilding. It has now found one in Senator Ekweremadu, who will be assisted by the scheming but experienced Senator Mark presiding over the caucus gathering of a coterie of restless, plotting and nostalgic PDP senators. The party will also now begin to rediscover itself. It will transmute from its previously euthanasic mode, where it was constantly prone to suicide, to finding relief and strength in its hardy attributes. It will appreciate that in reality it still controls more states than its previously hopeless condition gave it reason to believe. Strong in the states, resilient in its mordant ability to practice mischief and strong-arm politics, and now resplendent in the Senate and House of Representatives, the PDP is experiencing a definite revival.

Analysts had suggested that for the PDP to reclaim its primacy in Nigerian politics, not to say its exaggerated presence in Africa, it would need to abjure past practices and rid itself of its disdainful cocksureness, and rediscover those attributes that made it a preening and overweening political organisation. It was suggested that it also needed a new philosophy, in fact any philosophy at all, for it never had any, and yet managed to rule with an effervescent, if sometimes coruscating, presence. The party never codified its rules, which it broke with unabated flamboyance, and had scant regard for political morality so-called. The spectacular loss it suffered about two months ago was, therefore, believed to offer the former ruling party a chance to renew itself and reinvent its politics in such a way as to turn it into a vote-gathering machine. No one thought this eminent and complicated process could be concluded in a few months, let alone four years. If it promised to reclaim the presidency in 2019, it was believed to be a pipe dream. However, instead of the PDP being wracked by doubts, it is the ruling APC and the hitherto sceptical public that will now be flustered and dismayed. Nigerians had voted for the APC to champion new sanitary schemes for the society and politics . That hope now seems gone, as the PDP will have no incentive to embark on the painful renewal processes for which they were punished.

Not only will they avoid the painful task of reinventing their party, they will in addition have no incentive to elect into party offices bright and forward-looking politicians able to appeal to a wary and dispirited electorate. The men who govern the party now, nearly all of them third-rate politicians and fifth-rate human beings, are good enough to continue in office. Such men as the thuggish Nyesom Wike, who now rules Rivers State, and the intemperate and loquacious Ayo Fayose, who has all but declared independence for his deeply hobbled Ekiti State, will continue to preen and posture obscenely. There is no challenge for new hands; indeed, they do not need new hands. Moreover, what they would have needed to secure with untrammeled imagination and hard work, they can now get through the chicanery they had become accustomed to for many years.

The newly reinvigorated PDP will not be content staying relevant in an APC-led legislature. Ruthless and ambitious, it will attempt to get ahead of the distracted and fractured APC, a party some PDP officials mercilessly and hastily described as either unfit or immature to govern. The PDP had feared that the party that worsted it in the last polls and wrong-footed it at nearly every electioneering turn and stump would present a hard nut to crack. PDP leaders are, however, pleasantly surprised that the APC is made of brittle metal, if compared with the unfeeling machine language the PDP likes to cruelly visualise the society, or of biscuit bone, if compared with the humanising ideals the new ruling party likes to cast its mould.

If the PDP can be persuaded to eschew the expediency and opportunism that its current exploitation of APC’s weaknesses has inescapably led it, it will heed the warnings and admonitions of this column to reinvent itself by purging its ranks of the odious politicians who led the party to defeat, and by conceiving a new philosophical rampart upon which to build a luxuriant present and enduring future. There is little chance the PDP will opt for this hard option, for the former ruling party was birthed in opportunism, which it cavorted in for 16 years, and for all anyone cares, will prefer to pass away in the same inglorious and uninspiring manner of its founding.