The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, is presently at the strangest pass for a major political party in Nigeria. The party is wracked by protracted and enervating wranglings from within. And it is being systematically assailed from without. PDP has lost a major, loyal and safe state, Delta State, to the ruling party, and is likely to lose more states as the battle for 2027 prematurely heats up. The political grandeesstill left in PDP are mostly of divided loyalty: some are suspected to be working for the ruling party from within; some are reportedly staying back to further weaken the party to pave the way for the emergence of another party or a coalition; and some are clearly on their way out to a more viable political platformfor the next general election.
Is the end then nigh for PDP? It is still difficult to say, as politics is more art than science.
Whatever happens, PDP has had a good run. It is not only the oldest political party on the scene today, PDP is also the sole survivor of the three registered parties that ushered in the Fourth Republic in 1998/1999. The Alliance for Democracy, AD, lost its way in 2003 and was eventually supplanted by the Action Congress, AC (which later became Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN). The All People’s Party, APP, lingered for longer, initially effected a slight change by inserting Nigeria in its name to become ANPP, and eventually got folded, alongside ACN and other parties and splinter groups, into the All Progressives Congress, APC, in 2013. But PDP, even in its most difficult moments, has remained as PDP, a constant feature of Nigeria’s political landscape in more than a quarter of a century, and this epoch’s most dominant political force—whether in power or out of it.
PDP’s longevity thus far is a tribute to thoughtful political design. The party was conceived as a platform wide enough to accommodate different political tendencies and sturdy enough to serve as a bulwark of democracy. The idea behind PDP predated the party by more than a decade. With the fall of the Second Republic, most of the prominent politicians ended up in Kirikiri Maximum Prison, no matter their political parties. Some of the jailed politicians like Chief Alex Ekwueme, who was Vice President from 1979 to 1983, received an epiphany: there were two political parties in Nigeria—the political class and the military class. They reckoned that having a broad-based platform for politicians would be a good insurance against the usual suspects, who in alliance with disaffected politicians, rudely abbreviated the first two experiments with democratic rule in the country. The umbrella symbol for the eventual culmination of the big-tent idea in PDP was thus not an afterthought. It is an apt representation.
However, that accommodating and broad conceptionhas worked both ways for PDP. It led to the creation of a political behemoth but one so enormous to be threatened by its own bulk. PDP almost became the only game in town, and the internal contestation for control became its albatross. We will return to this shortly. Of the class of 1998/1999, PDP stood out as the only party with national aspiration, more than its precursors in either the leading National Party of Nigeria (NPN) or the United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP) of the Second Republic and the stillborn Third Republic respectively. AD clearly was a regional party, localised in the South West. APP had tentacles in three zones, but all restricted to one segment of the country, the north. At the outset, PDP was the only party that had dominant or significant presence across most of the geo-political zones, and it has largely maintained this national outlook.
The results of the 1999 general election confirmed PDP’s pre-eminent status in the beginning of this republic. At the gubernatorial level, PDP took control of 22 states—all the six states in the South South; all the five states in the South East; four of the six states in the North East; four of the six states in the North Central; and three of the seven states in the North West. On their parts, APP won the governorship election in eight states—four in the North West, two in the North Central and two in the North East; while AD won six states, all in the South West. PDP also earned more than a simple majority in both chambers of the National Assembly.
PDP was seen as the anointed party of the military (an impression reinforced not just by its presidential candidate being a former military head of state but also by the large number of retired military men within its ranks). In a sense, PDP became a synthesis of the thesis and the anti-thesis, a fusion of the crème of the two competing classes that Ekwueme and others had identified about 15 years before PDP’s formation in August 1998: the political class and the military class. It became obvious to AD and APP that for them to stand a fighting chance against PDP in the presidential election of February 1999, they would need a united front of their own. They formed a sensible alliance. But this didn’t help much. The PDP flagbearers, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, roundly defeated the APP candidates, Chief Olu Falae and Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi. (Though of AD, Falae ran on the platform of APP, the senior partner of the AD/APP alliance in a presidential election conceded to the South West to appease the zone for the annulment of the June 12,1993 presidential elections won by Chief MKOAbiola of the Social Democratic Party, SDP).
In the unusual race between two Yoruba chiefs, Obasanjo (fully rejected in his South West zone) polled 63% of the valid votes cast and led in 27 states and FCT. Though he got the lowest proportion of votes in Lagos (11%)—incidentally the state with the highest number of votes cast in the country—Obasanjo scored more than 70% of the valid votes in 19 states, the highest proportion being in Taraba (91%). There were question marks here and thereabout the 1999 presidential election, but the resultslargely reflected the prevailing sentiments in the country. Obasanjo and his PDP rode into the dawn of this republic with all-conquering, imperial air.
Four years after, in 2003, PDP further upped the ante. This was despite Obasanjo’s not-so-stellar performance in his first term, a more crowded field of candidates and a stiff competition from another retired military head of state, Major General Muhammadu Buhari of ANPP. PDP and Obasanjo dusted 19 other candidates to secure 62% of the valid votes cast in 2003, with some fantastic twists including winning the presidential elections in all the six South West states this time around, securing 99.9% of the valid votes cast in Ogun State and snapping 92% of the votes in Rivers State, a state which notably had 95% voter turnout that year. PDPsecured a near absolute majority in the National Assembly, gaining 17 seats apiece in the House of Representatives and the Senate and notching 62% of the seats in the House and about 70% in the Senate.
Similarly, PDP increased its governorship tally from 22 to 28: it flipped two North Central states from the APP (Kwara and Kogi) but lost Kano to APP and gained five South West states from AD. Lagos State was the lone survivor of the South West tsunami. Two things worthy of note here: AD, for some curious but obvious reason, did not present a presidential candidate in 2003 and did not form an alliance with any other party; PDP’s haul of 28 states later dropped to 27 when the courts in 2006 ruled that the 2003 gubernatorial election in Anambra State was won by Mr. Peter Obi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA.
PDP went on to win the presidency in two other electoral cycles—2007 and 2011— and to welcome or even poach governors and others from the other parties before tumbling out of power in 2015. Things have not been the same for the once towering party since 2015. But PDP’s decline did not start when it lost power. It started shortly after it strode majestically into office in 1999. From the very first day, PDP had been dogged by a consistent battle for the control of the party. PDP, as a big umbrella, was an agglomeration of different tendencies trying to upstage one another but unified by the common quest for power, not what to do with it (other parties are cut from the same cloth in this respect). The battle for control within PDP took different forms, but Obasanjo who was drafted to the party was able to impose himself, making himself the leader of the party ahead of the chairmen who he installed and replaced as he fancied along with principal officers of the parliament, especially Senate Presidents. The governors mimicked the president at the state level. Obasanjo had enforcers, who spared no means, to impose his will in the party and in the parliament. The governors did same in the states.
There were cracks within, and PDP remarkablybecame the biggest opposition to itself, ahead of the neutered or coopted opposition (Chief Bola Ige of AD and the party chairmen of AD and APP were appointed into Obasanjo’s cabinet ostensibly to form a government of national unity). Obasanjo with his totalising impulses triumphed but the big party was more of a divided house held together by the allure of power and the certainty that PDP offered as an electoral machine enhanced in no small measure by access to patronage and instruments of the state. PDP once provided such a certainty that the battle to fly its flag used to be fiercer than actual contests in the general election, as winning the PDP ticket became almost a guarantee for winning the election proper. (It must be said that internal opposition was also a net positive: it helped in holding Obasanjo in check. He was threatened a few times with impeachment bypeople from his own party and his Third Term bid—which he continues to lamely deny—was snookered because many PDP members made common cause with the opposition.)
The initially muted but bitter altercation between Obasanjo and Atiku in the lead up to the 2003 elections also contributed a lot to weakening the party. By 2003, PDP had become vulnerable. But the party survived because it wasn’t confronted by an opposition with the required spread and because it corralled state apparatus to its advantage. It even did more corralling in 2007 when it reportedly scored 70% of the valid votes in the presidential election. The magnitude of the enhancement even embarrassed the declared winner, late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.
The second major crisis that enfeebled PDP was the internal struggle over its power rotation principle following the death of Yar’Adua in 2010. President Goodluck Jonathan went on to complete Yar’Adua’s term and to win a fresh mandate in 2011, though with a reduced margin by PDP standard. The division over the rotation principle and the emergence of a viable opposition, which included a splinter group from PDP which former Vice President Atiku was part of, eventually led to the dethronement of the all-conquering PDP.
Meanwhile, the party had lofty ambitions and was not shy of trumpeting it. Some of its thinkers and foot soldiers, possibly high on hubris, used to tell anyone who cared to listen that PDP aspired to be like the LDP of Japan and the PRI of Mexico.Interestingly, the PDP shares the same colours with PRI, which ruled without interruption for 71 years in Mexico. PDP heavyweights, including a former chairman, used to boast that their party would rule Nigeria for between 60 and 70 years. They sounded believable because of PDP’s imposing stature at the time. But PDP’s dominance ended after 16 continuous years in office. It became the leading opposition party afterwards. But PDP was never designed to function as an opposition party. In football terms, PDP is a team that is programmed to starve other teams of the ball but is out of its depth without the ball. Out of office and without the accoutrements of power that it pressed to electoral advantage, PDP is lost, floundering, now being fed the bitter pills it patented. The problem is not that a party got knocked off its perch. It is PDP’s failure to adapt or reinvent itself, made a bit more difficult by the eagerness of most Nigerian politicians to jump on the winning team.
As at today and even in its diminished and threatened state, PDP is still a major party, given its existing structure, national spread and name recognition. The news of its death may be a bit exaggerated, though the circling of the vultures overhead cannot be ignored. PDP may continue to be a major party. It may become marginal. And it may even manage a comeback. Time will tell. But whatever happens to this once dominant party, it is difficult to write about the Fourth Republic without devoting some sizeable space to PDP. It has been a force to reckon with.
Credit:This Day