PDP must earn right to criticise Buhari

By Festus Eriye

I overheard a conversation between two men on a street that captures the magnitude of the burden inherited by President-elect Muhammadu Buhari. It went something like this:

Mr. A: “Why e come be say now wey your man (Buhari) don win naim we dey suffer dis kain thing? No light, no petrol, no money… Na so una dey shout change, change … him don win now see wahala!”

Mr. B: Haba! But Jonathan is still in charge, Buhari never take over now!”

Mr. A: “Look … we no go gree o!” And their voices tapered off in the distance.

In stunned silence I digested what I had just heard. The size of the challenge confronting the next administration is gargantuan, but it is compounded by so much ignorance on the part of a longsuffering population who now expect their newly-minted leader to brandish a wand and sweep their troubles away. If only this was wonderland!

Buhari’s assignment is complicated by the bitterness factor. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) was unprepared for the loss of the presidency. Party spokesman aptly described his organization as ‘traumatized’.

Many in the ruling party still cannot reconcile themselves with what has just happened: they are handing over the reins to the man they disdained and they just can’t stop the habit of sniping at him. This is the campaign that never ended, and the attacks would continue whether or not they are reasonable or morally justified.

That the PDP is in disarray after its calamitous electoral performance is to be expected. The scope of the debacle is such that the party which has been in power for an unbroken 16-year stretch would be would be psychologically damaged for a long time.

Up North it has been virtually wiped out by Hurricane Buhari. In the South West it is standing on two shaky legs in Ondo and Ekiti. These outposts are bound to come under sustained pressure from the new governing party after May 29.

In the South South and South East zones it faces an uncertain future. Electoral litigation and potential defections are bound to erode its holdings in these areas.

In Abuja, national chairman Ahmadu Muazu and members of his National Working Committee (NWC) are exchanging brickbats with aides and associates of President Goodluck Jonathan over the defeat while crossing swords with governors who want them sacked.

But no matter how bad things look for PDP at the moment, the worst is yet to come. In the next few months as the new government begins a forensic examination of the Jonathan years we should expect more embarrassing scandals to be unveiled as whistleblowers – long restrained by the fear of the outgoing government – begin to sing.

The savage in-fighting that has already kicked off is not going to disappear just because a committee has been appointed to examine why the party did poorly at the polls. Peace will only come when one of the factions contending for the soul of the party prevails.

Although there’s no unanimity as to the best way forward most members agree that PDP has to reinvent itself. But that isn’t going to happen until the party understands where it went wrong. The reactions of some of its leaders – from President Jonathan who’s already dreaming of PDP’s speedy return to power in 2019 to Muazu who’s been bragging about transforming into a vicious attack dog who will give the All Progressives Congress (APC) government nightmares – shows they still don’t get it.

Their comments and those of their camp followers on the internet show that their understanding of their new opposition role ends with lobbing criticism and invective at every move of the incoming lot and their leader, Buhari. It was that sort of wooly-headed thinking that inspired the hate campaign strategy that backfired spectacularly of March 28 and April 11.

The tactic or strategy a party in opposition adopts is usually shaped by the circumstance. There is the ‘reaction model’ involving relentless sniping and nitpicking. This means harassing your quarry over every little failing. It could be quite effective where the government in power is already unpopular, but it is very risky where certain lines are crossed.

The other option is the ‘proactive model’ in which the opposition tries to take the initiative by proffering new and more attractive policies than those set forth by the government of the day for dealing with challenges. This is mostly adopted where the incumbent regime retains a measure of popularity and credibility. In this case frontal attack doesn’t work because there’s not much to attack.

APC adopted the relentless attack model, now the PDP lazily wants to follow that same tack without understanding why it worked. You don’t attack for attack sake. The power of a critic’s utterances comes from his credibility. When Buhari talks about fighting corruption there’s a ring of believability to his words because of his history. The same comments coming from some of our former heads of state immediately conjures images of very black pots calling the kettle names.

Jonathan was roundly criticized because there was so much to criticize in his government. The flak hit home because it was supported by concrete evidence. If the opposition were hitting him over the head for corruption, they could point at several running scandals at every point in time. It was so bad that by the final year of his tenure the president had lost so much credibility locally and internationally.

In trying to savage Buhari even before he’s sworn into office, the PDP is making a big mistake. The man still enjoys tremendous goodwill and this will not dissipate overnight; it will take him stumbling from disaster to disaster for that to happen.

If anything PDP and its leaders should stay out of the way. As the magnitude of the mess it created becomes evident they should be hiding their heads in shame and allow the new team clean up their mess. And truly Nigeria in 2015 is one massive mess.

Every day the sheer scale of Boko Haram atrocities becomes evident. On the positive side the military has recorded successes in recent times. But it has struck me that all the efforts of the armies of Nigeria and three neighbouring countries have not been able to wipe out the sect.

After each day’s fighting the military reports new heavy death tolls of the part of the militants. How did they manage to get this big? How did they manage to build such a mighty force of men under arms? What were the administrations in charge in the last decade doing while this monster grew? All of this occurred under PDP’s watch.

Under the same party the nation has become bitterly polarized along ethnic and religious lines like never before in her history. The hatred between groups is frighteningly approaching the intensity of the pre-civil war period.
That’s not all. The economy has been run aground. There is no electricity. Fuel queues have become a permanent feature of our landscape. We squander billions of naira on dubious subsidy payments every year. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that neither the Ministry of Finance nor the oil marketers can agree on what the numbers are.

Unemployment has assumed the status of a plague. Under pressure from falling oil prices the naira now exchanges at an all-time low of well over N200 to the US dollar. The foreign reserves and Excess Crude Account are depleted. With one or two exceptions most states cannot pay monthly salaries and even the federal government had to borrow to meet its own wage obligations. This is the country that PDP would be handing to the next administration.

The clean-up exercise that Buhari has been saddled is going to take a while to get to done. We’re not going to wake up on May 30 to discover that Nigeria has become Paradise.

I believe that the president-elect has started going about his business in a very sound way. Some have tried to make his attempts at lowering expectations out to be an attempt to renege on campaign promises. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

Anybody who has bothered to read between the lines of his words in the past few weeks would notice he’s been clearly setting the style and tone of his government. In his comments on the first anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok girls he said the approach of his administration to resolving the issue would be founded on honesty. That required him to declare bluntly that there were no guarantees the girls would ever be found.

One of Jonathan’s greatest undoing is that for much of his tenure he lived in denial and never leveled with the public about how bad things were. He preferred to tell the each audience what he felt they wanted to hear instead of the bitter truth.

He glossed over the insurgency even when bombs were going off in Abuja – preferring the narrative that it was the work of APC and sundry enemies who were bent on unseating him. He and his wife didn’t initially accept that the Chibok abductions happened. Indeed some of his aides up till today insist that the incident was a politically-motivated stunt to embarrass the government.

After he accepted that the incident did happen, he kept reassuring the country of their imminent return. At a point one of his defence chiefs even boasted of knowing where they were being held. More than a year after they are still not home. By promising what he could not deliver Jonathan did incalculable harm to his credibility. The result is he led his party to the electoral carnage we’ve just witnessed.

Seamlessly the party responsible for our sorry state becomes the new opposition. It expects to get going in that role by deploying criticism. But the erstwhile ruling party lost the moral right to criticise by its criminal mismanagement of Nigeria. Indeed, it would be amusing watching PDP leaders moan about the state of the nation in the next one or two years.

PDP must now earn the right to criticize those who govern the country. Introspection and planning were never its strong suit. But that more than anything is what is required in opposition. In 1999, the party’s first Minister for Power, Bola Ige, excitedly promised to deliver 24-hour electricity within six months. He didn’t wait to understand what the problem was. Sixteen years after his successors haven’t done better.

The party needs to prove through concrete actions that it has repented of its old, discredited ways and can now be entrusted with power.

It will not have the federal platform to showcase anything in the coming years. It would have to prove its competence using its few remaining outposts in the South-South, South-East and Gombe. APC did this successfully – that was why during the campaigns it could point to the achievements of its governors in Lagos, Kano, Rivers, Ogun, Oyo and elsewhere as examples of good governance it intended to replicate at federal level.

Until it has something positive to show PDP and its discredited leaders must really stay out of the way of the cleaners.

– this Piece was written by Festus Eriye/the Nation