“I would rather lose doing the right thing than win doing wrong. The process into an office is as important as what you do thereafter.” — Peter Obi
No mincing of words. Erstwhile governor Peter Obi’s cavorting with the PDP, while it lasted, can be likened to the celibate in a whorehouse, virgin/nun in a maternity ward, or saint among sinners. In other words, he did not belong there.
What could a priest who had taken a celibacy oath be doing in a whorehouse? Could the priest have gone to dissuade the pros from plying their age-old trade? Failure in this impossible mission could leave him with options that include walking away or the whores would seduce him. Could this be what happened between erstwhile Governor Peter Obi and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, that made him resign?
When a priest takes the celibacy vow and suddenly finds himself trapped in the habitations of harlots where chastity scandalises, he certainly needs to re-examine his stay and do the needful by finding an escape route immediately. That precisely was what the frontline presidential aspirant, Peter Obi, did when he suddenly quit the leading opposition party and joined the Labour Party of Nigeria to continue to pursue his presidential ambition.
Mr Obi, Nigeria’s most frugal political leader by popular acclamation, could not imagine himself under the dollar rain that greeted the PDP primary election. He had to exit before the door closed on him and he got entangled in the dollar spree that enmeshed the process. Since, by his own words, Obi was not desperate to be President but only desperate to see Nigeria work, he needed to exit that club to be able to continue his mission to recover Nigeria. But sceptics are asking, is Nigeria ripe for recovery? Is Obi the man with the divine mandate? Time will tell in the next eight months of electioneering?
Any meticulous follower who also monitors how PDP conducts its affairs since its inception in 1998, especially how it chooses its leaders, would understand why a character like Peter Obi is a scandal to PDP.
Since July 2021 when a stupendously rich governor entered the stage with his cash and vandalised the PDP, the party has not been the same.
There is no way anybody who would rather lose doing the right thing will find PDP a comfortable home. Since August last year, those things that are morally challenged have a way of finding PDP a natural environment. PDP is not alone though, as even the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, appears to be in a more shabby situation. The loser in all this mess is democracy in Nigeria.
Yours sincerely’s journey with PDP has been a torturous experience. As a record keeper–all political journalists are supposed to be–and one who has been part of the party since its inception in 1998, I have been privileged to see PDP from two vantage positions…as a newsroom operative and as a party insider. Yours sincerely was among the first battery of reporters accredited to cover the activities of the PDP. I was also at its first National Convention in Jos in 1999 and witnessed all the schemings that culminated in Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, fresh from incarceration, torpedoing Dr Alex Ekwueme who was almost crowned to fly the flag of the party in the 1999 general election.
Since then, PDP has not fundamentally changed in principles but has had some terrible interventions like the dollar-spraying governor. He has shamed the party since last year. The newly-elected presidential flag bearer, one-time Vice President Atiku Abubakar, a PDP founding father, has an arduous task ahead to harmonise a party disjointed by arrogance and impunity.
How and why did PDP get here? Simply put, its leaders and influencers succumbed to pecuniary hypnotism and looked away, thinking that barefaced perversion would not have far-reaching consequences on the party. Last Saturday, if not for last-minute manoeuvres, lunatics would have overrun the asylum, also called PDP, and that would have sounded the death knell.
This columnist has had a chequered career with PDP and seen how it frittered away opportunities and now struggles to learn the hard task of learning to be left-handed in old age.
How did we get here? PDP’s pioneer National Secretary and onetime governor of Enugu, Dr Okwesilieze Nwodo, tapped me in 2010 to leave the newsroom to join him at the Wadata Plaza headquarters of PDP where President Goodluck Jonathan had drafted him to strengthen the party. By then I had been enjoying pen-pushing (reporting politics) for more than 30 years. Without thinking about it, so to say, I turned him down. When Dr Nwodo asked why, I told him bluntly I did not like PDP and had never written any positive articles about the party. He was cool with it.
“Why don’t you like the party? Is it that it never did anything good from your perspective?” he asked nicely. Answering him, I said, “Even the little the PDP was doing was drowned by its arrogance.”
Dr Nwodo smiled and said, “You are exactly the one I am looking for. I want you to join me in this task of rejigging PDD. I am not going to look for anybody else.” The rest is now history, but that was how I found myself at Wadata Plaza as Media Affairs Adviser to the National Chairman. Since then, I have been part and parcel of the party as Media Adviser to another National Chairman, Prince Uche Secondus, for four years. I was also the head of the media team as a consultant under Olisa Metu that pulled PDP out of the abyss after losing power in 2015. I have virtually been part of every PDP electioneering since its inception.
Therefore, without fear or favour, I can state here that the failure of the PDP has been the failure of Nigeria’s democracy. This party had a 99.9 per cent chance to put Nigeria back on track but was carried away. If the APC interregnum is an aberration that shouldn’t have happened, the blame should go to the PDP whose unbecoming and unflattering behaviour in governance led to its rejection and the birth of APC in 2015. After seven years in the opposition, the PDP appears to have learnt no lesson to warrant a political fad whose only credential is possession of enough money to run riot.
Now, rather than have an easy ride back to power, the PDP’s return to the presidency of Nigeria can only come by miracle. As a believer, miracles are possible. Its journey to the Aso Rock Villa has become a gargantuan task because PDP allowed money, rather than reason and principles, to control its affairs. A political party whose actions and inaction result in losing good heads like Peter Obi, Rabiu Kwankwaso, and Enyinnaya Abaribe whose membership defines the PDP brand, must have issues with credibility and reputation.
PDP’s journey to opposition began in 2010 when the party allowed individual ambitions to override corporate interests and ousted Dr Nwodo as the National Chairman. Before he left, Nwodo’s resetting of the party for the challenge of the time was already loading. He was trying to make the party independent by being self-accounting. That did not resonate with some powerful tendencies within and he was shown the way out. That action marked the nosedive of the once arrogant and hubristic so-called largest party on the continent.
Again, like being anxious to repeat an inglorious history, in August 2021, the party’s smooth and swift journey to 2023 was truncated with the needless removal of Prince Secondus as National Chairman. The reason for removing Secondus, just as it was with Nwodo, turned out to be the party’s undoing. Trust that nemesis always lives next door!
If a political party like PDP has a Peter Obi from Anambra State [with his high political profile] as a member and its leadership prefers to deal with an unelectable Chris Uba, such a party certainly has issues with reputation.
If a political party like PDP is aspiring to dethrone the ruling party by cashing in on its many missteps and it is not clumsy and unwieldy also, it then raises the bar for itself on points it has against the governing party.
If there is nothing to differentiate you from the man on the wrong side of the view, your argument of better appearance falls flat before good heads. What PDP has displayed in the last year that was climaxed with the dollar rain at its National Convention has narrowed its leveraging path against the grossly dented APC.
If the PDP wants to dethrone APC and return to power it must not hang out with chicken and aspire to fly. It must find a way of hanging out with the eagle soar. Any political system that discomfits a reputable political influencer like Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso does not appreciate the electoral value of its people.
By running away from PDP, the likes of Obi, Kwankwaso and Abaribe appear to be heeding the advice of Booker T. Washington: “Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in the company of bad people.” Energies are contagious and that is why we are admonished to strive to be with people who reflect what we feel and what we want to be.
The long defeatist view of, if you can’t beat them, join them is what has kept our polity down and the Obi and Kwankwaso revolutions appear to be addressing this. The populace, especially the youth, appears to be reverberating with them, thereby raising the hurdles higher for the APC and the PDP.
God help us.