Panacea for PDP’s Legacy of Crises

The Peoples Democratic Party’s constitutional hierarchy needs to assert itself against internal pressure groups that constantly generate tension in the party,

In the last few weeks, the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was a major highlight of the news media for all the wrong reasons. Its cousin, the All Progressives Congress (APC), was not obscured also. Beyond the klieg lights of being the ruling party, the APC has been in a deep existential crisis which promises to sound its death knell. If many would be happy about the crisis in the APC for its potential to take away their sorrows in 2023, not a few would be disappointed that the PDP that appears the most realistic alternative to the ruling party has fallen into distress - an avoidable distress, some would say. Although it now has a reprieve following the resolution of the crisis last week, the party would still have to go through the implementation process, which could throw up its own challenges.

The resolution that Uche Secondus, the national chairman, and his colleagues in the national working committee should be allowed to serve out their term but be barred from running for a second term is already regarded as an unconstitutionality that might be difficult to enforce. The fact that the tenure of the Secondus-led National Working Committee was cut short by two months has worsened this illegality. But time will tell. For now, there is calm after the storm.

Close watchers of the PDP would have noticed that storm is the middle name of the party. Since its inception in 1998, no national chairman has served out his term. The founding chairman, Chief Solomon Lar, who led it to win its first general election in 1999, was immediately eased out shortly after the polls won by President Olusegun Obasanjo. Although the PDP constitution provides for a four-year tenure, which means Obasanjo would have had at most two chairmen during his eight years at helms of affairs, the party had four: Lar, Chief Barnabas Gemade, Chief Audu Ogbe and Col. Ahmadu Ali (rtd).

Emerging from a long period of military rule, with an ex-general and an ex-customs top brass as the drivers of the incipient democratic order, it was obvious that anyone who had an independent mind and wanted to assert the authority of the party over the politicians in power and government was not bound to last. And so, the likes of Gemade and Ogbe, who attempted to assert the authority of the party over Obasanjo’s brazen quest to dominate the party’s structure, were bound to be shown the door. The door was indeed opened for them to check out.

The trend continued post-Obasanjo but with a new variant of the power struggle. The coming of President Umaru Yar’Adua, a former governor, who succeeded Obasanjo in 2007, saw the rise in the power of governors as a major power bloc in the party. With Yar’Adua ceding political management to his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, the states’ chief executives under the leadership of an ambitious and deft politician like Dr. Bukola Saraki of Kwara State, found their groove that was completely subdued under Obasanjo and began to call the shots. If Jonathan was too weak as a vice president to curb them, he would soon find his rhythm the moment he became president. Too politically aloof, and later bugged down by health issues, Yar’Adua virtually left the governors to determine the party’s structure with Chief Vincent Ogbulafor emerging as the first post-Obasanjo chairman. He was soon to run into problems.

In the power struggle that attended the ailment of Yar’Adua, positions were taken between the tendency that preserved presidential power on behalf of the president and those who wanted the reins of office vested in Jonathan as the vice president. As the civil society groups agitated for power to be handed over to Jonathan, the PDP governors led by Saraki held power and the party. They had the support of Ogbulafor. Everything went their way until Yar’Adua died and Jonathan became president. With the swing in the balance of power, Ogbulafor’s position became untenable as Jonathan would not risk leaving the awesome party machinery in the hands of his political foes who had tried to prevent him from mounting the saddle.

Jonathan forced Ogbulafor out and engaged Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo, a former national secretary, as chairman. But Nwodo could not complete the term of Ogbulafor. His original sin was his attempt to assert the independence of the party by seeking its financial freedom. In obedience to the party’s constitution, Nwodo moved to digitalise membership registration, asking members and intending members to go online to register for a fee. That move was to fetch the PDP N10 billion annually. With this war chest he would be able to assert the authority of the party since it would be financially strong enough to fund its activities. The governors did not like this and they moved against it. Meanwhile, he got entangled in the local politics of his state and despite presidential intervention asking him to leave the state for his governor, Sullivan Chime, he persisted. A couple of court cases sprang up in Enugu. One of them threatened Jonathan’s nomination for the presidential ticket of the party for the 2011 general election. It was at the presidential nomination convention ground in Abuja in September 2010 that Nwodo was shown the door and was replaced by his deputy, Mohammad Bello.

After earning a fresh term in 2011, Jonathan fought a hard battle with the party’s governors to install his own chairman. At the 2011 National Convention, Bamanga Tukur, a Jonathan ally and former governor of the old Gongola State, emerged the chairman, the only nominee of the president in the NWC of over 10 members. The governors muzzled their way to pick up the rest. With that balance of power within the party hierarchy it was obvious that it was a matter of time before the chairman would be shunted aside. That did not take long in coming. In less than a year and a half, Tukur began to have problems with his colleagues on the national working committee. Accused of high-handedness and overreaching himself, all his colleagues signed a vote of no confidence in him. Jonathan might have tried to help him but faced by ceaseless pressure from the governors, the president buckled and consented to the chairman’s removal. Adamu Muazu, a former governor of Bauchi State, was brought in to complete Bamanga’s tenure.

Muazu’s immediate challenge was how to manage the increasing dominance of the governors over party hierarchy, particularly the rising revolt of some governors of the North who were opposed to the second term ambition of Jonathan. Eventually five of them left, leaving the party weak and porous. The outcome was its defeat at the presidential election in 2015 by the nascent opposing APC that fielded a fourth time contestant, Muhammadu Buhari.

With the party’s defeat in the presidential election and without a president in office, the reins of party leadership fell on the governors, who did not waste time to force Muazu out of office ahead of his term.

In all of these turbulent years, one party member that saw it all was Secondus. A former state chairman, national organising secretary and deputy national chairman, it was without doubt that when Nyesom Wike, his Rivers State governor, sponsored him as national chairman in 2017 against the run of play, he was bidding for a job in a terrain that he was familiar with. But a presidential election, and three years after, his godfather rose up in arms, mobilising his fellow governors against him. What went wrong?

Wike argued that Secondus had run the PDP aground and needed to be changed to save the party. His evidence was the exodus of some governors and key party members to the ruling APC. Not a few analysts of the party’s usually complex internal politics think that this accusation flies in the face of Secondus’ records.

Emerging chairman after two years of rancour, Secondus led the PDP to the 2015 presidential election. First to his credit was the presidential primaries in Port Harcourt that were adjudged transparent. Then he managed a post-primaries fallout that saw all the aspirants rallying behind the party’s candidate, Atiku Abubakar. Many PDP stalwarts believe till date that the party actually won that election but was rigged out. If that claim is disputable, a clear fact is that the party increased his haul of governors from 13 to 17 under his watch.

And he had been able to keep the party together all these years until his godfather’s revolt began a year ago or so.

Sure, three governors and some federal legislators have left the party in the last few months. But could Secondus be blamed for that?

Interestingly, in spite of Wike’s pressure, his colleagues resisted him. The argument that a weak chairman had to leave four months to the end of his tenure to save the party was obviously a hard sell. But the fundamental issue the party needs to deal with, say analysts, is the need for the formal party hierarchy enshrined in its constitution to assert itself and resist its extra-constitutional pressure groups. Secondus and his NWC may just have started this and the way to lessen the constant tension in the party is for his successor to consummate it.