FORMER Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Ahmadu Ali, has been many things – Director General, South South Health Delivery Services, Senator, Director General of the National Youth Service Corps, federal Commissioner for Education in 1976, a retired Colonel of the Nigerian Army, and a medical doctor trained at the University of Ibadan.

He was never a government critic until four years ago, having been in too many governments in the past 40 years and admittedly part of the problem. He criticised attempts to privatise federal government colleges. Then he had been pushed off the revolving PDP chairmanship.

Col Ali made a major contribution to political discourse in January 2007 when he said that politics in Ibadan was garrisoned. Anyone who wanted to be part of it had to line up behind Chief Lamidi Aribiyi Adedibu, a political gadfly who held the city to ransom until he sacked the elected Governor of Oyo State.

As Chairman of the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, in 2011, he said, “The refineries are a problem and government cannot run this business,” Ali said during an inspection of storage facilities in 2011. “Government has failed. Let us call a spade a spade, government has failed. And that is why this problem has continued. It is time for all these companies started investing in the refining business in Nigeria because the country must refine its entire domestic products before it can get out of the problems of incessant scarcity of petroleum products.”

Why would he consider government, which his party, PDP, controlled in the past 13 years, a failure? What part did he play as party chairman in the failure? Was there no fuel scarcity then? Did the refineries work? When did he discover this failure?

His thesis, days back, that bad governance was responsible for Boko Haram, the massacres in Mubi and Port Harcourt create an impression that governments in which he served took care of those situations.

Today’s failures cannot be divorced from PDP over which Dr. Ali presided with pronounced certainty about the infallibility of its actions. The PDP’s domineering craze for power was an end in itself. Unless otherwise proven, the PDP was only interested in grabbing power and sharing the spoils of office. PDP officials who lose in this enterprise complain. Nobody bothers about the growing pains of ordinary Nigerians.

It is more painful that a former chairman of the PDP, who has held influential positions in more than four decades, does not realise his own part in wastes that have been visited on Nigeria in those years. Dr. Ali’s outburst raises new concerns about the future of Nigeria under PDP’s guidance.