Jonathan, Sheriff, Makarfi and PDP’s 2019 ambition

IN the next few months, it will be obvious whether yesterday’s Court of Appeal decision on the contentious Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leadership tussle is sufficient to end the nearly one year schism in the party. On Friday the court declared Ali Modu Sheriff as the authentic chairman of the PDP, thereby hardening the obviously forced marriage between the former Borno State governor and the party which is yearning to throw off his yoke. But as many politicians know, sometimes, legal outcomes do not prove as potent and medicinal as political outcomes. And for now, no one is sure whether there can ever be a political solution to the leadership struggle in the party or whether the party can ever produce a strategist able to chart a way forward for the disheartened and apprehensive members of the self-appointed largest party in Africa.

Last week, however, both factions of the party led by Senator Sheriff and a former governor of Kaduna State, Ahmed Makarfi, were active in selling their controversial mandates to party faithful and giving the impression that their bona fides were unquestionable. Senator Sheriff, an implacable and pugnacious politician, was in Delta State pumping up the adrenalin of party members who gathered to hear him serenade them at a town hall meeting in Agbor. Senator Makarfi on the other hand was in Abuja together with highly respected party leaders to receive and endorse the report of the Strategy Review and Inter-Party Affairs Committee led by Jerry Gana, a professor of Geography and former minister.

In a way, last week was therefore replete with psychological operations executed by the two factional leaders. On the surface, the Makarfi faction seems to enjoy the upper hand both in terms of mass appeal and elite following. The former Kaduna State governor is not only highly regarded, he has demonstrated a high degree of level-headedness, responsibility, calmness under fire, and has proven to be a proponent of a collegiate system of leadership. His idiosyncrasies, which also obviously eschew any form of presidential ambition, have seen him soar in confidence since his appointment as caretaker chairman in last May’s controversial Port Harcourt convention and attracted some of the party’s biggest and brightest names. That some of these big names, including former party chairman Bamanga Tukur and a former Board of Trustees (BoT) chairman Tony Anenih, turned up last Wednesday to receive the Prof Gana report was, therefore, not surprising. More, that the committee was given audience by former president Goodluck Jonathan seemed to have added to the thoroughness and credibility of both the Gana-led committee and the Senator Makarfi leadership faction.

It is not clear whether the dispute will get to the Supreme Court. If it does, and except the apex court saves Senator Sheriff, or he can, failing that judicial reprieve, contrive some ingenious methods and measures to energise his faction, the safe final bet may be on the Senator Makarfi faction, which at the moment may be loth to imagine bailing out and forming a mega party. Three things, however, stand out from the submission of the Gana report.

One, former vice president Alex Ekwueme, who also received the report in Enugu on Thursday, is right to argue that those who hijacked the PDP soon after its founding, especially after the inauguration of the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency in 1999, neither had the discipline needed to nurture the party to full strength nor the principles and philosophical convictions needed to imbue the party with a great and noble sense of purpose. Said he while addressing Prof Gana and his team: “PDP was packaged to be a mass movement of all Nigerians just like the ANC of South Africa. We started that way, the first election in 1998, December 5, we won massively across the country, we took control of 28 out of 36 states,  In 1999, we ended up with 21 of the 36 governors. South-East and South-South were all PDP, 10 of the 19 governors of the north were PDP, it was a strong showing. We also had control of the National Assembly. With that showing, all we needed to do was to manage the party properly as envisaged by the founding fathers, making it a mass movement and expanding its power base. Unfortunately, some people, who did not know how the party was formed or what informed its philosophy, got involved in the party and decided to convert it to a personal estate without regard to the underpinning principles that formed it, and gradually, we started to lose ground.”

Two, when the report was presented to him, Dr Jonathan also observed that the party derailed when it focused on personalities or strongmen instead of strong institutions. According to him, “Yes, we lost the presidential election, but that doesn’t diminish us. Every other party still knows that PDP is a leading party. Losing the presidency is something temporary. We should be able to get that position back as long as we are able to get our acts together.” He then added: “There is no way a nation will grow with weak institutions, because everything about politics is about the people, not about the individuals… You see as powerful as America is, look at President Donald Trump’s decision, and the court said `no you can’t do this’ and of course, they have to shut down the decision to move forward. That is the strength of an institution. That is the only way individuals could be regulated so that you can grow.”

Three, though a new wave of optimism swept through the party before the Appeal Court judgement, especially because of the well-received Prof Gana report, not to say its detailed recommendations and suggested modalities of internal politics, it is important for party leaders to moderate that optimism on account of the major changes they have so far left unattended to. Party leaders may have accurately identified the factors that undid their party, but they do not appear to have come to terms with their own sordid involvement, and their complicit show of lack of resoluteness and character in the face of the rampaging overthrow of party principles by their elected representatives up to the presidency level. Dr Jonathan, as Chief Obasanjo said, had become wiser after the presidency. Even Dr Jonathan himself will not dispute this conclusion, for he has evidently made some splendid contributions to national and international discourses in the past few months.

However, he must ask himself, and so too must other party leaders, why they found it difficult to submit to party principles while in office, and whether their new convictions are not just a consequence of their painful loss of the 2015 general elections. Dr Jonathan is right to point out the value of strong institutions, as indeed former U.S. president Barack Obama did during his visit to Ghana in 2009. But he must ask himself why he also undermined public institutions when he was president between 2010 and 2015. Worse, he must introspectively find out why, more than any Nigerian president, he enabled probably the most vicious attack ever orchestrated against the public till by his aides and ministers. Surely, irrespective of his stoical approach to issues, he must feel both embarrassed and inadequate about the startling revelations of gargantuan corruption perpetrated under his presidency. But perhaps the scale of thievery astonishes even him, as indeed it has baffled the country.

PDP leaders and the Gana report have both made sensible and adequate analyses of the factors that led to their defeat in the last polls. They have also suggested the way forward, with many of these recommendations quite extraordinary and practicable. Indeed, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has not also demonstrated cohesion, discipline or principles in its own practice of politics, espousing and promoting, as it were, some of the most noxious attacks on the rule of law and other democratic principles. But to take advantage of the ruling party’s clear failings, the PDP must in less than two years show enough contrition about its own misdeeds in office and be prepared to purge its ranks of those who orchestrated the mind-boggling assault on the public treasury now confounding the whole world. For legal and prosecutorial reasons, Dr Jonathan may be reticent about his spectacular abdication of responsibility. But as a party that hopes to reclaim office in 2019, the PDP needs to demonstrate ample atonement in order to cash in on the APC’s equally mind-boggling and ongoing dereliction of duty.

Given his predilections, Senator Sheriff, despite court approbation, could never manage the reforms needed to bring the PDP back to prominence and general acceptability. That task seems more squarely suited to the now sagging shoulders of the more intellectual, bureaucratic and accommodating Senator Makarfi. The Appeal Court has however dealt the latter a punishing blow and complicated the party’s effort to reorganise and reinforce itself against the ruling APC. If party elders cannot find a way to placate or unhorse Senator Sheriff soon — for he has to be unhorsed if the party is to present itself an effective and fitting counterpoise to the APC — then they must seek ways of working with him in the interim until they can fully and comprehensively punish his insouciance. It will not be an easy task, for the wealthy, gregarious and affable Senator Sheriff loves this sort of fight, especially one where he has the legal upper hand against the aloof Senator Makarfi in a fight where his enemies wriggle and squirm in a sterile political aquarium.