PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

PDP and Kalu’s letter-bomb

kudugana@yahoo.com

If, as Nigeria’s ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) often likes to boast, it is the biggest party in Africa, it may also be argued that it also doubles as the most crisis-prone ruling party in Africa, if not the world. Since its first convention in Jos in 1998, a convention which threw up General Olusegun Obasanjo as the party’s presidential candidate in what has been widely acknowledged as the freest and most well organised party primaries in the country, the PDP has barely managed to avoid breaking into pieces. Since the Jos convention, the party has changed its leadership thrice and has sacked many, if not most, of its founding members, essentially for insisting that the affairs of both party and government should be conducted in a transparent and proper manner.

More recently, (1) some of its key members from Anambra  organised an ill-motivated attempt to kidnap the state’s governor for apparently reneging on a devilish pact surrendering the state’s resources to these key members; (2) a key minister Malam Nasir El-Rufai, accused two ranking PDP senators, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu, the Senate President, and Dr. Jonathan Zwingina, of demanding for bribe before they would fight for his confirmation; (3) an even more important minister – at least that was what we all thought - the defense minister, Lt-General T.Y. Danjuma, resigned his job in apparent frustration and subsequently accused the PDP government of executing the agenda, not of the party, but of a cabal; and (4) only very recently, Malam Adamu Ciroma, erstwhile minister of finance and President Obasanjo’s campaign manager, quietly resigned his membership of the party’s board of trustees and of the party itself.

As if all this was not  enough  wahala for the party, penultimate week, Chief Orji Uzor  Kalu, the self-promoting and somewhat boastful governor of Abia State and one of the key members of the party, lobbed a letter-bomb at it via the office of the president.

Kalu’s letter-bomb may be a classic study in self-promotion and bombast – “I can be counted”, he says as a matter-of-fact, “among the few Nigerians who stand for what is right and are ready to pay even the supreme price to defend the cause of justice. For the 57 months I have served the people of Abia state, I have shown transparency and courage in whatever I have done” – but there is no doubt that in accusing Chief Tony Anenih, recently promoted to the chair of the PDP’s board of trustees, of being a serial killer, the Abia governor has done serious, if not irreparable, damage to the party and its leadership.

Anenih, says Kalu in a widely publicized letter to President Obasanjo, “openly told my deputy that he was very bitter with me, and that plans had been concluded to deal with me the way they dealt with Bola Ige. My deputy was taken aback by the effontrey of Anenih.”

Ige, then Obasanjo’s minister of justice, was murdered in cold blood at his home in Ibadan two days before the Christmas of 2001.  Since then there has been speculations about the complicity of PDP leadership in the murder, fueled by the apparent inept police handling of the prosecution of the murder suspects and by the party leadership’s strange support for the principal suspect, Chief Iyiola Omisore’s bid for a senate seat which he eventually won in somewhat dubious circumstances.

“Anenih’s reckless comment,” continues Kalu in his letter, “has gone further to buttress what Wole Soyinka said many months ago that there was a nest of killers in PDP and that until the nest was disbanded, political killings in the country would never stop.”

The Abia governor said he was worried by Anenih’s threat, not only because the killers of Ige appear to have gotten away “scot-free”, but also because “some powerful persons in the presidency and a governor from one of the South-South states of the country” who had threatened to kill Chief A.K. Dikibo, a vice-chairman of the party, did so three days after Dikibo had revealed the threat to Kalu and Governor DSP Alamiesegha of Bayelsa state.

Kalu then said that although he wished to make it “absolutely clear to Anenih and his co-conspirators that Orji Kalu is neither Ige nor Dikibo who got killed like a dog”, he still felt it necessary to let the world know of Anenih’s threat to eliminate him. For good measure the governor concluded his letter with the threat that “if Anenih or any other person for that matter tries to carry out his threat then this nation will burn to ashes.  Enough  is enough.“

Kalu would like the world to believe Anenih wants him dead because he has persistently asked Anenih to  account for over 300 billion Naira reportedly given to  him, as minister of works and housing, to reconstruct and repair the country’s highways. Kalu cannot see what is wrong with his persistence especially considering the fact that the president himself had occasion to complain about the neglect of our highway inspite of the purported expenditure of the hundred of billions of Naira.

Whatever the substance -- or lack of it -- of Kalu’s allegation, it has, once again, exposed the deep-seated confusion and intolerance in the leadership of the party itself and in its government.

The extent of the confusion in the party leadership is revealed by the conflicting remarks from the party hierarchy about its position on Kalu’s letter; while one of its vice-chairmen, Chief Bode George has dismissed Kalu’s allegation as mischievous and malicious, the chairman himself, Chief Audu Ogbe, has said the party will treat Kalu’s it with all the seriousness it deserves.

The extent of the party’s intolerance is clearly demonstrated by its statement that Kalu will face severe punishment if his allegations are found to be baseless. Which, of course, is fair enough, except that the party was deafeningly silent on what it would to Anenih,  if Kalu’s allegation are found to be true.

As for the  government’s intolerance this is clear from the crude way it withdrew the operating license of SLOK, an airline in which Kalu is known to have the controlling interest. The government tried to disguise its crudity by tagging SLOK’s suspension along with that of another airline, IRS, and by asking the collapsed Okada Air to remove its aircrafts that have littered  Benin Airport. Few people, however, would be fooled by this disguise for the simple reason that whereas the charges against IRS and OKADA were specific, the charge against SLOK was that it has engaged in some ill-defined “unethical practices contrary to the terms of its operating license.”

This crude response of both the party and the government to Kalu’s letter-bomb is hardly surprising for, whatever virtues the Obasanjo’s presidency has, tolerance of dissenting views is certainly not one of them. And Kalu’s letter was clearly aimed not only at Anenih, the president’s Mr. Untouchable, it was also aimed at the president himself. Nearly a third of the letter was a harsh criticism of the president’s policies and performance to date. “Yes”, Kalu said while taking a broad swipe at Obasanjo, “I have nothing against reforms by your administration per se, but they should have a human face”. He then proceeded to blame President Obasanjo for, among other things, worsening the country’s rate of unemployment, for neglecting the state of its security, and for also neglecting its infrastructure.

There are people who will see Kalu’s letter as a case of the kettle calling the pot black: despite his bombast, it is doubtful whether Kalu has been any more transparent and accountable than President Obasanjo in managing the revenues and resources of Abia State. It is also doubtful if he has been any more tolerant of his political opponents than Obasanjo.

Again there are people who will see Kalu’s letter-bomb as a strategic move by the governor to checkmate Obasanjo over the president’s much speculated bid for a third term come 2007, a bid which would definitely get in the way of Kalu’s own much speculated vice-presidential ambitions.

Whatever the accuracy of these perceptions, there is little or no doubt that Kalu’s letter-bomb, as I have said before, has done incalculable damage to the PDP. In the past four years or so, the party has demonstrated its propensity for sweeping its problems under the carpet. Kalu’s letter-bomb may yet prove too explosive to be easily swept under the carpet even for a party whose capacity for self-deception has since become legendary.