The last chance for PDP

In the context of a free and fair election, commitment to the interest of the party is the condition for winning success for a party.

PDP’s failure to enforce respect for the party’s interest was the major reason it lost power in 2015. It allowed all manner of private interests – impurity, imposition, factionalism, god-fatherism, and money politics – to distract it from enforcing respect for the true interest of the party.

Since that major loss in 2015, the party has been struggling within itself to reestablish its internal stability and moral legitimacy. Then came the last (July 12, 2017) Supreme Court decision that gave the party a new lease of life and a fresh institutional stability.

The final litmus test of PDP’s regeneration and ability to survive into the future is the forthcoming elective convention, especially the race for the National Chairmanship position. This will be the final test of whether PDP has learnt enough lesions to ensure its survivability.

If commitment to the true interests of the party is not allowed to guide the conduct of this National Chairmanship race, then the concluding story will be an inglorious rendering of a nunc-dimittis. Unfortunately, there are indications that the old habits are creeping back to endanger the true interest of the party by sowing seeds of injustice, unfairness, factional selfishness, and cash-muscling syndromes.

Let me conclude this piece by identifying some of the factors that will derail the ability of the party to pursue its true interests. By the party’s established tradition, party positions are usually zoned to specific geopolitical zones. Accordingly, the chairmanship position should have been zoned to the South-West for the simple reason that the South-West has never produced the national chairman.

Equity, justice, and fairness demand that the post should go to the South West. But by some curious logic, rather than pursue this path of equity and justice, the position is said to have been zoned to the South contrary to the established tradition of zoning to a geopolitical zone. And rather than correcting this by micro zoning to the South-West some curious private interests are muscling for the position to be taken by the South-South.