Recent developments in the Peoples Democratic
Party (PDP) should ordinarily have been taken as
the normal, internal palpitations in a healthy
political institution. But they were not. The PDP
was the country’s ruling party for 16 years and
is in possession of an expansive institutional memory to benefit our democracy. The PDP, as the
country’s leading opposition
party, has a formidable structure to help keep
the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in
check. But, as the APC marked its first anniversary
in power, the absence of the opposition was very
glaring. Instead of articulating its own informed
scorecard of the APC Federal Government at this
important milestone, the leaders of the PDP were
enmeshed in a complex leadership tussle for the
control of its future. The squabbles saw the leadership fragmented
into at least four factions claiming authority at
the national level. The factions included those led
by Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, who was sacked as
the interim national chairman by officials at the
recent convention of the party in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. The second group was led by Senator
Ahmed
Makarfi, who was appointed as the chairman of a
caretaker committee at the convention. A third
tendency was the collegiate leadership centered
on the founding fathers of the party including Prof. Jerry Gana and Senator Ibrahim Mantu, among
others. A fourth group coalesced around
the Board of Trustees (BoT) which claimed to
have intervened to stop the fragmentation. The
seeming crisis in the PDP is of concern to
watchers of our democracy in Nigeria because we need strong alternative political parties to
strengthen our multi party system and keep the
current party in power on its toes. The many
mistakes that the PDP made as a
governing party took place because of the
absence of any virile opposition party. We, as a nation, should avoid the mistake of having one
dominant ruling party, as this predisposes those
in power to impunity and corruption as experience
has shown. When this is the case, it is
the ordinary people that suffer the misrule more.
We urge both the ruling party and the other political parties to strengthen their internal
processes and give their political outfits the
character, distinct identity and vision that will
give Nigerians real choice when next we go to
the polls. Seventeen years after the military left the
political scene, party politics should have grown beyond the mere tussle for power or posts. It
should now be more about where each political
party wishes to take Nigeria and how they want
to achieve it. This can only happen if our politicians
learn from
their mistakes and build on areas where they have done well.

I concur!

Well said! But I must quickly add dat u can't give what u don't have. D current leadership brouhaha in d erstwhile ruling party is a reflection of d fact dat d party had been held together in d past not by principles of shared vision, national interests & common ideology but by d power & size of Ghana-must-go bags. And now dat there is no more place to feast, d cracks in d largest party in Africa has come to the fore. Good news for APC but bad news for Democratic governance which requires strong opposition to survive!