IN this interview, EMEKA NWANKPA, Special Assistant on Media to past successive acting national chairmen of the party articulates expectations of the party faithfuls from the new national chairman. Excerpts:

PDP’s new National Chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Mohammed Tukur and other new members of the National Working Committee of the party have assumed office. What is your experience of this new leadership?

A politician is rated by his colour and content, his company and clout. Bamanga has it all. From the moment he took over from former Acting National Chairman, Abubakar Baraje at a brief ceremony, he hit the ground running. From that moment, something electric and dramatic hit the Wadata Plaza National Secretariat of the Party as his action between Tuesday, March 27 and Thursday, March 29 showed.

He inaugurated the NWC at a meeting that lasted for less than 2 hours. A 14-day vacation was approved for all members but for him, it turned out a working vacation which afforded the management an opportunity to brief him on the state of the party’s bureaucracy.

Bamanga Tukur

He has started like a man who has evaluated the task before undertaking it. If this momentum continues, his exploits in it will change many things the party. Take for example what he has done to the African Business Roundtable as its executive president within a very short time and space.

Do you anticipate real changes in the way and manner PDP is run or is it just the usual razzmatazz that follows a change of guard?

It is definitely beyond the razzmatazz. Of course, politics without the razzmatazz is no politics. Let me say that from what you can see and from the man’s political antecedents, the razzmatazz in Bamanga’s politics has colour and content.
It is not for nothing that they call him the grandmaster of Nigerian politics.

How are the people in the party taking this message?
It is about the currency of his ideas; the vibrancy of his intellect, the audacity of courage and the clarity of his vision. People’s expectations are quite high. The people can see in the man a raw passion to serve to the best of his ability.
It is now that they are beginning to see what the man saw; it is now they are beginning to realize that when a man is possessed by a great dream, what calls to question is not the number of his years but the weight of his dream.
It is even more consuming when that dream is not about the self. Tell me, what Bamanga has not achieved in life except to offer more service to his fatherland?

What then is your expectation of the new leadership of the party having worked round past successive leaderships of the party?

My quick take is that PDP is perfectly safe in Bamanga’s hands. Under him PDP is set to bounce to the big league.  He knows what to do to make an impactful tenure. He has an uncanny ability and capacity to connect with the people, high and low. Having been a founding and funding member of the PDP, he knows the party from the cradle.

His Chairmanship is not an accident. He has the vision, he is running with it. He has said he did not come to be national chairman to play politics but to seek how to collaborate with other concerned stakeholders to reform the party and bring about its eventual rebirth.  As an accomplished administrator, industrialist and business icon with wide national and international network.

He has the administrative savvy and political acumen to drive the party as a vehicle to guarantee social justice, equity, dividend of democracy, good governance to the people of Nigeria and not just to a few baring in mind that the party, like any in the country, is tellingly imperfect in it politics and political culture.