PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

PDP and Power Rotation; When The Chickens Came To Roost Sooner Than Expected

ndajika@yahoo.com

 

 

Wherever he is, Mr. Audu Ogbe, former chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), must be having a good laugh at the apparent discomfiture of his former party over the defeat on Monday of its official candidate for the Speaker of the House of Representative, Honourable Mulikat Adeola-Akande. 

 

In an interview in Newswatch (October 21, 2002) in the heat of his big row with President Olusegun Obasanjo, his benefactor-turned-detractor, over the scandalous Ngigegate crisis in Anambra State, Ogbe said the only threat to the party’s hold on power was not the opposition but the party itself.

 

“The only threat to the PDP,” Ogbe said, “is PDP itself. The indiscipline and the selfishness within, that’s all, otherwise we have no threat.”

 

What Ogbe did not specify, perhaps because he was ironically a beneficiary of those twin vices (he had been imposed on the party following an earlier row over party supremacy between his predecessor, Bernard Gemade, and the president which row, in turn, had led to Gemade’s unceremonious exit) was that this indiscipline and selfishness were virtually the prerogatives of the leadership of the party; it was like its rules were made to be obeyed by everyone else but by its sanctimonious top leadership.

 

The row between Gemade and Obasanjo was itself predictable. During its first convention for the election of party officials following its 1999 victory, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Chief Solomon Lar, its Interim Chairman, would be succeeded by the widely respected and a chief architect of the Obasanjo presidency, late Chief Sunday Awoniyi.

 

But trust the man, i.e. Obasanjo, to payback good with anything but; during the elections at Eagle Squire delegates were openly bribed at the behest of the presidency to vote for Gemade and against Awoniyi for no worse crime than the fact that he was well known from his days as a rising bureaucrat in the Northern civil service under the great Sardauna, for being his own man and upright.

 

The bribery was obviously the last desperate act of a presidency that could see its dubious whispering campaign that it would be wrong to vote a Yorubaman as party chairman when the president himself was Yoruba had fallen flat; after all everyone knew that Awoniyi had always considered himself a Northerner first and a minority Yoruba second.

 

In the end Gemade defeated Awoniyi. But like all human beings Gemade in the end could stand only so much manipulation and humiliation; what had been a simmering disagreement over party supremacy between him and his godfather almost from the word go finally broke into the open during its convention in November 2001, the first after Gemade’s election.

 

In a speech at the convention Obasanjo condemned what he described as undue party intervention in government affairs. “Party officials,” he said, “need be reminded that they are not government officials, appointed or otherwise. Party officials are remunerated from party headquarters and they must stay away from the day-to-day executive decisions of the government once the party manifesto remains the guide for the president.”

 

In an apparent response to the president, Gemade in effect said in an interview in Vanguard (November 11, 2001) that the presidency had made the party totally irrelevant to policy making.

 

“A situation where other avenues rather than the party are the focus of actions,” he said, “is definitely not healthy and cannot guarantee the required allegiance, commitment and dedication to the party. Our candid observation is that we have only paid lip service to the concept of party supremacy.”

 

The division within the PDP over the concept of party supremacy which has been one manifestation of the indiscipline and selfishness within the its top leadership in particular has since haunted the party. Last Monday was payback time for the leadership.

 

My Encarta Concise English dictionary defines discipline, among other things, as “the practice or methods of ensuring that people obey rules by teaching them to do so and punishing them if they do not.” It also defines selfishness as concern “with your own interests, needs and wishes while ignoring those of others.”

 

We all know, don’t we, that the best way to teach is by example. We also know, don’t we, that it is well-nigh impossible for the selfish to teach by example.

 

Not too long ago the PDP sat down and decreed that it would rotate certain party and government positions among an informal six geo-political zonal structure. At first it was essentially a gentleman’s agreement. Then in a bid to secure support for Obasanjo’s surreptitious Third Term Agenda ahead of the 2003 presidential elections, an expanded caucus of the party reduced the principle, or call it rule if you will, into writing and eventually entrenched it into its constitution.

 

However, no sooner did the first big test of the leadership’s commitment to the rule confront the party than the leadership shamelessly repudiated it. First, Obasanjo as the chairman of its board of trustees told an audience in far away America than no such rule ever existed in the party. Then President Goodluck Jonathan who had succeeded Umaru Yarádua following his death in May last year from a long illness and who himself was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the rule told the American CNN last October that the presidency was an exception to the rule. In a nation where sycophancy seems to have since been elevated into a high art, all but a few leaders of the party chorused the godfather and his godson.

 

Barely several months on, however, the same party leadership has turned round to say zoning and power rotation in the party was alive and well after all. Few about-turns are more brazen and shameless.

 

Obviously the party leadership thought it could eat its cake and still have it. In thinking that way it apparently did so without reckoning with most members-elect of the 7th House of Representatives.

 

Last Monday the vast majority of them – 252 against 90 – defied every means, fair and foul, by the party and the presidency to zone the Speaker to the South-West, a zone that produced less than half a dozen PDP members. Instead they decided to assert the independence of the First Arm of government from undue interference by the party and the presidency – and it is said, by the First Lady, Dame Patience whose self-imposed mandate to appoint any government or party official, much less the Speaker of the House of Representatives, clearly has no legal or constitutional or even moral basis - and voted for Alhaji Aminu Waziri Tambuwal the long serving member from Sokoto State and a former Chief Whip. Tambuwal had defied every pressure from every angle to step down for the party’s anointed speaker.

 

Not surprisingly some of the very self-same PDP leaders who had joined Obasanjo and Jonathan in pronouncing zoning and power rotation dead and buried or pretended it never existed are now in the forefront of those that are condemning Tambuwal’s defiance. Chief Ebenezer Babatope, a former minister and progressive-turned conservative, for one, told National Life yesterday in an interview that would surely resonate with the PDP leadership that Tambuwal would eventually pay dearly for his defiance of the party’s rule on zoning and power rotation.

 

“I wish the young man who emerged as Speaker the best of luck,” he said apparently tongue-in-cheek. “But he must know that he has undermined his party. He has shown disrespect to the party leadership…Nobody in history has ever conflicted with party’s supremacy and emerged victorious in the end.”

 

Regardless of how tenable Babatope’s version of the history of party politics is, the inescapable lesson of last Monday is that sooner or later the chickens always come home to roost.