On May 30, 2022, delegates of the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are scheduled to converge on Abuja for the party’s national convention to elect a presidential standard-bearer, going into the 2023 presidential election.
Ordinarily, the leadership of the PDP, whose handpicked nominees mostly populate the party’s delegates’ list, are supposed to prioritize the emergence of not just a winning candidate but one who has the capabilities to really “rescue and rebuild” Nigeria, if elected President. But the feelers about the permutations within the leadership hierarchy of the party suggest that the PDP may not be setting the stage for the emergence of a presidential candidate who can win the presidential election on the strength of his/her capabilities to rescue and rebuild Nigeria.
Since the return to civil democratic rule in 1999, Nigerians have never voted a deliberately corrupt person or a bullish clown as President. Nigerians have consistently voted for only the best available presidential materials in every election season. And in exercising their democratic right to choose their Presidents, Nigerians are usually guided by the most compelling needs of the country, going into the election season. In 1999, the need to balance power shift to the South and national unity threw up Olusegun Obasanjo, a well-known pan-Nigerian nationalist who had the capabilities to unite Nigeria and lead it from the brink of disintegration, as the clear favourite.
By 2007, when the Obasanjo administration had successfully raised the anti-corruption mantra to national consciousness with the establishment of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the conversion was also how to balance zoning to the North and the sustenance of the war on corruption. And to continue Obasanjo’s war on corruption and protect the national treasury of Nigeria, which had grown from to about $45 billion [foreign reserves and excess crude account], Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, then governor of Katsina State, who was considered the least corrupt among the eligible, emerged as clear favourite for Nigeria’s top job.
And by 2015, when Nigerians came to the conclusion that what ailed Nigeria was the virus of corruption and the scourge of insecurity, as represented by then President Goodluck Jonathan and his PDP, Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army general with a reputation for incorruptibly and Spartan discipline, was widely accepted by Nigerians as the “change” they needed. Even though in each of these instances, the highly anticipated best candidates did not exactly live up to their expectations, events have shown that Nigerians have refused to lower the bar of leadership recruitment requirements and have continued to gravitate towards the best available candidates in their relentless quest for good governance.
As was the case in the previous quadrennial presidential elections, Nigerians appear to be gravitating towards their preferred presidential prospects who they believe have what it takes to meet the current leadership needs of Nigeria. But for the main opposition PDP, that person is billionaire businessman, commodity trader, banker and former governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi. And if indeed it is the aim of the PDP to win back the presidency after eight years in opposition in order to rescue and rebuild Nigeria, Peter Obi is their best foot forward into the 2023 presidential election, as Nigerians have now come to consider him the better fit for this purpose.
Ahead of the PDP presidential primary, Peter Obi, like Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Buhari before him, has emerged as the most popular, acceptable and trusted aspirant on the platform of his party as possessing the capabilities to rescue and rebuild Nigeria.
With national unity and social cohesion as fundamental conditions preceding sustainable socio-economic development, healing a thoroughly disunited and socially fractured Nigeria will require the PDP and other parties picking their presidential candidates from the South as the first step towards national healing and reconciliation after eight years of President Buhari’s northern presidency. And northern aspirants on the platform of the PDP can no longer claim to be ‘unifiers’ since their aspiration is a drawback on national unity, because, without justice, there can be no unity, peace and socio-economic development.
To rescue and rebuild a country that is cash-strapped, debt-burdened, devastated in every part by heightened insecurity and whose borrowed finances are haemorrhaging from the virus of corruption, Peter Obi, with a reputation for incorruptibility, track record of frugal management of public resources and ability to create wealth, stands out of the crowd as possessing the qualities of the leadership needs of post-Buhari Nigeria. To fix the economy, Peter Obi, a Harvard and Cambridge-educated businessman with a string of successful businesses and a clear understanding of global economics, has pledged to transform Nigeria from a “consumption” to a “productive” economy. Nigerians appear to have trust in his capabilities and believe he is equipped with the requisite knowledge and the right policies and programmes that can transform Nigeria from a consumption economy to a productive one.
With a security challenge that has both economic and social dimensions, whose containment by the government has been largely hampered by corruption, incompetence and ineptitude, Peter Obi’s frugal management of resources will be needed to stop the haemorrhage in government’s finances enough to prioritize spending on improving the welfare and equipment for Nigeria’s security services. And in the long run, a productive and export-oriented competitive economy such as Peter Obi envisions will gradually absorb able-bodied men and women into legitimate ventures away from crime and terrorism.
Apart from his tried, tested and trusted capabilities as an effective public administrator as seen in his successes as governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, like Muhammadu Buhari before him, is like a prophet that is recognized at home. What Buhari was to the APC in the build-up to the 2015 presidential election is what Peter Obi has become to the PDP going into the 2023 presidential election. With a strong support base among his Hausa-speaking people of northern Nigeria, which enabled Buhari to go into every presidential election with a “12 million vote bank,” Peter Obi similarly enjoys the massive support of his Igbo-speaking kinsmen that reside in every part of Nigeria and is now believed to have a vote bank of not less than 10 million. And in a polity that is still largely defined and shaped by identity politics, Peter Obi’s 10 million potential vote bank is an invaluable asset for PDP going into the next presidential election.
But like Buhari in 2014, Peter Obi does not have a hold of the party structure, a corrupt transactional and undemocratic contraption that is always available on sale to the highest bidder. For an aspirant like Peter Obi who goes before them to speak to the issues of democratic good governance, the delegates are clearly more interested in how much he is bidding for their votes. But, unlike the APC in 2014, when its leadership understood the value of Buhari’s acceptability as pivotal to the electoral success of their party and looked at the bigger picture by mobilizing the structure of the party to elect him as candidate, the PDP leadership is looking at the smaller picture by not doing the same for Peter Obi.
The consequences of not presenting Peter Obi, a candidate that many Nigerians consider PDP’s best option, will be unpalatable in many ways. If the PDP picks a candidate from the North, it will lose its southern support base and also lose in the North against a stronger APC in the region and go into oblivion. If it picks any other heavy-spending southern candidate other than Peter Obi, the PDP will come across as a joke of a party that is irredeemably corrupt and not different from APC. But if the party picks Peter Obi as its standard-bearer, he will in the least lead the PDP to victory in its traditional stronghold of the South-East, South-South, parts of the South-West and the Middle Belt areas in the North, enough to remain relevant in post-Buhari Nigeria.
And it is better to lose gracefully with a decent and upright Peter Obi than to lose disgracefully with a bullish clown and a corrupt money spender.
