Faltering APC gives PDP confidence boost

Much more than the general economic crisis, and in particular the crippling fuel supply problem, the string of electoral losses suffered by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the strongholds of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has become a morale booster for the opposition. Shortly after the comprehensive beating it received in the last general elections, the PDP had reeled from one crisis to another, and lurched under the weight of unpalatable news about their leaders’ serial bungling and malfeasances. Mind-boggling stories of how its leading apparatchiks plundered the national treasury lowered the party in the esteem of all right-thinking Nigerians. Even though party leaders put up a brave face and defied the censorious gazes of their countrymen, it was clear the party was in danger of dying altogether should the APC develop the killer instinct to push the knife deeper into the back of the prostrate opposition.

But less than a year after that famous 2015 shellacking, the opposition party has regained some measure of confidence, composure and even boisterousness. Not only did it almost immediately begin to win re-run elections and a large number of court cases, it has proved dexterous in retaining influence in inverse proportion to the damage it inflicted on the body politic. It is almost as if the states where it still retains influence are inured to the unhealthy politics the party practiced for more than a decade. Party leaders and hangers-on have been accused of stealing billions of dollars and naira, but they have simply shrugged off the allegations with perfect insouciance. And beginning with hoary and disapproving whispers of APC’s tactics and politics shortly after the 2015 polls, the PDP has graduated slowly and steadily this year to loud declamations to draw attention to the ruling party’s clumsiness and frustrations. They sense APC faltering; and they assume that that faltering provokes and promotes their own renaissance and lustre.

Since the last general elections, the PDP has won a significant governorship poll in Bayelsa State, home state of the former president, Goodluck Jonathan. And they have won virtually all the re-run and by-election polls in the key South-South states of Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Delta, Cross River, and even Osun (Ife Central state constituency) in the Southwest. Their confidence is now considerably buoyed, their nerves increasingly steadier than steel, their ambitions hugely bolstered, and their voices crisp, loud, self-assured and eloquent. Accused of egregious financial malfeasances, they have nonetheless spoken disparagingly of the ruling party’s sometimes hesitant and incongruous juridical penchant. Accused of running the country aground in their 16 years in office, they have, regardless of logic, mocked the unsteady bureaucratic gait and exploratory politics of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency. And accused of gross indiscipline, the PDP has met the country’s derison with its own carefully wrought burlesque.

One year is hardly enough to undo the damage done by the PDP over 16 years. And sometimes, things must get worse before they can begin to get better. But such logic and such apparent truism do not cut ice with a hurting and suffering public. If the Buhari presidency can’t seem to make things immediately better, Nigerians at least want it to steady the ship of state and put some fair amount of food on their tables. Instead of these palliatives, the economy has seemed to go into a tailspin consequent upon falling oil prices; inflation has shot through the roof; and insecurity perpetrated by robbers, kidnappers and herdsmen, among others, has never seemed to be more corrosive and audacious. This long list of jeremiads has prompted the electorate to be rather indifferent to the APC than spiteful of the PDP. Moreover, the opposition party has optimistically read the public’s unusual and convoluted state of suspended animation as a form of endorsement, and is thus ambitiously hoping to supplant the ruling party in the next general elections.

Whether the PDP can perform that miracle in 2019 is not immediately clear, especially in view of how a few months in the time-space continuum of politics can bring about revolutionary changes in electoral behaviour. Indeed, the political condition in many states indicates a disturbing state of flux on a scale that is both shocking and troubling, considering the outcome of the last general elections when the whole country was swept off their feet in a sea of near unanimous and euphoric progressives victory. Now, without the benefit of the sanitising transformation many Nigerians require of the PDP, and based solely on the weaknesses and failings of the APC, the opposition is hoping to transit into office on nothing but the sheer idealism of wishes and youthful dreams and exuberance. The PDP is neither projecting wholesome politics nor emphasising strength. It is instead fixated on office and power.

Nigeria is evolving into a two-party system. It is, therefore, not destabilising to the country, nor counterproductive, for both parties to stand a near equal chance of winning office. While the APC is in office, it must be coaxed into offering quality governance and meeting the needs of the electorate. And while the PDP is in opposition, it must be encouraged to take cognisance of its 16 years in office and the tragic failures that attended its rule. Without the needed self-assessment and re-examination, the PDP will be unable to remedy its failures, a prerequisite for positioning itself for a credible shot at the presidency in the near future. Were the party to win a major election without the reforms and re-engineering the public desperately and rightly ask of them, both democracy and good governance would be jeopardised.

It is indeed bemusing that the PDP hopes to leapfrog over its weaknesses and failures, and land smack into the cushioned and coveted office of the president. As this column suggested a few weeks back, the party must urgently purge its ranks of those who executed the worst form of thievery Nigeria has ever known, far exceeding the stealing perpetrated by the Sani Abacha military dictatorship. It must re-examine its values and put a huge distance between the party and those who led it to ignominious defeat last year. It must also reassess its policies, programmes and ideology to incorporate the needs of the modern era.

So far, the party has neither shown it learnt any lesson nor has it exhibited a willingness to explore other modern and civilised ways of doing political business. All that the party has really admitted doing wrongly was picking a southern candidate to run against the APC’s northern candidate, Muhammadu Buhari in 2015. Any other wrongdoing was, to the PDP, tangential and superficial, including its deliberate and puzzling belittlement of the Chibok schoolgirls abduction. The APC may be lax in governing with the kind of precision and insight its 2015 campaigns signposted, but the absolute lack of mortification by the PDP, not to say its loathing for internal review and re-engineering, may ensure that in the next polls the ruling party will escape paying an exorbitant electoral price for its shortcomings. The APC’s misdeeds may have strengthened the PDP’s confidence and internal resolve, but there is nothing to show that the opposition’s confidence of victory in the next general elections is also not wholly misplaced. The PDP has won many re-run polls since the APC assumed office last year, especially in its strongholds, but to expand beyond its territories will take far more than the enthusiasm and euphoria the party has deployed in place of substantial internal reforms.

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