PDP locked in a quandary
The winning faction in the legal battle for the body of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was not as magnanimous as everyone hoped; but the losing faction was not also
The winning faction in the legal battle for the body of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was not as magnanimous as everyone hoped; but the losing faction was not also gracious in defeat. These fundamental dispositions may explain why the leading opposition party remains sundered by conflict and irreconcilable differences. Put inelegantly, the Nyesom Wike faction, which many Nigerians opposed to the Bola Tinubu administration love to hate, won the contest handily at the Court of Appeal last Monday. There was indeed no other way to judge the intraparty dispute; the outcome was already known even before the suit began, regardless of the losing Seyi Makinde faction finding a judge who risked his career to legitimise their usurpations before and after the November 15-16, 2025 convention. Two Federal High Courts had judged that the Makinde-inspired conventions were illegal. Last week the Court of Appeal upheld the judgements and ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission not to recognise the outcome of that convention. By implication the appellate court has declared that all the Oyo State governor's faction did last year was a waste of time and money.
In about two months, political parties must conduct their primaries to elect standard-bearers. In less than one month, the PDP must not only conduct their convention, the makeshift one in Ibadan having been declared a nullity, the new party executives must also do the primaries. While the Makinde faction, whose pointsman is Tanimu Turaki, blithely plays brinkmanship, the Wike faction and its PDP caretaker chairman Abdulrahman Mohammed have become very frantic. The more politically savvy Board of Trustees (BoT) chairman, Adolphus Wabara, is tentative about the whole legal challenge and has seemed a bit more pragmatically amenable to the Wike faction victory. But the Oyo State governor and head of the faction, Mr Makinde, has instead doubled down on the legal challenge and begun to explore alternatives outside the PDP. He appears apathetic to the political fortunes of many of his followers caught in the middle of nowhere regarding their political ambitions. If both factions do not make a deal to forge ahead as one, and if many aspirants thus fail to actualise their dreams, the PDP may fracture irretrievably.
Unlike the dour Mr Turaki, Mr Wabara is not keen on pursuing the legal challenge further. He seems instinctively convinced that going to the Supreme Court to explore the pithy notion of party autonomy over its internal affairs and mechanisms may amount to a waste of time. One more wasted month of doubtful litigation could prove obscenely costly, the BoT chairman thinks. The ousted chairman on the other hand thinks he has all the time in the world, a dangerous illusion many tested politicians in the PDP find at once intriguing and reckless. What would he do should the Supreme Court sensibly determine that a party's administrative independence does not include unconstitutional behaviour? Why, of course, he will move on, chastened by defeat, but resigned perhaps to merely placating those whose ambitions had been truncated by his relentless but ultimately futile pursuit of justice. Other than Mr Turaki, it is unclear whether any other party functionary, including the vexed and vengeful Mr Makinde, still thinks any reprieve, legal or political, is possible.
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Yet, the Makinde faction, even after the Court of Appeal judgement, still appears more like the authentic faction, especially on account of the presence in the party of many powerful politicians and old warhorses. They are less given to histrionics and are less sanguine about legal solutions, and wish for a more practical approach to solving the disputes ravaging the party. But the stolid Mr Turaki still thinks the Makinde faction holds the ace, in fact all the aces. The legal planks of the faction's arguments are tenuous, and the old warhorses in the party could feel it and even smell it from miles away, but the ousted chairman, the same who called on the eccentric United States president Donald Trump to intervene to help the PDP and save Nigerian democracy, has an affinity for clutching at straws. The Wike faction has set a March date for the PDP convention; it remains to be seen whether the olive branch its leaders have held out to the Makinde group would be taken or rebuffed. After all, Mr Makinde himself has seemed completely detached from the whole exercise, perhaps pulled in different directions by the Young Turks in the party, with whom he shows closer affinity, and the tested warriors of the party whose voices and collective strength he can neither resist nor toy with. Against his natural instincts, however, he must find a way to defer to them. His inflexible stance, some outsiders suspect, is informed by his complete repudiation of Mr Wike whose manners he finds intolerably pugnacious and vulgar, and with whom he cannot by any stretch of the imagination work.
Mr Wike dominates his faction totally, despite the presence and commitment of fine gentlemen in his victorious PDP faction. The factional leaders are naturally proceeding apace in organising the convention and fixing dates for the primaries. They seem convinced that the Supreme Court cannot upturn the Court of Appeal judgement that nullified last year's Ibadan convention, and are even more convinced that the only argument still held by the Makinde faction, to wit, that the internal affairs of a party are not subject to court pronouncements, cannot stand legal rigour. The Oyo governor did not in fact say whether the internal affairs he mentioned and around which he has tried to erect a very high jurisprudential wall should not conform to the constitution. The Wike faction seems aware that the legal die is cast, and that what remains are the convention and primaries. As a lawyer, he knows how to tie up loose ends and avoid running afoul of the law, even if his mannerisms sometimes appear to grate on many nerves. His faction has, therefore, fixed the convention for late March and the primaries for May. It will be hard for the opposing faction to erect legal bottlenecks to torpedo the victorious faction's plans.
The problem, however, is that while the Wike faction has repeatedly won the argument and run rings around his opponents, it nevertheless seems to lack the gravitas and the technicality to deploy that advantage to rebuild the PDP and imbue it, as expected, with the ideology and character needed to vivify it. The Wike faction, it is widely accepted, cannot breathe without the FCT minister. He has the push, the law on his side, and the resilience to fight a good fight and achieve breakthroughs. He proved that capacity after the 2019 presidential poll when he took a dispirited and abandoned party and gave it the kiss of life. And in 2023, he again proved just how imaginative and sturdy he is by almost single-handedly determining what roles the PDP should play in that year's presidential election. Again his judgement was unerring and consequential, even if alienating to many PDP faithful. His talents are, therefore, necessary to sustain the party and turn it into a great fighting force. He may lack the intellect on a general level to build a great organisation and calibrate it for the future, but as he proved in Rivers with stellar achievements as the governor and the FCT as a thoroughly accomplished minister and builder, a party like the PDP calls for a different but nuanced intellect.
After its founding, and almost from the beginning, the PDP began to decay in the hands of a succession of meddlesome or inattentive presidents, starting from ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, to Umaru Yar'Adua, and then to Goodluck Jonathan. The party's chairmen were either too weak to withstand the obtruding presidents or too baffled by their excesses to offer significant resistance. Anchored on amorphous ideology, its raison d'être limited to holding the presidential office and nothing more, the PDP began to decay slowly and quietly until everyone saw only the president and not the party. To return the party to prominence and infuse it with the right philosophy will require a prime mover who can see the day after tomorrow. Mr Wike is unlikely to be that man. Worse for the PDP, Mr Makinde has seemed too opportunistic and politically grasping to perform that altruistic, extraordinary role. The PDP's legal entanglements may, therefore, be a last-ditch effort by nature to force the party to self-adjust, having failed by political entanglements and general dissension to imbibe the corrections salient to the party's repositioning.
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The party is not lost entirely, but alive and still breathing, whether in the hands of caretakers or in the hands of court-sanctioned masters. It is, however, unlikely to amount to much in the months ahead without an admixture of imaginative leaders. Its leaders need not worry about the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the new coalition vehicle conjured from old templates to seize the presidency. Led by aggregators whose ambitions are fickle and wafer-thin, the ADC does not have a unifying and galvanising ideology, or the men of nuanced intellect and administrative brilliance to build a party for the day after tomorrow. Once their ambitions fail, and it is hard to expect a different outcome, the coalition may quietly disintegrate. The PDP does not also need to worry too much about the All Progressives Congress (APC). The ruling party actually sees the PDP as the saner opposition party capable of appreciating the dynamics of the presidential system, playing by the rules, and safeguarding democracy as a whole.
The APC thus has a stake in keeping the PDP alive and helping it to play the foremost opposition role. For now, however, the party is effectively in the hands of the Wike crowd, and they will make it play the circumscribed roles the calculating FCT minister dictates. The Makinde crowd may, however, see cooperating with Mr Wike as an option beneath their dignity. If they embrace intransigence, the party may face prospects so dire that not even the most gifted pundit can confidently predict what fate might befall it. But if they humble themselves and cobble together some arrangements with their despised comrades, the party will muddle through the coming months and elections, and then fight a titanic battle for the party's soul after the polls next year. No side to the mayhem deserves to win, but one side will have to win in order to shorten the party's misery and give it a fighting chance in the years ahead as the ADC disintegrates under expected electoral debacles.
