What has happened to PDP

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was always a badly organized political party. Its history is fraught with profound missteps that were largely the result of organic failures and dysfunction; a terrible lack of disciplinary capacity, and fickle institutional structures. It was evident from the Jos debacle late in 1998 when external forces operating from outside the party, took it over, and imposed Olusegun Obasanjo as its presidential candidate that the PDP, even if it had some modicum of ideas, was going to short-circuit in short order.

At best, from that moment, the party could only function as an umbrella association of strange bedfellows; an amalgam of hacks, privateers, power mongers, and political harlots. Although it positioned itself as a right of center organization ideologically, its lack of clear or specific political ideas, made it incomprehensible. Its most famous claim to political relevance was that it was “the largest political party in Africa” which would be in power for “the next fifty years.”

It was attempting, I think, to rub shoulders with the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. But it lacked the organizational depth and institutional capacity of the ANC. I was always amused by that kind of claim. It quite clearly defined the intellectual depth of the party for me, and its rather tragic view of itself. PDP is a spectacular failure. It also probably forgot that size alone did not matter; nimbleness is all.

A big “size” required large habiliments to cover the generous folds, and a large infusion of blood to keep it alive. “Big” in short came with its own debility and was not always an advantage. PDP was very clearly, politically diabetic. There is no question about it. It was stuck in a morass. Its years in power, from the transition of 1999 to its defeat by the even more ramshackle APC, was marked by a terrible lack of clarity.

It wasted an opportunity to organize itself, build up a party establishment, and structure a proper political party out of the chaos of its founding. This now haunts the party. It manifests in the current party crisis over the leadership of the party. Two factions have emerged: one, the faction that is backing Mr. Ali Modu Sheriff as party Chairman, and the faction backing Ahmed Maikarfi as Chair of the PDP National Party Commission.

For some reason, nobody is yet to figure-in the rather obvious truth that this crisis has much to do with the unsustainable structure of the PDP party organization which concentrates too much power on the Chairman of the party, rather than on the party institution. I should come back to this question, but the main grouse in the party is that Ali Modu Sheriff is something of an APC “sleeper agent” in the PDP, inserted surreptitiously to destabilize the party, and keep it from reorganizing in time for the National polls of 2019 which is only two years ahead.

Ali Modu Sheriff’s opponents point to his rather troubling past: he started out as a two-term Governor of Borno State, from 2003 – 2011, elected first on the platform of the defunct All Nigerians Peoples Party (ANPP). Then he became a foundational member of the now ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) until 2014, when he moved into the PDP.

Sherrif’s opponents’ chief gripe remains that he is not only too much of a newbie in the party to run it, but that his affiliations from the very start had placed him outside of the orbit of the party, and outside of its linkages and imaginations. There might be some point in all that.  But the question remains: how was Modu Sheriff elected chair of the PDP National Caretaker committee initially? The Parliamentary committee of the party did endorse him as did the PDP Governors Committee – two powerful interests within the party.

There was clearly a disjunction between party interests and party loyalties, confused by a shocking loss of power to the APC in the 2015 polls, and unable to quickly grasp the immediate necessity for a quick recalibra