Ohakim: PDP’s Loss Good for the Polity
Speaking with Chuks Okocha, former Governor of Imo State, Chief Ikedi Ohakim, examined some of the issues before the Peoples Democratic Party and how the party can reinvent itself. Excerpts:
What did you think happened to the PDP at the polls? What happened to PDP is heart-breaking. On the positive side, it is a good omen. It will offer the party the needed opportunity to rethink, remodel and come back in a big way if the right things are done using the right materials. This unavoidable calamity will offer the party the needed opportunity to head back to the laboratory. It is part of our national psychology – psychology of hate, psychology of anti-intellectual and anti-thinking. It is a national leadership challenge. It has affected our match towards greatness. We must do something about it if we must move forward.
Please go to the social media and review most of the debates going on and you will understand what I am talking about. It has affected PDP today and might affect any other organisation or political party tomorrow. What happened to PDP did so because it is part of Nigeria. It was a great injury as a result of our national psychology.
You will recall in 2002 heading to 2003 election primaries in PDP, people acquired ammunitions and took it out on each other, people forget so soon that PDP was not the biggest political party in 1998, a bigger political party in 1998 was APP before the local government election.
Where is APP today? Those who formed the party are now part of APC and PDP. At the beginning of this democratic dispensation there existed four formidable parties which included Alliance for Democracy (AD). Where are they today? The same national bug affected them and killed them so if PDP follows suit, they won’t be the first. Are you implying that PDP may follow suit? Yes and No. A few fellows are in charge to day and must try and save the PDP. Those who should resign should offer that sacrifice quickly. PDP existed till today because of a few people who applied intellectual thinking, and those people were taken to the cleaners. I can tell you one of those people without mincing words was President Obasanjo. If Obasanjo did not do what he did in 2007, there wouldn’t have been PDP in 2015.
What did he do? He took the psychology of the nation into consideration in coming up with the painful decision of persuading Governor Peter Odili to drop his presidential ambition. Odili reasoned with the leadership and paid the big price.
Obasanjo knew that if governor Odili of Rivers State wins the primaries of PDP, PDP would lose the presidency and if PDP loses the presidency, people would scamper away because of the psychology of Nigerians – we tend to flow with the tide.
Odili paid that big price to make sure PDP remains, and working with leaders, Obasanjo engineered them to the North and that was the emergence of President Yar’Adua. That man that paid that supreme price, what did PDP do with him? Nothing! But you can’t do that now. PDP won’t go down this route again.
You spoke about the present crisis. As far as I am concerned, what I see is not crisis. I can only see misunderstanding. What I am seeing is not unexpected; it is a very important ingredient in any society. It is part of our national psychology. The NWC of PDP is grieving; they lost an election so they can talk and whatever they are saying now, you have to weigh it against their own psychology. They lost the Presidency and naturally, they are apprehensive of also losing their job.
The buck passing, the defensive mechanism, fact bending, the use of powerful committee are all human. Most of them know that the game is up. In the just concluded World Cup, Brazil produced what to them was their best team and they performed abysmally and even though their coach had a-four-year tenure, he was forced to resign. No general that takes a troop to the war front; loses the battle and will continue to be the commander of that particular division or battalion. It is never done.
This has nothing to do with democracy. After all, in democracy, we have what we call doctrine of necessity. There is something we call the psychology of the general, a general that is weary cannot continue to lead. The NWC is shell shocked now, but that does not mean that you stampede them away. If you do that, they will fight back which is what I understand they are doing. Unfortunately, it is a war they cannot win. Nobody that is a true PDP member across the country would want this present NWC to continue till 2016 and until after congress.
They have the good ones in their midst, but we are talking about re-engineering and coming with a new power and a new set of people that are not shell shocked. I think they should withdraw honourably. The aircraft they piloted has crashed. I hope they are not insisting to be allowed to remain in the cockpit of a crashed airplane. Unfortunately no passenger will enter. A new modern airplane must be manufactured with low fuel consumption in order to complete.
These fellows are wounded and they have also killed and wounded so many people. They have psychological problems.
Take an example from the committee they set up in a hurry, most of the people there are fantastic gentlemen, thinkers but some of them are part of the problem of PDP. I believe that PDP requires new vision, new kind of personalities. The National Chairman, Adamu Mu’azu was a calamity. He may not know and he may not have intended to be calamitous but I think he was overwhelmed.
If he is now saying that people bent his hand to achieve their goal and produced candidates of their choice, then it means he was not the right man for the job or he deliberately compromised. On the other hand, he is blaming those who foisted him on the party.
If people can take your job and give it to a campaign organisation, that means you were not trusted, why didn’t you resign? When you were taking this job, you put yourself as one of the president’s men or boys but now you are issuing statements accusing president’s boys, so you have withdrawn from being a president’s boy?
Is it because the man lost election? Why do we betray people like this? Is it right to deny being president’s boys or associates now? What kind of country are we in. After the last primaries, those who would have helped the president where completely blanked out. Muazu deliberately did not attend to their petition. He neither initiated reconciliation nor peace. Honestly and with respect and every sense of responsibility, the Adamu Mu’azu regime was a calamity. I’m not saying that PDP wouldn’t have lost the election, but we would have lost happily if the right things were done.
There are a number of strategic moves the party would have made to ensure victory despite the fact that we were grinding against the psychology of the nation. Having come to this stage, my advice is that Mu’azu should resign honorably. I’m not saying he should be chased away, that he was a calamity does not mean that he was a fool. Maybe his own strength was not to run an organisation like PDP; he may have his own strengths, so a party that was anti-thinking couldn’t have moved forward. What then is the way forward for PDP?
I’ve given the road map in my various writeups. The classical thing that would form the road map cannot be for public consumption now, but I am saying that there is light at the end of the tunnel and I can tell you that if PDP works hard, it can take back power in 2019. Do you think the APC would sit down and watch that happen?
Never, APC would view it with usual national psychology. There would be scramble for power.