PDP: What Happened?
the presidency after Obasanjo, a Southerner. The constitutional inevitability of the Jonathan ascendancy gave him only about two years but by 2011, Obasanjo came into the picture after Jonathan had expressed interest to run for a full tenure of four years. Obasanjo came with the wisdom of his better knowledge of Nigeria and in agreeing that Goodluck Ebele Jonathan should go for his own presidency, insisted that the latter should do only four years, that is, between 2011 and 2015.
It is a fact that cannot be over-laboured that President Obasanjo traversed the length and breadth of the country canvassing support for President Jonathan to be allowed to do another term of just four years and in the process made promises on behalf of the party. However, President Jonathan decided to take another shot at the presidency in 2015, thus putting Obasanjo in a quagmire especially before the North.
Meanwhile, some discerning strategists in the Southwest, led by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, saw an opening and moved in their political machine which eventually culminated into the winning alliance. It is important to point out that the final decision by President Jonathan to run in 2015 was the result of a deliberately designed conspiracy to prod him on to that fatal mistake. The conspiracy entailed, among other things, the sacking of Bamangar Tukur, the recruitment of Mua’zu as well as the recruitment of some elements, especially contractors, to block people who would have offered the president better advice on the matter and other vital issues. Let me illustrate this with the Oyinlola saga. The Oyinlola saga seems to me a major proof of the conspiracy theory. It baffled even the least discerning fellow why the PDP leadership acted with so much impunity on the Oyinlola matter when it was clearly evident that it was shooting itself on the foot by the way the matter was handled.
Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, a former military administrator of Lagos State and former democratically-elected governor of Osun State was suspended as national secretary of the party in a manner that confounded even the most benevolent apologist of both the presidency and the PDP leadership. Yet, even after he got reinstated via a federal high court order, the party resorted to legal obstacles and judicial rigmarole to ensure that the court order was not implemented till today.
Coming close the 2014 governorship election in Osun State where Governor Oyinlola has a massive following, it was unthinkable that the party could afford to treat him the way it did. Had Oyinlola not gotten that treatment, PDP would have won the governorship election in Osun and with the earlier recovery of Ekiti State, that would have formed a basis for establishing a strong hold for the entire Southwest. I am of the strong belief that the conspirators blocked President Jonathan from seeing the danger in the Oyinlola saga. I will dwell on the conspiracy matter more elaborately in the next part of this series.
The result was what Nigerians and the rest of the world witnessed on March 28, 2015. The North demonstrated in unmistaken terms its resolve to have the presidency back as agreed before the ascendency of the late Yar’Adua, though not cast on stone. The region completed that determination on April 11, 2015 at the governorship election. At the end of the political tsunami, only two PDP states survived in the entire North, made up three geo-political zones, the Northwest, the North-east and the North central.
Thus, from one single act of removing his eyes from the big picture, President Jonathan had the baton of PDP tragically fall off his hands. In a twinkle of an eye, what was known the world over as Africa’s largest political party became a regional party overnight; now restricted to the former Eastern Nigeria. The national chairman, Malam Adamu Mu’azu, did not help matters. With a style of leadership that defied any known tenets in party administration, Mu’azu frustrated several party leaders across the country who genuinely wanted to make inputs on how to save the party. The national chairman was incommunicado most of the times. He neither accepted telephone calls nor returned. He never replied to letters or memos from well-meaning party leaders. For example, none of the petitions written to the NWC, which he leads, on the governorship and national assembly primaries in the states were treated.
Malam Adamu Mu’azu never addressed any of the issues that were causing discomfiture in the state chapters; but resorted to a style that saw him pick and choose friends from among party leaders and chieftains across the country. In my article in question, OBASANJO: WHAT HAPPENED?, I pointed out that the party never reaped any benefits from replacing the former chairman, Bamanga Tukur, with Mu’azu who unfortunately was described by another writer as a product of the grand conspiracy to crumble the PDP. As I pointed out, Mu’azu failed in particular to address the issued that lead to the exit of five governors of the PDP extraction in one single swoop. As a matter of fact, the party lost many more influential and resourceful members especially in the National Assembly as soon as Mu’azu came on stage. Yet, curiously, he continued to bask in the euphoria of the rather mundane nickname of “game-changer”. Well, the game has finally changed, indeed!
Doubtless, the problem the PDP was confronted with was not limited to the national level. In addition to the obvious flaws in the way the national leadership handled the affairs of the party, it needs no emphasis to state that the party’s biggest setback came from its abysmal performance at the state level, which culminated into the perfidy witnessed at the party primary elections in December 2014, beginning with the election of delegates.
List of delegates were changed several times to suit the whims of aspirants who claimed to have the ears of the national chairman. The party primaries were a bazaar. Aspirants were milked by party officials at all levels.
In the states, officials imposed arbitrary levies on aspirants even after they had paid the officially prescribed fees. In a bid to meet the standard set by the party, aspirants borrowed money from sundry sources; many disposed of their priced assets and property. The citizenry watched with dismay as delegates were lavished with hundreds of thousands of naira, in some cases millions, by aspirants in a bid to win the delegates over. The governorship primaries in many states were far from credible, throwing up candidates whom the electorate, including members of the party, rejected right from day one. But with a baffling indifference or outright connivance, the national leadership looked the other way as aggrieved aspirants complained, asking for the right thing to be done.