THREE days after the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national chairman, Uche Secondus, offered a public apology to Nigerians for his party’s misdeeds in office, the Information minister, Lai Mohammed, responding to a challenge from the opposition party, named him as one of those who allegedly looted the country. Mr Mohammed was careful to rest the naming and shaming on ongoing court cases, perhaps aware that his claims could be litigated. Should Mr Secondus decide to challenge the minister, it is not clear whether he would stand on any solid ground. No one can say, in addition, whether Mr Mohammed’s ploy of naming and shaming was not actually designed to diminish the gravity and importance of the public apology offered by the PDP chairman. If Mr Secondus hoped that his public apology would serve as the main talking point for quite some time, or even inspire a revival in that political behemoth of years past, that hope must now be totally lost.
It is practical politics for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to skewer the PDP and take the shine off its imponderable and belated apology. This probably explains why a day after the apology, the APC downplayed the value of apology as against the usefulness of restitution. Nigerians did not want an apology, the APC mocked, only a return of the loot squirreled away by members and friends of the former ruling party. The PDP of course countered, suggesting that even the APC, despite its sanctimonious politics, was funded and enthroned by looted funds. There will be no end to the brickbats from both sides of Nigeria’s apparently politically irreconcilable divide. Perhaps a reconciliation is not even needed. The PDP has apologised, and it seems enough for now to examine what that apology is worth.
There is no proof that the PDP chairman’s apology proceeded from a consensus within the party, even though he suggested that it did. The apology in fact seemed at once spontaneous and contrived, lacking depth and substance, not to say conviction and vigour. He offered the apology in Abuja on Monday when he spoke at a public discourse where the mechanics and dynamics of nation building preoccupied him, his party and other conferees. Said he: “PDP made many mistakes and we accept that there may have been impunity and imposition in the past, this is human. But the ability to admit making mistakes is one of the best ways to make amends and progress. Let me use this opportunity to apologise to Nigerians for our past mistakes. This is the best way forward and we want to set a precedent that if one makes mistakes it is wise to apologise and to move forward on a new note. We do not want to behave like the APC which would rather tell lies. On behalf of members of my NWC I apologise to Nigerians and ask for your support in seeking to rebuild the country. This is a clear departure from what the APC is known for because the party believes in using lies.”
Mr Secondus suggested that there “might have been impunity and imposition in the past”. If he was unsure of his party’s transgressions, why would he embark on that self-abnegating path of grovelling before his party’s mockers? It is true, as he says, that the APC has imperiously refused to acknowledge its own faults, especially its inability to offer profound and proactive leadership, but the PDP chairman’s apology is vitiated by any sort of comparison with the APC’s demonstrable lack of capacity. What the country appeared to ask for was a sincere apology from the PDP unfettered by any comparison with the APC, and backed by both a purge of its ranks and a projection of great ideas and philosophies for the future. The APC asks for restitution. That is not for the PDP to act upon; it is the courts’ responsibility to exact revenge and catharsis on behalf the sullen and wounded public.
Even if the public apology was a product of the PDP’s consensus, Mr Secondus managed to present it with a striking ungainliness, bereft of the passion and ethical conviction real and deep penance is associated with. The PDP chairman is himself not a very charismatic man. He is undoubtedly accommodating, fairly well spoken, possesses a great measure of grace and even some striking nobility. But where his words needed to be driven with gusto and flair, and where his ideas needed to be accompanied by fire and hail, he had inexplicably chosen either a sepulchral silence or whisper, or an inscrutable gaze and tame posture. Mr Secondus is the perfect example of why the PDP is destitute of men and leaders. He might be the party’s safe bet after the turbulent reign of the rambunctious Ali Modu Sheriff, but he seems hardly the appropriate man to match the permanent spuriousness of the APC, a ruling party whose men and leaders, apart from taking office unprepared, behave more with the radical and sometimes regicidal strain of anarchists.
The PDP chairman’s uninspiring outlook is compounded by the contumacious politics of the fiery duo of Nyesom Wike and Ayo Fayose, governors of Rivers and Ekiti States respectively, who singlehandedly enthroned him. Both governors are practical men and exponents of realpolitik, not men of ideas; enforcers and antagonists, not men known for their placability. To be backed by this unprincipled pair and succoured by them is to completely empty oneself of any conviction, no matter how grandly pretentious or annoyingly pedestrian that conviction is. Yet, given the mercurial but generally fruitless demeanour of President Muhammadu Buhari, and given Nigeria’s sterile politics, the PDP desperately needs a chairman with some depth, drive, steel and courage. Senator Sheriff, who was also a governor, was partially that man. Wealthy, pugnacious and daring, and full of acrimonious persistence, he would have matched the APC naira for naira, and punch for punch. Yet, he was unlikely to tower above the ruling party’s dubious morality, seeing that he himself is politically devious. But at least the APC would not be indifferent to him, nor fail to be mortified by his continuous presence on newspaper front pages.
However, instead of a barren apology, especially one not accompanied by restitutive eagerness, Nigerians had expected from the PDP a thorough transformation and regeneration of its leadership and membership. More, they expected that in about three years, the tremors of defeat would have worn off and the party would rework its existential structure and philosophy. Unfortunately, its leaders are now being dragged through the muck of corruption allegations, its structure is left forlorn and unwieldy, its ranks left perplexed by defeat and incompetent leadership, and its hope of regaining paradise more doubtful than even before it was electorally pulverised. Yet the country needs a strong and enterprising opposition, one that Nigerians hope could be typified by the PDP, as crippled as it has seemed.
The PDP, it must be admitted, has made some efforts. It fought off the rampage by Sen. Sheriff, reconstituted its leadership through a surprisingly well-managed convention, one that is perhaps better than the APC could conceivably organise, conducted one or two conferences, and energised its secretariat to respond to the APC’s tenuous maledictions. But these are clearly not enough. Since it cannot overthrow its chairman nor dismantle the Nyesom-Fayose condominium, nor yet pretend to be what it had never been, the progress of the party, not to say its possible return to office in Abuja in 2019, will depend almost entirely on APC’s anticipated implosion. The APC ensemble, like any other futile political smorgasbord, could not win in 2015 without the meltdown suffered by the PDP; the PDP will perhaps now hope to procure the same demons to help fracture the ruling party and gnaw away at its liver. This political gambling is, alas, idiosyncratically Nigerian.
Luckily for the PDP, the APC is in mortal dread of itself, fearful of conducting congresses and convention, and scared of even its own shadow. It is now being dragged screaming and kicking into holding a convention. Its current leadership is reluctant to engage that unsettling and potentially explosive process, whether it is constitutional or not; and so it has resorted to the worst forms of intrigues ever. (See box). Whether the party can hold out against the persistent call for change within itself is hard to say. If it goes ahead to organise its congresses and convention, and by some miracle stays together beyond that elective process, the PDP will need not just an external force to give it victory or make a strong showing in the next general elections, it will in fact need a miracle akin to that which saw Jesus walk on water.
The PDP should not be surprised that no one is taken in by its feeble penance, nor be shocked that everyone sees its touted change as tentative and hesitant. The party is, in addition, clearly unable to embrace restitution. For whatever it is worth, therefore, it should be encouraged over and over again to purge its leadership of those who in the eyes of the law personify corruption, to propound great and uplifting ideas about how the fractured and impotent Nigerian society should be run, and to show a clear readiness to offer Nigeria a convincing alternative to the APC’s complaisant but ineffective politicking. More, the party must assemble a group of technocrats and politicians whose instincts are sound and whose ideas resonate with the public. There is nothing to show that Mr Secondus can chart that new direction, nor does there seem to be anyone in the party or its leadership who can help him to shoulder that great burden. The party must urgently do something, indeed anything, other than wait for the ruling party to splinter. For if that splintering does not occur, the PDP would be hard put to find a formula to sustain its relevance beyond 2019. A defeat in the next general elections, especially of the kind and scale that stupefied it for some three years, could sound its death knell.
The post PDP’s feeble, tentative penance appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.
Source: The Nation
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