PDP factionalisation
exists only on pages of newspapers – Nnamani
By ONUOHA UKEH
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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Nnamani
Pix: Sun News Publishing |
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Enugu State governor, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani, says that there
is no factionalsation in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
According to him, while speaking with group of editors in
Enugu, the PDP is becoming stronger, citing the recent defection
of the governor of Jigawa State, Alhaji Saminu Turaki, as
a sign that the party is in a growing instead of breaking
up as some people want Nigerians to believe.
To buttress his point that the party is intact, he said that
none of the people who control the structures of the PDP in
the federal, states and local government level is among those
talking about discord in the party.
"I just gave you the clear picture of the structures
of the PDP and what they represent among Nigerians, within
the national scheme and I took it for granted that you would
have seen clearly that for a political party producing 27
governors, now 28, with majority presence in the local government
setting, and in which none of these people who actually control
the structures giving no hint of discord, any other person
talking is merely posturing. Or, let me ask you, of all the
so-called heavyweight that are part of the dissident group,
which of them is a governor of a PDP-controlled state, which
of them is a National Assembly member, which is a council
chairman or even a councillor?," he said.
The governor said that the supposed crisis in the PDP exists
only on the pages of newspapers, saying: "What they attempted
to do was to signpost a condition of discord and skirmishes,
all aimed at attracting sympathies among irresolute and shallow-minded
members, who would believe that so much had gone wrong for
them to provide the foundation for factionalisation. They
attempted to pretend that they had rebelled and others should
join, but the point non-politicians miss is that you do not
build a political base on the pages of newspapers. Those who
knew they were off target were those who asked, where are
the states joining? Where are the local governments? Where
are the wards and their executives? None of these followed
and real politicians knew it was all air and no substance.
That is real political calculation, not screaming newspaper
headlines."
PDP, Ahmadu Ali’s leadership and future elections
I stand by my earlier view on the leadership and I will restate
my view under some premises you will soon understand. But,
first of all, let me formally welcome you to Enugu State,
one of the PDP states and one which is clearly unwavering
about our inclusion in PDP; one which clearly stands along
with the other 27 states controlled by the PDP, to say that
we know no faction and we have heard of no fragmentation.
Let me take you through the power base of the PDP.
Our party is a national party, which forms the national government.
It has control of 27 of the 36 states of the federation and
has recently added up Jigawa State, whose governor has just
joined our great party. This is a party whose leader is the
President of the Federal Republic, with the distinguished
Senator (Dr) Ahmadu Ali, as the national chairman. It is also
a party, whose presence in the 774 local governments is clearly
in the majority. As it stands today, there is no hint whatsoever
that there is any shift in this equation. There is no news
yet in town about any kind of rupturing of this composition.
So, it becomes difficult for me to place your heavy-weight-pull-out
and factionalisation!
I just gave you the clear picture of the structures of the
PDP and what they represent among Nigerians, within the national
scheme and I took it for granted that you would have seen
clearly that for a political party producing 27 governors,
now 28, with majority presence in the local government setting,
and in which none of these people who actually control the
structures giving no hint of discord, any other person talking
is merely posturing. Or, let me ask you, of all the so-called
heavyweight that are part of the dissident group, which of
them is a governor of a PDP-controlled state, which of them
is a National Assembly member, which is a council chairman
or even a councillor?
Remember, when we talk of PDP governors, we also talk of 28
PDP state structures and none is a part of what you called
factionalization. When we talk about our clearly heavy majority
in the local government, we also talk about controlling the
structure in that political theatre. Again, we have not heard
anything like factionalization in those countless zones.
Mind you, we are politicians. We know who is worth what and
we can tell you that those men who maintain heavy media presence,
but who have no form of control of the structures of the party,
from the national through the state, the local government
and the wards, are only limited to their media pretensions,
not the real thing. The real thing is structure. How many
wards can come with you? How many local governments can come
with you? That is before you now boast of what state you have
base. Can you tell me, Mr. Editor, which of the PDP states
can be said to be controlled by the promoters of the media
presence which excite you? None!
What pains me most is that the media seems not to understand,
pretends not to know or knows and is powerless against the
fact that this is a mind war that these people are fighting.
They know that the PDP, for them, is a lost battle. They know
that structures make a party and they do not have them anywhere
in the country, but they are equally aware that there is capital
to be harvested from noise-making. As things stand now, they
are affecting the language of the Press in the description
of the PDP and themselves. Some newspapers are already saying,
so, so and so person is chairman of the faction of PDP!
That is all they want, not recognition, not anything, which
they are sure would not come! In the frequency and currency
of their appearance in the media, they could curry some empathy
and sympathy and at the last minute, go wherever they are
going with the accumulated dissidents they must have garnered.
It is a strategy, it is a covert attempt to build up a hegemonic
base and they are well aware that the newspapers are the most
potent base for the flowering of the hegemonic base they desire.
It is a phantom collection or if you like, a dissident group
sustained through media creativity and attention. They know
it won’t work, but they are sustaining it as a stimulus
and with the media’s constant lap up of a supposed faction,
they would remain in business. They could sustain a vehicle
of make-believe. That is where it ends.
But Sir, much as your argument is convincing, you
cannot dismiss what is happening as not disturbing the leaders
and players under the PDP platform?
Disturb? No. Let me help you. What you see today, which I
repeat, is a clearly media issue without foundation, was a
failed pre-factitionalizing effort of some people. There is
no factionalization. What they attempted to do was to signpost
a condition of discord and skirmishes, all aimed at attracting
sympathies among irresolute and shallow-minded members, who
would believe that so much had gone wrong for them to provide
the foundation for factionalisation.
They attempted to pretend that they had rebelled and others
should join, but the point non-politicians miss is that you
do not build a political base on the pages of newspapers.
Those who knew they were off target were those who asked,
where are the states joining? Where are the local governments?
Where are the wards and their executives? None of these followed
and real politicians knew it was all air and no substance.
That is real political calculation, not screaming newspaper
headlines.
Your Excellency, are you alluding to these men not having
real political bases?
In politics, especially party politics, the issues are not
really matters for boastful claims as they are practical in
terms of how many people you can get to follow you. How much
control do you exert? Which level of structure comes along
when you say lets go.Often, politicians lose sight of the
truth of their trade, the practice or call it profession,
if you like. It is not for me to say which person has this
clout or the other, but there is one trend you have to pick
as you report politics.
The issue is always who would get the structure going? Who
will deliver Enugu State when the chips are down? Whose voice
is more reliable when we say we are speaking for any chapter
or level of the structure of the party? It is practical, and
very easy to ascertain. And I hope you do not forget that
what you promote today on the pages of your newspapers was
an after-thought. I have no doubt that it is like a fall-back
plan preceding the debate on constitutional amendment. That
it is mentioned today is one other striking confusion among
the political elites.
All right, Your Excellency, how would you place the brashness
of Dr. Ali in the last few months; in speeches and interviews
which are clearly against democratic ethos? Some people are
even drawing similarity in the gruff emanating from him and
a perceptibly militarised democratic dispensation that is
in place now?
Well, you are entitled to your opinion.
That is why this is a democracy. To me, the chairman has not
gone beyond the confines of expectations of him as the chairman
of the biggest party in Africa, with all its attendant Babel
and the irritancy that would expectedly come from such a large
family. Where you see gruff, I see decisiveness and firmness
of an administrator per excellence who knows his onions. One
thing you can say about the chairman is that he does not know
how to posture and says his minds over an issue and moves
on; no residual acrimony. And I think such people are preferable
to vipers who shroud their venom and pretend as if everything
is well. Look at the way he humbled himself before the Senate
after he was accused of being gruff: Not only did he write
them to explain his position, he apologised if his views were
perceived as wronging anyone. You don’t get that quality
from a militarised polity.
Here is an administrator who has held a divergent party like
the PDP since last year in an excellent and clearly fatherly
way, in a unifying and decisive manner. His meetings are devoid
of the usual hypocrisy and swashbuckling of a Nigerian politician
but short and straight to the point. Everybody expresses his
opinion and they are approached in a clearly intellectual
and fatherly manner. Maybe there is a misplacement of semantics
here because clearly what you call gruff is what I call the
decisiveness of a senior colleague in medicine and Fellow
of the Royal College of Physicians.
Your Excellency, the fact that it seems to miscarry
does not remove the fact that many were justifiably upset
by your leader, Mr. President. Was that not enough reason
to pull out?
Yes, Mr. President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, is the national
leader of our great party, and he has done so well as both
party leader and President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal
Republic. Elsewhere, I have had to review the administration
and I can tell you without mincing words that we have had
tremendous and bold initiatives, especially the reform policies,
which successfully commenced and carried out for the good
of the nation.
Most importantly, Mr. President embraced the tenets of globalization,
realizing, as he carried the nation along, that we must act
to be included in the new values which underscore globalization
– stakeholder-driven democracy, free enterprise economy
and information technology. He led us gainfully full blast
into these and we are the better today.
Take, for instance, the silent revolution going on in the
polity today. Nigerians tend to forget where we were in 1999
and where we are today because of the convenience of the present
time. Could we have forgotten so soon that the country was
literally not worth anything in the eyes of international
assessors? We were being rated non-existent in virtually all
areas of developmental index, things were falling fast, which
led Karl Maier to come to his judgmental conclusion that the
Nigerian house has fallen! But look at the same indices today;
you would notice a clear and marked departure from the rot
of decades.
You may be right to say that we have not reached El-dorado,
but you would be grossly wrong to say that we are still in
the Hades. No. Look at the reforms. Look at the spate of globalization
in virtually all ranks of our lives. Is it the expansion of
the telecom sector? Have you forgotten that six years ago
telephone was used as status symbol? Only the few rich could
think of owning telephone lines. Mobile phones were clearly
not for the other Nigerians. What do you see today? Every
Nigerian can do businesses on phone.
Okay, is it the increase in enrolment of students in our schools
under the Universal Basic Education system? And do not forget
that the last such explosion in education enrolment came as
a result of the then Universal Free Primary Education (UPE)
of the same Obasanjo, though as a military Head of State.
Why is it that it is only coming back long on the way as he
returned to power. That is consistence in interest in the
good of one’s country.
Is it the fact that Nigerians are now aware that if we must
move forward, corruption must be wiped out of the polity and
its attendant gradual removal of the tendency to swim towards
gratification? Is it the systemic and systematic enthronement
of gender empowerment and equality in the public service through
the President’s clear look-out for women with high cerebral
make-up to administer key and vital sectors of the economy?
Tell me, how unprecedented in the history of the polity that
women are the engine of key and fundamental places in the
economy? Can anyone claim not to understand that the Ngozi
Okonjo-Iwealas, Oby Ezekwesilis, Irene Chigbues, Dora Akunyilis
and others too numerous to mention are manning strategic aspects
of our lives is not the tokenism that we were used to about
the female gender?
Of course, we all know about the liberalization of the downstream
oil sector, the public sector reforms in the civil service,
the banking sector reforms, a significant of which are the
consolidation of the banking industry, along various other
reforms that percolate virtually all aspects of our economy
are not just accidental or mere fluke. Common, let us give
kudos to this man! Agreed, as the president and the leader,
we must grill him and probably not tell him to his face that
he is doing wonders so that he does not relapse, but no harm
is done by giving him some pat on the back for moving Nigeria
forward.
That is why till today, you journalists cannot even come to
terms with how he publicly commended the so-called Third term
debate. You probably expected him to demonize the dramatis
personae of that civilian coup but he has so far bonded with
them more than ever before. These all show a president that
is clearly ahead in all things. Mr. Editor, let us be sincere
for once with ourselves and put sentiments apart, tell me
of a Nigerian leader that you know of, who has made half the
impact of the President in the administration of this country?
Tell me, I am listening! None!
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