2027 and PDP’s expiry date

Years ago, I asked an older person why a particular person’s business fell into ruin after his death. The person was wealthy, with a chain of retail businesses spanning several sectors. Shortly after his death, his outlets began to close one after another. His wives and children quarrelled over how to divide his inheritance, with no thought given to sustaining his businesses. I remember the answer the person gave: when a rich person dies, his money also follows him. In my childhood, it meant something mystical about wealth that attaches to a person, and when they die, it departs and probably returns to that family in another generation. As an adult, I understood it. Wealth and achievement do not simply disappear because someone has died. They disintegrate because they are attached to a personality’s charisma rather than grounded in structures that could have sustained them.

Nigeria has had some stupendously rich men whose legacies are currently in tatters. Every now and then, you see videos on social media that show the houses they once lived in looking unkempt, palatial estates being overtaken by weeds. Their many children with their countless wives cannot summon the initiative to preserve what the deceased left behind. Each simply grabs their own share and walks off into the sunset of obscurity, the life of opulence and privilege they once lived receding into a distant memory, occasionally recalled in quiet moments. Meanwhile, the point of having so many children was to build a legacy. It takes their deaths to realise that creating value is not about the number of heads but the quality of reason. This same inability to create the structures that can sustain achievement repeats in several spheres of our lives, including politics. Today’s good example is the political party called the Peoples Democratic Party.

Once upon a time, the PDP was a most formidable political party. They had power; they had money; they had the whole country in their pockets. The party’s founding fathers—riding high on the hog of power capture—boasted they would rule the country for 60, or even 100 years. Nothing was going to stop them, or so we thought. Until it took one election—just one! —to reveal that everything that looked like achievement was mere fluff calibrated on a few charismatic personalities. Once that was removed, they fell apart. Today, to describe the PDP as a ghost of its former self is to pretend the apparition bears any resemblance to what it was pre-2015. The party is as good as dead. They do not have a single governor left; their influence in the state assemblies has been considerably whittled down. In the National Assembly, they have a handful of senators and roughly 12 per cent of the House of Representatives members.

While PDP was the PDP, its founding fathers took no pain to think beyond the moment. They had power, but the best they did with it was hustle for money, appointments, and resource allocation.

Nothing more. They built nothing that would last, let alone outlast them. If it ever crossed their minds, they would have dismissed it. Why waste time thinking of the future when today was begging to be eaten? The result of their myopia is now clear to all. The whole architecture of the PDP, the party that once boasted it was the largest in Africa, has been reduced to the fiefdom of one egomaniac named Nyesom Wike.

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Wike, currently serving as the FCT Minister, has told us he would support the APC candidate in the presidential election (even though his party is fielding a candidate). For the governorship, National Assembly, and the State House of Assembly elections, he wants his party to win. Now, that would have been hilarious if it did not have repercussions for what we still call our democracy. When the man who currently represents the face of what is left of the PDP abandons his candidate during the presidential elections and returns the following week to ask voters to still vote for his party, it demoralises the whole affair. What is the point of an arrangement where a political party’s purveyors lack the conviction to stand by their own candidates? Today, they want you to vote for another party, and tomorrow, they want you to still retain them. If your party is not good enough for the federal, it cannot be good enough for the state either. The APC might as well clear all the seats so that the PDP can start its journey into oblivion.

But Wike does not want the PDP to die. If it does, he would have to join the APC (or start another party), and that would make him an average-sized fish in a pond full of many similarly-sized fish. His best bet is to maintain an outsized influence in the drained PDP pool to stay politically relevant and even barter for future political appointments. His current game mirrors the 2003 deal the AD governors of the southwest made with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo when he ran for re-election as president on the PDP platform. The agreement was that they would support him in the presidential election while he let them keep their seats as governors. All of them, except Bola Tinubu of Lagos State, who did not join the alliance, lost their seats to PDP candidates. People like Bisi Akande of Osun are still bitter at Obasanjo for supposedly deceiving them, forgetting how they contributed to their own losses. The same outcome could repeat next year if Tinubu wins one Saturday and people decide to back his party the following weekend. People might calculate that since there is no more distinction between the APC and the PDP, why maintain the illusion of an opposition party?

Wike might be calculating that once Tinubu wins his own election, he will be generous enough to give him something to take home, rather than using federal might to blow his sponsored candidates out of the water. But Tinubu is not like Muhammadu Buhari, the man who won his re-election in 2019 and forgot to reciprocate the governors who mobilised for him at the state level. Buhari told voters to vote for whoever they liked. He had secured his own re-election; why care about the pawns? Tinubu might just be invested in the outcomes of the elections that Wike will sponsor. He might want to completely vanquish the residues of the PDP so that—in Rivers State especially—they will not pose a threat in the foreseeable future. Besides, what better time to clip Wike’s wings so he does not continue to be an albatross around his neck, as he has been to Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi? Tinubu is the kind of person who enjoys being the only star in the firmament while others bow before him in worshipful adoration. He might get tired of tolerating Wike’s pompous nonsense.

However, the election goes on; hopefully, the PDP shrinks further until it is ultimately absorbed by another party. If it cannot maintain a principled differentiation from another party, then there is no point in its existence. One of our problems is how easily we can set up political parties without any expectation of ideological value; the result has been their needless multiplication, many of them poor copies of another. More political parties should mean more options, but the only people who benefit from the surplus are politicians who use them as platforms to compete in elections without adding value to the process. The political space is presently fragmented among many delusional aspirants who, ideally, should build coalitions to strengthen the political process. Instead, we just keep piling on candidates. Hopefully, the 2027 election eats up as many as possible, starting with the PDP, the behemoth that has become diminutive.