As I prepared last week’s column in which I reflected on whether Nigeria will survive 2015, little did I know that before its publication, the Profoundly Decadent Party would unravel. On August 31, one day before the column appeared, the PDP collapsed.
As I prepared last week’s column in which I reflected on whether Nigeria will survive 2015, little did I know that before its publication, the Profoundly Decadent Party would unravel. On August 31, one day before the column appeared, the PDP collapsed.
And it all took place in Eagle Square in Abuja where, for 14 years, the party has perpetrated some of its most heinous magic, made some of its emptiest promises, and laughed the hardest at Nigerians waiting for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to put in an honest day’s job for Nigeria.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
Drama does not always move swiftly. That was not the case with the PDP House of Cards as the vengeance of its own demons swept into its convention. One moment, there was “African’s biggest party” in full ceremony mouthing the same empty clichés with which it had arrogantly and disingenuously perpetuated itself in power.
But the next: there was one Big Man after another Big Man rising in outrage and sweeping through the exits, followed by their State delegates. Disturbing word would come back: their Excellences had not merely swept out, they were emptying into Musa Yar’Adua Centre, and they were doing and saying things.
Beyond the departing men and women, all of the air seemed to have departed the convention for the Musa Yar’Adua Centre, leaving the convention suspended between disbelief and mourning.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });
At the convention, there was the wilting party chairman Bamanga Tukur, apparently wishing the ground would open up and swallow him up. Next to him, there was President Goodluck Jonathan, stunned into the terrain of breathlessness and powerlessness, perhaps wishing someone would hand him a shot of ogogoro. He was in such disbelief he was actually able, reports said, fall asleep.
Within three days, the mayhem would spread, 57 members of the party in the House of Representatives would join what has become known as the ‘New PDP,’ led by Alhaji Abubakar Kawu Baraje, a former national chairman. The past had become the future.
It may have been completely untrue to say that President Jonathan dozed off during the dynamic doings at Musa Yar’Adua, where the new leadership was saying some pretty devastating things about him and the party.
The first thing they did, in effect, was to challenge the very notion of democracy in relation to the PDP. Confronting one of the mysteries of the age, they wondered, these PDP “born-again” politicians, how the concept of democracy appeared in the name of the PDP in the first place. They accused the PDP of Tukur and Jonathan as lacking a “democratic temperament,” of being inherently incapable of guaranteeing democracy as it lacked faith in free choice, the rule of law, transparency, and accountability.
It is not surprising when ordinary Nigerians call the PDP names. Since 1999, it has been little better than a swarm of locusts or an army of occupation. However, when the PDP begins to call the PDP names, Nigerians who hold the PDP responsible for the nation’s collapse are vindicated.
We have argued that the PDP’s quest is for power, not responsibility. That power, which is often acquired by manipulation, is often turned against the people, who are robbed and insulted.
I am an unrepentant critic of Mr. Jonathan because he is the most potent symbol of the decay of Nigeria, ascending to the nation’s highest office by luck and suddenly to become over-exposed.
Last week, as the crisis fermented, Mr. Jonathan accused Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who plucked him from obscurity and put him in office, of precipitating the crisis.
The truth is that what is going on in the PDP is not a crisis at all. What we have seen in the past week is the natural extension of the regime of democratic betrayal and manipulation which began in Nigeria in 1999. The Bible says “whatever one sows, that will he also reap.”
Ignoring this counsel, the PDP has repeatedly snatched the keys to political power, and then those of the Central Bank. Ignoring it, he PDP has systematically nurtured and bred a culture of corruption wherever it has travelled. Ignoring it, the PDP has defined a new political geography in which nobody within the family could be wrong, and nobody outside it could be right.
The philosophy enabled the PDP to “win” elections everyone knew it lost; it could field a dead leaf against a well-prepared citizen and its dried leaf would win. Consolidating under the famous umbrella, many dead leaves became so wealthy they began to think they were alive.
And then there were dead leaves within the family but not in power that saw no reason why dead leaves wielding power should tell them what to do, and dead leaves within power who found no reason why they should be challenged.
That is largely how we got here.
What is the future? Well, that one is complicated. Obasanjo is accused of masterminding the conflict, but is that good or bad? Obasanjo created the first conflict; is he really creating another so as to resolve the first?
And if he is doing that, is he not contradicting himself? Obasanjo created Jonathan as his puppet: a weak political neophyte the strength of whom was in being able to pronounce the word, YES, to lead 150 million with a sick man who could be manipulated from a hospital bed.
The trouble is that the sick man did not stay sick. He died. That meant the man who knew the word, YES, needed to learn a few more words. It is no surprise he has often said the wrong, embarrassing or empty ones.
But if Obasanjo wants Jonathan out, can he possibly be working with Atiku Abubakar, the man he hates the most, in order to accomplish that objective? Some “analysts” draw attention to the presence of several Obasanjo loyalists in the ‘New PDP,’ but nothing about Moses who led them out of Egypt.
My reading of the tea leaves is quite simple: Obasanjo is not against Jonathan, but Obasanjo is not for Nigeria either, as History testifies.
Were Obasanjo for Nigeria, Jonathan would never have ruled Nigeria in the first place. In 2006 when Obasanjo chose him for Vice-President, he was unqualified, unprepared, and facing a corruption indictment.
Obasanjo is for Obasanjo, and that is what must be understood in the current situation. Obasanjo knows that politically, Jonathan has run his full course and cannot win in 2015. He is also propelled by such people as Tukur and Tony Anenih whom Obasanjo simply loathes.
Obasanjo knows that as a product, Jonathan would be not be as sellable as he might have been in 2011 when he enjoyed Obasanjo’s support. He would thus readily be defeated by a robust opponent from a hostile party who could be sending the party’s legion of thieves to jail by the bus load every afternoon.
By “opposing” Jonathan, Obasanjo is using smoke and mirrors to position himself to determine who the next President will be: another puppet the principal task of whom will be to keep the kleptocracy well protected.
- Email: [email protected]
- Twitter: @SonalaOlumhense
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });