The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was formed with the best of intentions. Its timing was right, its purpose noble and unassailable. The PDP was – excuse the cliché – a child of necessity. And expectations were high that party politics would be strengthened and our democracy enriched with its coming.
That was 1998. Nigeria was hungry for change, change in the way we used to do things before, change that would bring tangible benefits to everyone. After a long-running, ruinous military rule that brought the country to the abyss of economic collapse and national disintegration, the last military despot died suddenly of an apparent heart-attack. The succeeding interim government began to dismantle the edifice of tyranny to gain the confidence of a traumatized, divided and hopeless people. A transition to civil rule programme was unveiled and implemented with a sense of urgency and sincerity.
In August 1998, a group of well-meaning men and women representing different political associations met at the nation’s capital, Abuja, for the purpose of building “a strong national party that would promote unity and stability and serve as a bulwark against military incursion into politics”.
At its first enlarged meeting on August 19, 1998 at Sheraton Hotel in Abuja, members resolved, among other things, to “defend the sanctity of democratic elections and to enthrone a more respectable system of party politics and to establish a moral and ethical society guided by such core values as honesty, integrity and justice.
Its manifesto was drafted by a team of illustrious and patriotic individuals led by the late Chief Sunday Awoniyi. The late Chief Bola Ige was one of the members. The PDP promised speedy restoration of genuine democracy and good governance and hoped to build a society based on the principles of democracy, human rights, rule of law and social justice.
The first mistake made by PDP’s founding fathers and mothers was to have acquiesced to the decision of the (retired and serving) generals to entrust the fulfillment of these noble objectives to Nigerian democracy’s worst enemies – the military class. That decision to hand the torch of democracy to those who had always subverted democracy in Nigeria would later prove fatal.
Eight years in the iron grip of a people, who by training and orientation are ill-equipped to promote and nurture democracy, Nigerian democracy has been beaten, battered, disfigured and serially violated by those who had sworn to protect it, care for it and grow it. Two years after the departure of these pseudo democrats or civilian dictators, the military mindset still dominates the polity. No democratic institution displays that sort of mindset more glaringly today than the nation’s political parties. Political parties that should serve as the pivot of our democracy have been weakened and bastardized. Many of them lack internal cohesion and internal democracy as well as a vision of the purpose of power.
No party bears these visible scars of militarization more than the PDP. It has strayed too far from the course of its founders. It has become a caricature of the original vision. Strange men and women have seized control of the party offering no vision, no programme and no hope for the country. The PDP is no longer a party. It has been turned into an election rigging monstrosity by the bandits who have hijacked the dream. Most of its members believe in nothing but in the ideology of capturing power by all available means and using such power to intimidate, oppress and loot the treasury. Olusegun Obasanjo, the founder of the new PDP, did not mince words when in 2007 he unveiled its philosophical underpinning as “do-or-die” politics. Politics, to die-hard PDP members, is not a means towards a higher purpose in life, but an end in itself. They are not democrats. They only pretend to be democrats.
The PDP is the greatest threat to democracy today in Nigeria. It is, as someone rightly put it recently, an unruly collection of election riggers, a formless and purposeless mob of power seekers. The recent rigging of the re-run election in Ekiti State is a signal that 2011 will be another exercise in futility, a huge of waste of national resources, an open robbery of the people’s mandate and abortion of the people’s will.
The PDP would have to be destroyed to save Nigerian democracy and Nigeria . Some of its elected leaders at the states may be doing well, but the party’s ideology of conquest, its distorted notion of democracy, its disdain for the sanctity of elections as well as its embarrassing under-achievement at the centre will continue to haunt every member of the party. The PDP has to die for Nigeria to live. It has to unravel for democracy to have any chance of surviving in Nigeria.
The party has lost its soul. Its essence has been terribly corrupted. It is a far cry from the dreams of its founders. It cannot be re-invented. It cannot be reformed. It has to be destroyed first by all those who care about the future of this country. With the likes of Olusegun Obasanjo and Tony Anenih still in control of the party, nothing good can come out of the PDP. Right now, it has foisted on the nation the most incompetent administration in the history of this unfortunate country. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua lacks the vision, the mental and physical ability to run the affairs of this potentially great and dynamic nation. Under his watch, Nigeria is going down, losing even the modest gains of the Obasanjo years.
Every patriotic Nigerian should ensure that Yar’Adua and the PDP are flushed out in 2011. Neither the party nor its leader has anything to offer the country. Current cleavages in the PDP must be exploited and widened. The few good men and women in the party should be encouraged to leave to join a growing call for a new Nigeria. Nigerians must be enlightened about the damage the PDP has done and is doing to democracy and to Nigeria. Nigerians must struggle for genuine electoral reforms so as to be in a position to throw out the PDP at the next election. A humiliating defeat of the PDP at the polls will quickly lead to its collapse, thus giving democracy and Nigeria a chance to survive and thrive.
The PDP founding fathers and mothers proudly declared in 1998 that the party had come to save “the people of Nigeria and their offsprings from hunger, poverty, diseases, ignorance, corruption, oppression, exploitation and social injustice”. The PDP does not have the capacity or the vision to realize these objectives. Under its watch, these problems have actually worsened in the past decade. The situation will get even worse if the PDP remains in power beyond 2011. The PDP must go. Its lackluster government at the centre must be sent packing in 2011. Neither Yar’Adua nor the PDP deserves a second chance, again.
·Maikifi is a high school teacher in Funtua, Katsina State.
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