PDP: End of a 60-y
created by the northern elite. That is, a group people who have been ruling this country for a long time discovered they could not continue and, therefore, they had to create a party and choose the leadership of the party and then choose the candidate to stand for election and then conduct the election,” he said.
From its birth, Prof Yahaya held, the party has benefited from the “existing power structure and influence in the country,” while being funded by the elite. “So it was a projection of the failure of the northern elite to continue to rule this country. It was not a party that was founded by the generality of the ordinary people in the country who were tired of the military regime,” he submitted.
Riding on the back of either public discontent about military rule or elitist support, or both, the PDP swept the general elections in 1999, winning the presidency, a whopping 21 governorship seats, and taking leading majority in the two chambers of the National Assembly. APP, trailing far behind, got nine and AD got six.
It subsequently grew from strength to strength, priding itself as the ‘largest political party in Africa.’ The claim that the party was going to rule for 60 years snowballed from a one-off statement to a creed-like obsession and a battle cry that would continue to be echoed by devoted party supporters.
Similar electoral feats by the PDP were repeated during the 2007, 2011, 2013 elections, until the recent presidential and National Assembly elections when the opposition APC’s tsunami of change swept the ruling party off its feet.