By Olusegun Adeniyi
It was a meeting hurriedly convened but virtually all the critical
stakeholders expected were in attendance at the new banquet hall of the
presidential villa at about 6pm on Tuesday, 30th March 2015. That was
four days after the presidential election. The results of the election
were still being collated by the Independent National Electoral
Commission (INEC) but with strong indications that the All Progressives
Congress (APC) candidate, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd), was set
to win.
Aside President Goodluck Jonathan who chaired the meeting, other
people in attendance were: Vice President Namadi Sambo; Senate President
David Mark; his deputy, Senator Ike Ekweremadu; Deputy Speaker of the
House of Representatives, Hon. Emeka Ihedioha; the Peoples Democratic
Party (PDP) Board of Trustees chairman, Chief Tony Anenih; Secretary to
the Government of the Federation, Chief Anyim Pius Anyim; Governor of
Cross River State, Mr Liyel Imoke; and former Anambra State Governor, Mr
Peter Obi. At the meeting also were all the members of the PDP National
Working Committee (NWC) led by its chairman, Alhaji Adamu Muazu.
The atmosphere at the meeting was sombre and without much preamble,
President Jonathan announced: “Gentlemen, about an hour ago, I called
General Buhari to concede and to congratulate him. But I did that not
because the PDP lost the election but rather to calm the nation, as many
people advised me to do so. Even when I conceded to allow the nation
move forward, the information at my disposal is that the election has
been massively rigged and INEC is complicit. While I have done my bit as
a statesman, I believe the party should put out a strong statement to
reject the result and that the PDP will challenge it in court. I think
the National Publicity Secretary of the party should do that.”
After his speech, the president yielded the floor to Chief Anenih who
argued that the APC had already created a precedent in Ekiti State
where the defeated Governor Kayode Fayemi conceded and congratulated the
victorious PDP candidate (current Governor Ayo Fayose) but allowed his
party to challenge the election in court. Chief Anenih, however, added
that the party’s statement should be signed not by the publicity
secretary but rather by the national chairman while urging that “any
discussion of other elections be suspended until we recover the stolen
presidency”. He thereafter suggested that a committee headed by Olisa
Metuh be constituted to draft the statement which the chairman (Muazu)
would then sign and release.
With Anenih’s suggestion adopted, the PDP National Secretary, Prof.
Adewale Oladipo; the National Legal Adviser, Mr Victor Kwon as well as
Anyim and Peter Obi were asked to join the Metuh committee to draft the
statement. It was at that point that the meeting dissolved but by the
next day, with the statement drafted, Muazu declined to release it to
the media. And he got the support of the other NWC members who felt the
president, who sidelined them in the course of the election (which
ensured that they were only hearing about the campaign billions without
partaking in the largesse) now wanted to use them.
When words got to the villa that Muazu, who did not raise any
objection when the decision was taken the day earlier, had declined to
issue the statement, the duo of Imoke and the Akwa Ibom State Governor,
Mr Godswill Akpabio were sent to put pressure on him. But Muazu
reportedly told them that if the president, the party’s candidate at the
election had already conceded, why would he say something to the
contrary? The PDP chairman was also said to have reminded both Imoke and
Akpabio about all the warnings he had given on how religion and
ethnicity were being used by the president’s wife and some of his
supporters like Fayose to “demarket” him in the North in the course of
the campaign.
At the end, all the efforts by Imoke and Akpabio to get Muazu to
issue the statement failed and it was on that note that the idea of PDP
challenging the presidential result ended. But with that also, the
trouble within the party had just begun. Yet what it shows clearly is
that if PDP was unable to manage victory, the party has even greater
challenge in coping with defeat.
While I intend to share the details of the intrigues within the PDP
before, during and after the presidential election in my coming book,
“Against the Run of Play: How an Incumbent President was Defeated in
Nigeria”, it is very clear now that the party went into the election as a
divided house. But it is the president who is now paying the price
having been misled by some powerful ministers around him into believing
that money was everything, forgetting that you need a strong political
structure and everybody working on the same page to win such a crucial
election, even in Nigeria.
What I now find particularly interesting is that the president may be
meeting his match in Muazu, once being eulogised as “the game changer”,
who is not willing to go down (like Chief Vincent Ogbulafor, Dr.
Okwesilizie Nwodo, Dr. Haliru Bello and Alhaji Bamanga Tukur) without a
fight. It tells a compelling story of its own that Muazu is the 6th PDP
Chairman under Jonathan, all within a period of five years. One of them,
Abubakar Baraje, even led the break-away faction that later
metamorphosed into the All Progressives Congress (APC) that has now
defeated the PDP.
READ: PDP Chair Muazu Goes On A 3-Hour, 24-Tweet Vent On Loyalty, Tribalism, GEJ And Everything In Between
With many things now coming out about how the PDP ran a dysfunctional
presidential campaign, it is surprising that the party was expecting to
win. For instance, the presidential campaign committee was headed by
former PDP National Chairman, Dr Ahmadu Ali but I have it on good
authority that most of the approvals for campaign spending were coming
from Chief Anenih with funds disbursal being the prerogative of Senator
Nenadi Usman, a former Finance Minister under President Obasanjo. For
media, all the funds were routed through Chief Femi Fani-Kayode with
Olisa Metuh completely sidelined but that was not the problem. The main
issue was that many people within the party hierarchy, especially those
from the North, felt uncomfortable that statements from Fani-Kayode were
never complete without references to the Bible as if Jonathan was
contesting for the presidency of the Christian Association of Nigeria
(CAN)!
With the elections over, and at a time you expect the PDP to regroup,
the leaders are now squealing on one another. You hear stories of over a
thousand vehicles that can now not be accounted for, tales of how
billions of Naira and hundreds of millions of Dollars were being
distributed and who got what as well as stories of internal sabotage,
betrayals and double-dealings within the party.
In what appeared an attempt to douse the raging fire, the PDP, at the
instance of the president, on Tuesday, constituted a review committee
to identify, among other things, “the remote and immediate causes of the
relatively poor performance of the PDP in the 2015 general election.”
With three weeks to submit its report, committee chairman, Senator
Ekweremadu said at the occasion: “Much as we are pained by the sad turn
of events, we must come to terms with the fact that anger,
recriminations, self-pity and blame trading will not take us even an
inch away from the harsh outcomes of the 2015 general election.”
How the PDP resolves its internal contradictions is of no concern to
me but like many Nigerians, I am interested in seeing the PDP overcome
its current difficulties. By coming against the excesses of some people
in power and criticising government policies when we saw the need to do
so, some of us have been labelled APC members. I am almost certain that
very soon, we will also ‘become’ PDP members when we begin to highlight
the failings of the new apostles of ‘change’. That then explains why we
need the PDP as a strong bulwark against the soon-to-be ruling party
where you also have some very powerful individuals who are adept at
deploying (and possibly retaining) power, not necessarily in promotion
of the public good.
What the foregoing means in effect is that the president must help
the PDP to put its house in order but in doing that, he should also be
mindful of people who may want to use him in promotion of their own
agenda. President Jonathan must be discerning enough to see things
clearly: The current jostling within the PDP is not about the election
that he just lost no matter how the protagonists and antagonists couch
the issues for him; it is about the future, their own future. Of course
there is nothing wrong with that but the lesson such cold calculations
teaches is that the president should be circumspect about the choices he
makes or the ones being made on his behalf, especially at a time like
this.
All over the world, presidents and prime ministers lose elections but
their parties survive to carry on the work of democratic engagement in
the political space. In the instant case, President Jonathan has lost an
election and his party runs the risk of completely disintegrating in
the aftermath. While the PDP may have its down sides, its survival
beyond the Jonathan presidency has become a matter of national political
security.
The PDP was founded and sustained on the assumption that it would
remain in office and preside over the sharing of national resources
indefinitely. Now that it has lost its power of patronage at the centre,
the party could starve to death as President Jonathan himself predicted
recently when he warned those trooping to the APC that they may return
with ’empty stomach’. That presidential prophesy, an issue for another
day, also says a lot about what public service has been reduced to in
Nigeria: it is almost always about some people looking for something to
eat!
To come back to the PDP crisis, the sad truth is this: in the bid to
get President Jonathan re-elected, some of the people around him
overreached themselves, by-passed the PDP leadership in critical
decisions, mistook his personal political enemies for party adversaries,
abused those with whom they ought to have dialogued and conducted a
most primitive and very divisive presidential campaign. Clearly, these
same people who practically ran the ruling party aground, and
contributed in no small measure to the defeat of the president, cannot
be relied upon to salvage the PDP.
Therefore, all factors considered, the task of stabilising our
political space by helping the PDP come back on its feet belongs not
only to genuine party members but indeed also to the more perceptive
national elite, including those of us in the media. To the extent that
it is in our enlightened self-interest to have a formidable opposition
party so that our democracy can thrive, we must welcome the Ekweremadu
committee, hoping its report will help steer the PDP away from the
precipice of internal implosion.
This Piece was written by Olusegun Adeniyi/Thisday
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