PDP’s suicide (2)

I have noted that PDP’s actions at its recent convention amounted to a deliberate self-sabotage as it potentially alienates a large geo-political constituency and undermines its electoral viability in 2019. The sensible decision for the party was to pick its chairman from the South-West; plus a presidential candidate from the North, and VP candidate from the South-East. Having displaced the South-West from the party chairmanship, I can easily predict that PDP will have to pick its presidential running-mate from the South-West or it will lose the 2019 presidency! I am reliably informed that the new “godfathers” in PDP had assured the South-East that the VP ticket would be theirs, so the party may have forced itself into a cull de sac!

There are other aspects of the convention I haven’t delved into, most importantly the role of money! I’m told delegates were paid a minimum of N1million for voting the “unity list” that the power brokers led by the swashbuckling governor from the South-South had drawn-up. With about 2,400 delegates, that meant a budget of approximately N2.4billion just to “mobilise” floor delegates! No one could compete with this war-chest and it was inevitable that the new power brokers would have their way! There was however a more sinister dimension to this monetization of politics-the “prime mover” at the convention is said to have repeatedly reminded whoever cared to listen about how much he had spent on the party-to procure the judgment that set the party free from the shackles of Ali Modu Sherriff; on the national and state chapters of the party, particularly in the North; to organize conventions, etc. These were investments and the “investor” was insisting on payback, which it seemed would be in the form of a right of “first sale” on the 2019 presidential and governorship tickets! The investors had their way, and will now have preemptive commercial rights over the 2019 nomination processes of the PDP!

There was an aspect of the rebuff of the South-West that is an outright insult to the region! Many of the leading dramatis personae in the South-South/South-East argued that no one from the South-West could be trusted with the party chairmanship! Governor Wike was also arguing publicly that if the presidency of Obasanjo did not change the PDP’s fortunes in the South-West, the party chairmanship could not be expected to have any positive impact. Wike was a local government chairman in Rivers State at the time and may have been ignorant of the facts of national politics which are of course plain to the effect that PDP took over control of five out of six South-West states due to Obasanjo’s presidency! There was another narrative arguing that the South-West was irrelevant and discounting the need to worry about votes from the region. Whatever the thinking, and against the instincts of Northern leaders who urged accommodation for the South-West, the financial and political pressure was too overwhelming and Wike and his allies (including Governor Ayo Fayose and Ladi Adebutu from the South-West who have their own power calculations) had their way.

The tendency of the South-South and South-East to construct political alliances excluding the South-West which I referred to earlier reared its head under the Jonathan presidency. In my review of why Jonathan lost the 2015 elections, I wrote in “An Important Election (2)” on April 1, 2015 just after the elections “…The single most important political miscalculation responsible for Jonathan’s loss appears to have been allowing his presidency to be alienated from the South-West. He had been elected on a rectangular alliance of South-East, South-South, South-West and North-Central with inroads into parts of North-West and North-East, but once the South-West was due to acts of omission or commission displaced from the rectangle, his chances of victory became tenuous in spite of last minute efforts to remedy the situation….” PDP has just begun the process of repeating the Jonathan error and is likely to suffer the same consequences!

I started hinting at the strategic miscalculation under Jonathan from July 25, 2012 just one year into Jonathan’s presidency in an article titled “The Ironsi Syndrome” but the pattern was sufficiently clear eighteen months into Jonathan’s tenure for me to write a blistering critique titled “Naivety and Statecraft” on December 19, 2012 in which I wrote “…consider Jonathan’s post-election regional strategy! A president who was elected with overwhelming support from four geo-political zones (South-South, South-East, South-West and Middle-Belt) with additional support in the North-West and North-East, has shrunk his support base, seemingly deliberately into South-South and South-East…His emerging attitude to the South-West is inexplicable and will certainly exact a significant payback except something changes very soon…” In the event, the changes happened too little, too late and my predictions turned out very accurate!

In spite of the above, I personally gave Jonathan the benefit of the doubt and supported him in 2015 for three reasons-there was “contributory negligence” from the South-West in the manner we “threw away” the position of House Speaker which should have gone to Mulikat Akande-Adeola (nevertheless Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Femi Gbajabiamila who ensured Akande-Adeola’s loss were opposition ACN members and were pursuing their own pro-North alliance strategy towards 2015; and Jonathan had a duty as president of the whole country and a political necessity towards his second term, to remedy the aftermath and not punish his own party members for the sins of Tinubu and Gbajabiamila); the imperative of restructuring, which Jonathan had advanced with the 2014 national conference; and in my own analysis, a Buhari presidency was a bigger danger to the economy; political, religious and democratic freedoms; federalism and the prospect of ethnic and regional hegemony!

The recent actions of South-South/South-East politicians led by Nyesom Wike at the recent PDP convention suggest their antipathy for the South-West under Jonathan was not an accident, happenstance or co-incidence, but a pattern of behavior! This appearance will have to be quickly remedied or else their party will stay in opposition beyond the 2019 presidential elections.

Opeyemi Agbaje