Nigeria: A President and His Governors!bby Kabir Mato

The level of desperation being publicly
shown at the highest level of the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) is a clear
indication that the time has come. From all
indications, the party may after all only rule
for sixteen difficult years and not the sixty
or even hundred years that its crude
leaders often spite on our faces.
The last fourteen years in Nigerian history
would certainly go down in history as the
worst in every measure of human
catastrophe. Not even colonial period and
the civil war era as well as other minor and
major tragedies that befell the nation before
1999 could rival the pogrom, mayhem,
misrule and all other negative additives as
we have seen under the governments of the
PDP since 1999.
In electoral history, the charades that
occasioned several of the four different
polls we have in the name of general
elections especially the one of 2007 would
remain thresholds in global electoral
frauds. Yet, those who benefited form these
obstructions have made very violent and
wrong uses with power.
As we speak today, the essence of modern
state system has been grossly violated and
the sanctity of life and property completely
lost in Nigeria. Almost everyone of us goes
to sleep with two eyes open due to poor
political brinkmanship that has yielded so
much social disparity and equilibrium
whose effects are by the minutes
manifesting in form of violent agitations
from the aggrieved energetic exuberant
young people who have no other way to
dispense of the tremendous energies of
youthfulness because they are out of
school and out of jobs and it appears there
is nobody out there ready to care for them.
Nigeria under the PDP has become a worst-
case scenario of the literary animal farm. If
this is what democracy means, then, it is
unfortunate; we are getting it completely
wrong and in tears and blood.
The desperation by the PDP national
leadership under Bamanga Tukur in cohort
with Goodluck Jonathan to wrestle the
mantle of the party from domination of the
governors, a clear agenda that in the first
place was speculated as reason behind the
enforcement of BAMANGA Tukur down the
party throat has come to the open.
For some days now, rumors of presidential
dissatisfaction with the manner Rotimi
Amaechi was piloting the affairs of the
Nigeria Governors Forum was all over the
place. Attempts to make the forum remove
him was made with the hard place, the only
alternative was thus the very unintelligent
strategy of coming up with what they called
the PDP Governors Forum and ready to
provide leadership is the noisy governor of
Akwa-Ibom state.
The PDP leadership at the highest level
may not know that the singular act of that
creation has not only exposed the level of
divide in their rank but has open a vistas of
deeper contradiction within the party and
thus making it easy for the presidency and
Wadata House to be dragged in the mud by
its own members.
I will be surprised if many governors of the
PDP extraction would go along with the
new tradition against the old. The reason is
simple, they would lose their relevance,
they would henceforth be subjects of
presidential palace and the president in
Abuja would decide who becomes a
councilor in any local government area of
any state not to talk of other senior elective
and appointive positions both at the state
and the center.
Even if it is a party affair as indeed it is,
what has Amaeachi done to earn so much
anger of Bamanga and Jonathan? The guy
is lucky he is doing a second term already
he would have faced the Timpriye Silva
option, and that precisely is why I will
advise my PDP friends who are governors
to stay put with the Amaechi fold rather
than go towards Goodswill Akapbio. It will
be suicidal if they fall into that trap under
whatever circumstance.
The message in all these is a clear. The
PDP is desperate and about to loose power
to the popular will of Nigerians. It shows
clearly that the desperation has reached
crescendo and there is confusion all over
the place. The governors are struggling to
retain their relevance and hold on the party
while the presidency is increasing the
tempo of its agitation to shove aside the
powerful governors so that anything and
everything that is PDP would come straight
from the villa.
In my thinking, it is better to have centers
of power in a polity than just having one
that can make and unmake at will. That is
called dictatorship in political lexicon and it
is more dangerous than power diffusion.
It is amazing that the president and his
men can waste so much time and
resources in minor issues that boarder
around ego and self-ambition at the
expense of the nation and its peoples. Why
should President Jonathan get jittery mid
way into a term he promised to be his last?
Adding salt to injury, a term that is
bedeviled by so much issues that have kept
the nation years back. A tenure that is
unprecedented in the quantum damages
and wastages to man and resources. A
tenure characterized by blood bath, sorrow,
tears and blood.
I thought the PDP and its President would
await the verdict of Nigerians on whether to
continue or not. I am of the view that the
arrogance with which the PDP officials talk
to Nigerians is amazing. They rudely tell us
they would rule for one hundred years
whether we like it or not.
If democracy is a game of number, the
views of the citizens must take center
stage. The crisis that is brewing in the
party shows that the game is up and the
party would face the verdict of the people. I
am of the view that the time has come
when desperation would be met with the
will of the people. It cannot be business as
usual.
We say more grease to the elbows of the
PDP and its officials and reiterate that they
cannot have it the way they had it in the
past. It is time that the Nigerian opposition
organizes itself so that it can cash in on
the opportunities that are now open to
wrestle power from the hands of the PDP
and its officials.
The election of Chief Tony Anenih to chair
its board of trustees in my view is another
huge blunder. Papa can no longer fix
anything because he is already under fix in
his native Edo state where Adams
Oshiomhole holds forte. Again, the party
was unable to do an election amongst the
contestants who aspired to head the BoT.
The simple meaning of that is that ‘the
largest party in Africa’ has yet failed in
democracy. God save Nigeria. May the
crisis in the PDP continue to abate so that
Nigeria may be the better for it.