FOR many months now, the country’s leading opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has been engulfed in crisis. The division in the party culminated in the conduct of two rancorous parallel national conventions on the same day in Abuja and Port Harcourt, last month. While the Abuja Convention was organised by a few elder statesmen of the party led by Prof. Jerry Gana and Senator Ibrahim Mantu, the Port Harcourt Convention was spearheaded by former and current governors elected on the platform of the party.
Both conventions came after weeks of intriguing controversies and battles to save the party from disintegration. The high point of the Port Harcourt Convention on May 21, was the ouster of the acting National Chairman of the Party, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff. He was replaced by former governor of Kaduna State and serving senator, Ahmed Makarfi, as caretaker committee chairman, pending a fresh convention of the party. The division in the party has persisted, and resulted in the sealing off of the party secretariat in Abuja by the police.
The office was only reopened last week, even as the party’s Board of Trustees (BoT) claimed it had taken over the affairs of the party, pending the resolution of the crisis. The chairman of the party’s BoT, Senator Walid Jubrin, cited conflicting court orders and the recent parallel conventions to justify the action. He said the different court judgments in Lagos and Abuja have thrown up legal issues that have made it expedient for the BoT to assume control of the party’s affairs.
These ugly developments in Nigeria’s main opposition party are unfortunate and disheartening. The crisis does not bode well for our democracy. It does not serve the best interest of PDP members and Nigeria as a whole.
The PDP is no stranger to crisis. It has had a harvest of such crises since its formation in 1998. Much of its 16-year stay in power was embroiled in one crisis or the other, which its leadership often referred to as a “family affair.”
Although dissent and crisis are not unusual in any human organisation, including political parties, it becomes worrisome when such crises persist, and begin to impact the essence of such organisations. The division in PDP has crossed the line of a family affair. It has become a national embarrassment.
More importantly, as the country’s main opposition party, the PDP owes Nigerians and, indeed, our democracy the onerous duty of checking the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Democracy needs a virile opposition to thrive, and we must guard against a descent to one-party rule. We need a strong opposition to stop the government from exceeding its constitutional powers. The festering crisis in the PDP could, in the absence of other strong opposition parties, invite a slide to dictatorship in the country. This will be tragic for our democracy.
We, therefore, urge the party to quickly resolve the lingering crisis and put its house in order. The Makarfi-led reconciliation committee should consult widely within its fold, especially with the elders of the party. It should set aside personal differences and find an enduring solution to the rift within the party. Party supremacy should supersede personal interests.
It may not be out of place to posit (as some people have argued) that PDP is yet to recover from the shock of its loss of power at the centre after sixteen unbroken years. But, the beauty of democracy is that power is transient, and those who are out of power today may be back in power tomorrow. Success belongs to those political parties which are able to rise above their failures, amend their mistakes and prepare to perform better in future elections.
We, therefore, urge PDP and the other opposition parties to get their acts together in the best interest of the country. They must strive to play the role expected of them in the effort to sustain our democracy, which is currently facing one of its toughest times ever. We are constrained to remind PDP that it lost power at the centre last year partly because of the intractable crises within its fold that made some of its key members defect to the APC. The loss of the presidential election by the PDP was largely self-inflicted. The development calls for sobriety and introspection to avoid defeats in future elections.
Altogether, Nigeria needs virile opposition parties that are not weakened by internal crises, if they are to keep the government in check and boost our democracy. Democracy can only be as strong as the electorate and the opposition parties want it to be.