PDP Is Dead! Long Live APC!!

The hitherto ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Nigeria is literally dead. Its former leaders are either on the run (on the sick bed abroad), or are afraid to utter a word out of fear of being remembered and linked with one corrupt deal or the other. The members of the PDP are the major beneficiaries of the $2.1billion earmarked for the acquisition of arms for the war against Boko Haram, which the former national security adviser (NSA) Col Sambo Dasuki (rtd) allegedly diverted to politicians and other interests.

For a party that boasted that it would rule Nigeria for 60 years, it is strange that a small bump on the way, which is the loss of the presidency in 2015, has left the party prostrate.

Right now, it does not have a national chairman or even acting chairman. Uche Secondus claims to be the acting national chairman of the party, but the former special adviser on political matters to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Alhaji Ahmed Gulak has obtained a perpetual injunction from the court to stop Secondus from parading himself as the chairman of the party. Add that to the fact that the tenure of its acting Board of Trustees (BOT) chairman has expired it becomes obvious of the leadership vacuum in the party. To fill the vacuum Gulak has urged board members to urgently elect a new chairman for the board. There are doubts that the meeting called by Gulak would be well attended due to divergent interests. The party’s national publicity secretary, Olisa Metuh is in detention over his alleged complicity in the DasukiGate. Nobody it seems speaks for the party, as the only voice left is that of the Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, but there is a limit to what the ‘lonely voice in the wilderness’ can achieve when there is no savior in sight. Former President Goodluck Jonathan has better things to do and worry about. There are those who are already sponsoring media campaigns to ensure that Jonathan is charged to court over the DasukiGate, since the embattled Dasuki allegedly claimed that he disbursed funds based on the approval of Jonathan. Obasanjo had dumped the party on the eve of the 2015 general election and is an APC sympathizer despite all pretensions.

While PDP is losing its members, the ranks of the APC is swelling by day, helped in part by the emerging scenario where every member of the PDP is perceived to be corrupt while anybody that defects to the APC is perceived to be ‘progressive’ and incapable of committing acts of corruption even when there are judicial commissions of inquiry that indicted them. Little wonder, former governor of Old Anambra State, Chief Jim Nwobodo who was allegedly linked with the DasukiGate has dumped the PDP for APC, perhaps to be canonized saint.

Even Senator Uche Ekwunife who got to the senate through the PDP, and was recently sacked by the court, has convinently defected to the APC to fly the party’s flag in the forthcoming rerun senatorial election in Anambra Central senatorial district.

It is becoming obvious that with the determination of President Muhammadu Buhari to tighten the noose on past and present corrupt leaders in the PDP, there would continue to be mass defection to APC to take cover away from the tattered and licking umbrella of the discredited and disgraced PDP!