After waiting and scheming for months for the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration to collapse under the weight of electoral and religious contradictions, the legends of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have finally decided to forge ahead with measures they should have adopted moments after they lost the 2023 presidential election. The honour of being noble losers, which the world would have accorded them last year had they reconciled themselves to their losses and put the country far ahead of their ambitions, is painfully and permanently withheld. Losing that election was galling enough. But being asked to congratulate the winner, the most sensible thing to do in the circumstance, was to them anathema. They first hid behind the curtain of their constitutional rights to litigate the All Progressives Congress (APC) victory. They had argued that it would not make sense to offer congratulations before they took their chances in the courts. In the end, the litigation process went far beyond the law; it became a bitter and acrimonious exercise to strip the victor of all legitimacy before, during and after the proceedings.
Secondly, the PDP legends, some of them nesting in other political parties, actively schemed for the abortion of the poll victory even before the electoral umpire was through with collating the results. To aid their rebellion, they had diverse champions promoting abortion, some of them former presidents emotionally invested in a different outcome other than President Tinubu, and business leaders financially invested in any outcome other than APC. Shocked to the marrow by the final results, they were unable to help themselves from perpetuating the plot to scuttle the poll by any means. Might street protests do the trick? They tried to assemble opinion leaders, activists, civil society gangs, and sundry handymen and malcontents eternally bequeathed with grudges of indeterminate origin. Somehow, no critical mass was formed. Might preemptive coup d’etat then be the needed panacea? The military were at first amused, then uncannily indifferent when the calls came for them to intervene: they sensed that the world had since changed, perhaps very fundamentally, to countenance that retrogressive measure. Besides, they were unsure that the country had not become badly fractured to make any coup both undesirable and counterproductive. It might very well spell the country’s doom.
Finally, sensing that a vocal, but largely insensitive and ignorant, public opinion dictated by Internet denizens was apathetical to the inauguration of the Tinubu presidency, the PDP legends and their champions and their bedazzled charlatans prayed for Armageddon to descend and consume the administration and hypothetically instigate a national rebirth. Month after month, they hoped for that celestial fire; but month after month, no fire fell. A few days to the administration’s one year in office, the PDP has finally reconciled itself to defeat. Having split themselves into four entities shortly before the polls, an act that was a byproduct of their political naivety and tactical incompetence, the legends and their tired champions are now grudgingly contemplating the way out of three torrid election losses and nearly nine years out of office. They had each vaingloriously regarded themselves as independently capable of taking on the APC behemoth in the last poll; now they are no longer sure of their talisman or indeed of anything. If whipping up the populace into frenzy failed to furnish them the insurrection they needed, and the courts, which they had maligned endlessly, stood pat on the law and would not gratify their lusts, there was little anyone could do to get them their hearts’ desire. They now hope that the next election would not miscarry. But it probably will miscarry for a number of reasons.
The most pertinent reason for a future PDP poll failure is their inability, nay abject unwillingness, to rethink the PDP. When that party, which was then a darling of the military, ferried ex-head of state Olusegun Obasanjo into office, it only mimicked ideology. Its real ideological mooring was tenuous and incoherent. Worse, they were unlucky to put in office a retired army general whose political and social worldview was festooned with hubris and all manner of distortions. The new president thus imbued the PDP with his private failings and weaknesses, and ensured that the baton he passed on to the next generation of national leaders was brittle and greasy. Moreover, after his eight years in office, he suddenly realised he had done little to mentor the next generation. Shorn of a unifying and inspiring ideology, and inexperienced in preparing promising leaders, the PDP quickly began to fray at the edges, and after the 2015 election, simply disintegrated. One of the PDP legends who has taken the front seat in the party today, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, is unfortunately as eclectic as they come and not too dissimilar to Chief Obasanjo in his messianic appreciation of power and superficial consideration of ideology. He has the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Peter Obi, a former Anambra governor and PDP legend, as his right-hand man. Alas, Mr Obi is also destitute of ideology, largely unprincipled, and an opportunistic manipulator of religion and ethnicity. How both gentlemen hope to reform and unite the PDP and then reposition it for state capture in the next three years is hard to fathom.
But there is another pertinent factor: Alhaji Atiku himself. In an interview with BBC Hausa Service last week, the former vice president laboured unconvincingly to showcase his altruism. He affirmed his disposition towards forming a political coalition against the ruling APC, belatedly accepting that had the PDP not splinter into four parts before the last poll, he would probably have won the presidency. Mr Obi had also visited Alhaji Atiku and other northern political titans like former senate president Bukola Saraki and former Jigawa State governor Sule Lamido in furtherance of coalition talks. So, everything points to the possibility of a coalition of opposition parties squaring up with the APC in 2027. But there is a snag. The former vice president is obsessed with winning the presidency for himself. In the BBC interview, he, however, indicated that if the party zoned the presidency elsewhere, he would still energise the coalition to at least snatch the presidency from the APC. He predicates that ‘altruistic’ goal on the need to salvage Nigeria from the hands of an inept ruling party, thus making his new objective that of saving the country rather than actualising his personal goal of ruling it. Is he believable? Hardly, for the devil is in the detail. He indeed lied when he suggested in the interview that the PDP ordered an open primary contest for all aspirants in the last presidential election. No, he and his supporters forced the party into opening up the space, the consequences of which eventually led to their dismal 2023 performance.
In the interview, Alhaji Atiku created the impression that he would do everything to ensure that zoning was foreclosed. But if he fails, he would conversely do little to back the party’s candidate. After all, he is not averse to making his antipathy towards President Tinubu his other main and satisfying ambition. If he can’t become candidate again, let alone stand the chance of winning the presidency, he might be willing to commit significant amount of resources to unseating the object of his undiluted malice. Nevertheless, the BBC interviews and the Obi visits, including the reunions, are nothing but the first few tentative steps towards forming a formidable coalition to unseat the APC. It is still early days, however, and the variables that will form the kernel of the next polls are still crystallising. If in the end a durable coalition is formed – and this will be difficult to cobble – there is little now to suggest that a stable coalition can win a difficult and fateful presidential election in 2027.
