By AMINU JAHUN  

For a party that won an election, and uninterruptedly ruled for over a decade and a half, there is nothing it could strive for, after becoming an opposition party, than to be voted back into office again. But seemingly not the former self-branded Africa’s largest party, today’s Nigeria’s   biggest opposition party. The light that appeared on the eve of its   convention, after prolonged intraparty crises, is being dimmed by forces set to truncate the convention.

The Wikists are deploying political and judicial clout to frustrate it; whilst the Neo Wikists headed by Senator Bala Mohammed, the Bauchi State Governor and chairman of PDP’s   Governors Forum, are applying gubernatorial leverage to impose their preferred candidate as party chairman. And the radical conservatives are spiritedly fighting the abridgement of   Lamido’s right to contest the party’s chairmanship.

The recent suspensions and counter-suspensions in the party are fallouts of Wiki shocks: series of state sponsored intra party conflicts, the greatest affliction in the 26-year history of the PDP. With the recent opposing judicial pronouncements on the Ibadan convention, the shocks are becoming too many for the party to shoulder. Why has the PDP stooped so low from the party to beat to a political laughing stock?

Despite its earlier boast to uninterruptedly rule for 60 years, one might posit, with the benefit of hindsight, that the party was never conceived to last as long as   South Africa’ s ANC founded in 1912 ; or Sudan’s National Umma Party established in 1945; or Mauritius Labour Party set up in 1936, among others.

PDP’s lack of a sound ideological anchorage and its rainbow trajectory: a party for every political Tom, Dick and Harry, the conflation of progress and conservatism; fortune seeking and party nurturing; haven for political jobbers and horse traders; carpet crossers and fifth columnists of other parties – strange political bedfellows- is a house that would sooner than later crumble.

Abandoned by its former party leaders, and the failure to produce post-2015 credible party leadership, to put it on track if it flounders along the way, is partly responsible for its present challenges. For 16 years, accustomed to presidential commands and patronage, its ouster from power transformed the PDP into an infantile political party, incapable of solely minding its business as an opposition party. The PDP governors are projecting a collective entitlement claim to party leadership, expecting deference from party organs and party oligarchs. Since they pay the piper, they expect, that they should dictate the party tune.

Whereas the radical conservatives’ leadership arose from their political pedigrees: political experience in the Second and Third Republics. By then most of the political upstarts calling the shots in the party today, were either slugging it out in classrooms as learners, or involved in other callings; and their memberships in G7, G18 and G37.

As founding fathers, they expect deference and obedience from the party organs, presidential aspirants, governors, senators, etc.The struggle for supremacy   in the party is fuelled by clashes of pedigrees and expectations, interests, egos and patronage leverage. PDP’S fate delicately hangs on the outcome of its judicially bifurcated   convention originally slated for November 15-16. If it would hold at all, the convention would be an interesting battle ground.   Nyesome Wike, the FCT minister is fighting a two-layered battle. After falling out with some of his G5 colleagues, he is simultaneously fighting them and the Lamido-led radical conservatives in the party.

Despite its embarrassing political excesses to the APC government, Wikism isn’t yet discarded due to its electoral and judicial clout, underscored by Justice Omotosho’s recent Court order restraining INEC from monitoring and recognising the Ibadan convention, till the party does the legally needful. Which of the High Court orders should INEC obey? Abuja Federal High Court’s restraining it from attending and recognising the Ibadan convention, or Ibadan High Court’s that gave a judicial nod for the convention ? The cracks in Wikism engendered the need for another powerful group at arm’s length with, and disdainful to Nyesome Wike, but sharing the political objectives of Wikism.

Fearful that their immunity tenured offices would end in 2027, apprehensive that the “progressive” government could reproduce itself in power in 2027, some PDP governors have devised a post-gubernatorial survival strategy, a safety valve against the government’s backlash, which facilitated the emergence of Neo-Wikism.

Since the government would be uncomfortable with Lamido’s party chairmanship, because he would against all odds try to refocus the party to its former glory, the Neo Wikists have to by all means frustrate the bid, setting themselves against the radical conservatives in the party. A few privileged upstarts are politically rude to the party elders, who fought for democracy, and laboured in G7, G18 and G37 to form the party. Senator Iyorchia Ayu was unceremoniously displaced from the chairmanship of the party; Atiku Abubakar couldn’t withstand the shocks and the Neo Wikist plots of PDP governors, who are caging the leader of the party’s radical conservative group from exercising his democratic right to vie for the party’s chairmanship in a party he co-founded, nurtured and disproportionatelty shouldered its burdens.

The convention fallouts are a bitter pill for Alhaji Sule Lamido, whose political trajectory in the Fourth Republic is underscored by unparalleled fidelity to the PDP. 

He never faltered that the party could be saved; he never ran away from its battles; he never thought that the Wikist and Neo Wikist plots are terminal diseases to the party; he never believed that his democratic right to vie for any post could be extra democratically abridged by anybody in the party. Despite the powerful democratic leviathans sabotaging the PDP,   his unflinching faith that the party could be reinvented and spirited no barred’s hold defense of this trajectory constitutes   radical conservatism.

Unlike him, Adamu Maina Waziri, Senator David Mark, and many others were convinced that with the toxic impact of Wikism and Neo Wikist plots, PDP could hardly be saved. And even if it could be rescued, it would be too weakened .

They foresaw that with the increasing desperation to subordinate party stability to the post-gubernatorial interests of its tenure ending governors, there is nobody that couldn’t be sacrificed in the party, and concluded that the party could hardly be stopped from hopping from one engineered crisis to another, to make any meaningful impact in 2027, underscoring their painful decision to jump ship and join other opposition parties.

The triumvirate of the late Adamu Ciroma, Solomon Lar and Abubakar Rimi would be posthumously rattled that their PDP is in a sorry state, that their G7, G18 and G37 members are endangered species in the party. All things being equal, a successful convention could refocus PDP on a trajectory to Aso Rock. But since all things, have long ago ceased being equal in the party, its judicially bifurcated and truncated convention could send it nowhere except the gallows.

*Jahun, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Dutse, Jigawa State