PDP and the Curse of Icarus By Kennedy Emetulu

I see that the PDP has a new spring in its steps nowadays. After the victory of the viable faction of the party at the Supreme Court and their just concluded non-elective party convention, they are not sparing any expense to let everybody see that they’re flying high. But it would be the height of self-deceit if they think they can make any meaningful headway with the huge cracks within the party still showing. It’s not about making up with some phantom partymen and women whose agenda is pointblank destruction of the party, it’s simply showing purpose and going on to achieve it, irrespective of the few trying to pull the party down. So, to me, internal party unity is not their biggest challenge; their biggest challenge is the attitude of the new and successive leadership and the general membership of the party.


The way they are carrying on, it would seem they’ve learnt nothing from the past. They should not think the obvious failure of the APC is a guarantee that Nigerians would giddily welcome them back with open arms in 2019. All these boastful claims about what they consider to be their achievements and how the biggest political party in Africa is bouncing back should be on much more lower decibels. Maybe they don’t know, their noise is nauseating. This is because Nigerians hold the PDP and the APC equally responsible for our dire situation now. It is the same people that have been destroying Nigeria since 1999 and even since before then that people the two parties in an incestuous relationship governed by an unprincipled cross-carpeting culture. Nigerians know this, they can see all of them hopping around like overfed rabbits.

The APC made many mistakes and stepped on itself severally, yet they still went on to win the election in 2015. In fact, they were caught unawares by their own victory! It takes a level of failure to lose to a candidate that the PDP had defeated soundly three times before then consecutively, a candidate who had nothing to offer during the campaign except lies and lies mounted on his less than one hour cumulative campaign speeches on the trail, a candidate that never improved himself from the time he left Dodan Barracks as a military Head of State three decades before. It takes a kind of tectonic reversal for Nigerians to decide that they would cast their lot with a former failed leader and a known tyrant, rather than go with the PDP man whose democratic credentials and temperament were not in doubt. Nigerians were not drugged when they voted in Muhammadu Buhari. Of course, it might be convenient now for the PDP to say they were sold on a false message of change, but PDP failed because it had no true message of  national development either.

The party needs to do four things now. First, they need to quietly seal back the cracks within the party away from the klieg lights and they need to do it firmly. They must not compromise with destroyers and professional anti-party activists. Anybody, no matter how high-placed, who is not ready to work with the Ahmed Makarfi leadership should be expelled, not suspended, expelled. The party leadership cannot allow the tail to wag the dog. It must show strength and openness with equal measure. There are millions of Nigerians waiting to join a sanitised, focused party. The leadership must welcome them with firm housecleaning actions. They cannot allow muppets to run rings round them. But if they are welcoming new or returning members, as much as it would help to make a little noise about that, they shouldn’t make too much noise. To an extent, they need to rebuild under cover. So, anything that will make Nigerians recall their days of unmitigated corruption, frivolousness and reckless abandonment must be avoided. A new, accountable, disciplined and respectful party fit for purpose must be the outcome of all these trials.

The second thing they need to do is provide an actual, alternative vision of development for the country now. They must let Nigerians see them working on this from the grassroots to the national level. They shouldn’t go and dust up some old moribund manifesto to sell to the people again because that will show intellectual laziness. They must consult every sector – they must consult with members at the wards, Local Governments, States and the national level. They must consult with the professions, the private sector and knowledgable members in the public service; they must consult with all Nigerians, even those who are not members of the party. They need to draw up an agenda, a new development vision for the nation before the end of the year and it must be the foundation of a new party manifesto. It must be the first part of their 21st century governing ideology for the nation and it must address all the relevant sectors and all the relevant issues plaguing our nation in detail. It must provide clear-cut solutions and show how the funding would be raised to executive projects enumerated. They must ensure their numbers add up. We want to build a new nation in mind and in infrastructure, the PDP must show the way. The idea is that their vision should already be a singsong in the mouths of the ordinary people before the election. That is what they need to make noise about, that is the only way they can guarantee a win even before election day, no matter what the other party plans.

Thirdly, they must look to the youths not in a perfunctory way, but in a meaningful way that sends the right signals to the overwhelming majority of Nigerians comprising of young people. PDP must show that it is the first party in our history to deliberately and actually hand over to the perennial leaders of tomorrow today. It must seek to break the anti-youth jinx in our nation. The PDP must position the party for the future by giving young people real power within the party and in governments they control at States’ and other levels. When they look at the national demographics, they will realise that they definitely need the energy of the youth to win the next election. All this parade of old failures as the faces of the PDP would prove a drawback because it’s indicative of a people who have not learnt their lessons. Let the men and women who have been recurrent leadership elements since 1999 voluntarily step aside and play fatherly and motherly roles in advisory capacities for the young people they must encourage to take the party forward.

Finally and most crucially, they must do something I’ve addressed tangentially earlier, which is that they need to develop the speech and body language of humility. They should stop recounting things they’ve done in the past. Most Nigerians are not blind. Supposedly respectable partymen and women  were mobilized massively with funds to tell Nigerians all the good things the Jonathan government was doing all over the country before the election of 2015, but they pocketed the money and led their party to the slaughter. The ones who sabotaged from within were falling over themselves to outdo the ones that were conspiring with the then opposition to bring them to power based on useless ethnic politics. Those in charge of pushing out information allowed the airwaves to be seized by an unserious opposition whose only strong point was that they had foreign support in the false makeover of their flag-bearer. They sat on their hands while they were being guillotined. So, no, this is not the time for Goodluck Jonathan to remind us of all he did. You don’t want to return the debate to the past because neither the PDP nor the APC have the right answers in that regard. Even if the PDP continues to claim it did better than the APC or vice versa, it means nothing to the ordinary Nigerian because we all can see where we are. The quality of life of the Nigeria is far worse today than it was ten years, five years or two years ago. Therefore, what Jonathan and his co-travellers must be telling us now, in all humility, is what they want to do when they return to government, not what they did in the past. How do they hope to save Nigeria from the morass that the APC has dumped her? Enough of the chest-thumping! The last time around, with their overconfidence, they flew too close to the sun and got burnt. They’ve got to play this very wisely or they’ll get obliterated in 2019. And no, they shouldn’t think the APC is the opposition, they are not; it’s the people that are the opposition. The people are the real opposition to the APC and the PDP and we are in that dangerous place that if both of them offer us no viable vision to pull back the nation from the social, economic and political precipice it is precariously perched now, the alternative cannot be contemplated.