Year dream
Stopped in it tracks The massive failure that the PDP suffered in the presidential and National Assembly elections last week was as a result of the party’s undoing, its members and associates had argued. Buhari trounced Jonathan with 15.4 million votes to 13.3 million, while his party, the APC, took a commanding lead in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, ending over one and a half decade of PDP’s dominance at the two arms of government.
“This is not surprising, given the way the party mishandled the affairs of the country while it held sway in the last 16 years,” Umar Ardo, a former presidential aspirant of the party, said. Ardo identified corruption and a general failure to deliver on promises on economic and social fronts as the primary trigger for a national discontent against the ruling PDP.
“Add the polarization and great disparity of wealth amongst citizens, the overt and insensitive corruption by public servants, the increasing widespread of poverty and deprivation within the vast majority of the people, the extreme forms of election frauds by incumbent leaders, a dishonest, unjust, corrupt and compromised judiciary, etc., relations between the government and the governed invariably have to come under severe stress. And because our local civic cultures are unable to withstand the stresses and strains of these economic and political pressures, these naturally breed disappointment and despair against the ruling party. It then takes very little to hate the government. Here then lies the proper explanation for PDP’s defeat in the last Saturday’s elections,” the politician, who went to court to challenge Jonathan’s eligibility to contest in 2015 polls, emphasized.
He also charged the party for failing to uphold internal democracy, saying the fallout for that was the desecration of principles of good conduct. “It is on record that all efforts of well-meaning PDP members to achieve this noble objective through the entrenchment of internal and participatory democracy, and the creation of institutional collaboration and cooperation within the party structures were rebuffed as people of questionable character were allowed free hand to do with the party as they willed. Ethics and values were thrown to the dogs. PDP became an unjust and unfair political party, with no truth in its mouth, no compassion in its heart, no sincerity in its purpose and its actions always intrinsically self-serving and deceitful,” he stated.
Equally, the chairman of the Northern Elders Council (NEC), Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, believed that PDP’s poor performance at the polls was a result of lack of enthusiasm on the part of the electorate. He was, however, indiscriminate in apportioning blames for his concept of a “general apathy” for the elections.
“I think there is a general apathy. There is disappointment with the conduct of politicians in power in the country. Everywhere, the governments are the same, the parties are the same. Today, to me, the APC is a junior PDP. Majority of the leading members of the APC were PDP members just a few weeks ago,” Yakasai held.
“The fact is, if you look at what happened in this country from 1999, you will discover that any state election, conducted by the state election commission is won by the party in power, and massively so. It is the same in APC-controlled states, PDP-controlled states, APGAcontrolled states or any other party,” he added.
Yakasai, who said he was still pursuing a case in court against the PDP for dropping its zoning arrangement, disagreed that the party’s fall was a punishment by the electorate over issues of zoning and rotation of power among the regions in the country.
While blaming PDP’s lack of seriousness for the haunting outcome, he explained the effect of voter apathy in the elections: “PDP members took it (the contest) for granted and did not work hard. If you calculate the number of votes Jonathan got in the North-East, North-West and NorthCentral in 2011, he did not get them this time around.
“The number of people in the North and in the South who voted in 2011 did not vote in 2015. The total number of voters (in 2015) is 68 million, 28 million cast their votes and 40 million did not vote. If you make an analysis of the voter turnout, you will discover that the South-West has the lowest percentage of voter turnout.
“I know some people thought that by introducing the card reader, they would remove the PDP from power. It is not correct. The fact that people who were qualified to cast their vote did not go to cast their vote is the reason why PDP failed. Buhari got 15 million votes and Jonathan got over 13 million. So, the gap is a little over two million. The percentage of voter turnout is lower than the normal national average,” he explained.
But while some members of the PDP continue to wallow in the belief of a 60-year rule, other party chieftains saw it as dreaming for a party already headed for the rocks. Former Minister of Sports and former National Treasurer of the PDP, Alhaji Bala Mohammed Ka’oje, was one member who did not share in the longevity optimism.
“A number of us knew that there were problems and if they were not addressed, the party would end up becoming an opposition party,” he recalled. “I think we have been vindicated by what happened on the 28 of March.”
The existing problems of the party started manifesting under the leadership of Bamanga Tukur as PDP chairman, he asserted, recalling they had advised Bamanga to “look back.”
“Looking backward means (testing the possibility of) going back to his state to say he wants to take over the party structures there. From our experience, all the party chairmen that we had before him lost the position because they wanted to take over party structures in their states. Little did we know that Bamanga’s interest was to take over the Adamawa PDP structure from the incumbent governor at that time, so that his son would become governor of the state.
“The Adamawa issue was the one that actually started to indicate that the PDP is walking towards a very serious problem in terms of instability. The Adamawa scenario led to the defection of five PDP governors to the APC and it degenerated and it led to a lot of confrontations, for which other governors felt highly threatened. They felt if their colleague could be treated that way it meant any of them could be the next tomorrow,” he said.
After Bamanga’s inaction, he pointed, the party made the mistake of underrating the opposition and maintaining a nonchalant reaction to the defection by its five governors.
“As soon as our governors decided to walk out of the PDP to the APC, a number of us knew that the doomsday was coming unless something was done to rectify it. But our leaders were full of themselves. They felt what the hell; seven governors are leaving the party and so what. They didn’t care, nobody worked assiduously to talk with them to return to the party despite the fact that they knew the governors were our foot soldiers,” he added.
Ka’oje blamed his party for committing sins that robbed it of popular goodwill: “It played with insecurity and didn’t handle it the way it should be handled. Many people became disappointed in the issue of power. Its privatization was not done well as far as we are concerned. The economy was not doing well, even when we were considered the largest economy in Africa. The voters wanted to see food on their tables but it was lacking. The negligence of the party to allow those governors to leave and join APC gave APC the spread to win the election.” ‘PDP May Never Recover’ PDP’s failure to win the general elections has raised fears that the party may have been consigned to a political oblivion, from which it may never recover.
“It is not possible,” Prof Yahaya stressed about the possibility of a bounce-back by the PDP. “APC now has become a party of the people. It will take a very long time for it (the PDP) to stage a comeback. It has been limited to the regions that are not experienced in politics,” he claimed.
He, however, held that a chance to recover may happen on the PDP, should the APC fail to address the problems of the people. “Winning election is just one thing and running a government is another thing. People have high hopes,” Prof Yahaya cautioned.
Ka’oje painted a gloomy picture for the future of his party, one that leaves it with only one destiny - crash. “Now that the APC has taken over, I think the PDP, like other smaller parties, will be buried and only the APC will be heard. As far as I am concerned, I don’t see the PDP going anywhere again, because its leaders have not learnt any lessons. If they had, they would have learnt before we crashed. People gave advice but nobody cared to listen,” he hypothesized.
Lamenting how the party walked its way to failure, the former minister accused its leadership of refusing to listen to warning and advice: “Like the chairman of the party, they were calling him the game-changer and some of us were laughing. We warned that the name was a negative one and they should be careful but the president, the vice president and others didn’t care and the chairman was behaving very pompous. They didn’t know that the changing of game for him was the changing of the leadership of the country from the PDP to the APC and it has happened.
“I am sorry for the PDP because some of us who have been part of founding of the party from the beginning felt that we have been very highly marginalized and excluded from the scheme of things in the party, but despite this, we felt that if the leaders were doing the right thing, PDP would have stayed. But they were totally on the wrong side of history and that is why they led us to where we are today. They crippled the party and killed it. PDP is dead; it only remains to be buried soon. May be on April 11, it will be buried and that is the end of the story,” Ka’oje agonized. ‘It Shall Rise Again’ However, Tanko Yakasai did not believe that the election results can provide the premise on which it can be scientifically proved that the PDP has come to the end of its life cycle. He contended that out of Nigeria’s approximate “180 million people”, only 28 million people voted, positing that the figure “represents…15% of the total population of the country,” and submitting that “PDP supporters were still there, only that they didn’t work hard.”
He added, “If, for instance, you take the South-East and the SouthSouth where the PDP is very strong, they did not give Jonathan the number of votes they gave him in 2011. In 2011, they gave him 11 million; this time they gave about seven million. He lost four million votes. If they gave him those four million, it would have been over by now,” he held forcefully.
“Secondly, the number of votes in the North, particularly the NorthWest and the North-East, in some cases, are not natural,” Yakasai pointed out.