Dear PDP leaders and stakeholders, so far so memorable. Ours is a political party with a proud legacy of struggle in party administration and democratic governance, from our early days, where we had no one to learn from on how to administer a democratic platform, to becoming the first party to win the presidency of our country through democratic means in the dispensation that started
in 1999.
We have come a long way, sometimes stumbling along the way, but deserving of commendation on how we nurtured and sustained democratic values in our country Nigeria, and especially how, under us, a transfer of authority occurred, giving depth to our political maturity in 2015. Through our former president, we voiced what really is the core essence of who we are as a party and how precious our citizens and their wellbeing are to us. This is captured in the famous submission of Goodluck Jonathan that “no ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian.”
I believe that is our creed, based on love of country and respect for human life and dignity. There is no point dwelling on our contributions to the country and its development save to say we got the country out of debt and we ensured universal basic education, which was our attempt at insisting that education is what will give us the human resources to plan our nation for the future. Historians can do justice to our contributions, at least for the first 16 years, when we were in charge of the affairs of Nigeria! I hope and wish that history will be kind, or, at least, be honest with itself.
Now, to the meat of what we need to discuss. We have not measured up in our role as the main opposition party, a position trusted on us as a result of the loss of the 2015 national election. We can do a whole lot better. We ought to keep providing alternative viewpoints on all aspects of governance. This has become trite, given what we see as huge challenges in our nation, especially with regard to the security of lives of people living within our borders. Nothing stops us from having a security summit with the intention of finding solutions that can be immediately implemented; it will spur those in charge to get serious and we would be acting in a responsible manner, as to my mind, opposition is not just to call out the government of the day; it is more about providing alternative solutions and showcasing how things would have been under our watch.
We can have a timetable of important issues, such as ‘The Economic Agenda for Nigeria’; ‘Tackling the Unemployment Time Bomb’; Education: ‘Reworking our Curriculum for the future’ etc. We just must get more creative.
However, there is a major problem I see with how we are running things currently, and it’s time to review it. Candidates cannot carry too heavy a burden in our bid to fly our flags; we must all chip in. We all must also realise that this model of expecting the presidential candidate to find all the money, or do I say most of the money, is not acceptable. If we get into litigation, leaving the candidate to find the resources to mobilise lawyers and also find funds for other post-election logistics is totally wrong and unacceptable. It will eventually lead to a situation where quality Nigerians, who can be accepted, may never come forward.
Let’s face it; the process we run is damn too expensive. We must clearly see that this leaves us with a skewed recruiting template that can never be in our best interest. This is because those that can qualify are unable to play. We must fix this fast. I reckon this is as a result of our early success at national elections, where the presidency was always available, culminating in the now perceived notorious 2015 presidential elections scandal that has kept some of our handlers in court till now; never mind the hypocrisy of our rivals – the APC – and their propaganda.
The lesson for us is that, somehow, we seem stuck in that mindset of only one person providing most of the resources in a presidential election as I observed was the case with the Atiku Abubakar PDP presidential efforts of 2019. We have inadvertently enthroned a culture of Governors of PDP, who mostly, with the exception of a few, do not pull their weights in terms of funding party activities. Worst is that a vast majority of our young enthusiastic followers, who keep our flag flying, are neither encouraged nor supported to keep the work going. We need to find a way round this. Not even in the so-called glorious era of the First Republic did we find that political leaders in government didn’t find a creative way of funding and helping their parties; if we must survive, we need to reflect on this.
We have not achieved success with our efforts at free, fair and transparent party congresses at our wards, local governments and state levels. The result is that we are not growing as well as we should at the grassroots. A situation where we go into elections and record lesser votes than the numbers we have on our party register in some polling units must be of concern to us. It must suggest to us the need to have a credible party register where we ask members to pay some little contributions as right of ownership of their parties at the wards, local governments and
states.
We must do this to know how many active members we have in our party, so as to see how well we are doing in our recruitment drive. We must have seen by now, with the benefit of hindsight, that big rallies are a waste of time and money. It is time to get creative and sustainable. No political party can survive, especially in the opposition, if it does not pay attention to its youths department. This is the engine room, where the engagement with the most vibrant members of society takes place. It is more so with us in Nigeria, giving our very youthful population. We must stop using our youth leadership for patronage. That important leadership position must be reserved only for someone with competence, passion and capacity to drive the vision.
Narrative management cannot be reduced to just press releases; the world has moved away further than the days of STOP PRESS. We must understand that if we don’t get publicity right, we really won’t be going anywhere fast. We must embrace research a lot more, and surely, disagreeing with everything is no way to be an opposition party. We need to better project some of our state actors, especially those performing, so they can be the leading light that showcase how far better we are.
All in all, this season is a time where those who will leave for all the flimsiest reasons must be allowed to enjoy the constitutional freedom of association; we must just ensure that we do not tire out those patriots of our party who will remain behind to hold the umbrella or rein of our party; we must never again allow the situation where latter day joiners come back and push faithful party loyalists out of reckoning for whatever reason. I get the no joiner no founder principle, but I believe it is time to drop it, for it is at the heart of the excessive cross carpeting going on across board, which we are now mature enough to begin to discourage.
We must review our campaign and election planning procedure; it is fraught with a lot of challenges, least of which is mismanagement of funds leading to last minute destabilisation of all the work previously done on the altar of acrimonious infighting on who gets the money and how the money never seems to get to where it was intended or used for the purposes for which it was
provided.
Dear PDP, we must build on our successes, especially the improvements occasioned by the spirited efforts of the Atiku Abubakar/Peter Obi Presidential outing of 2019, which produced huge benefits for governorship elections. Of course, we won that election; and we are justifiably before the courts to reclaim our stolen mandate. In the meantime, we must commence our improvement drive. Power to the People! Nigeria needs us now more than ever before. Our nation is bleeding and everything is down hill, not looking up. If we must remain the hope of our country Nigeria, and Africa as a whole, the time to act is
now!
Segun Showunmi is a PDP chieftain and spokesman of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar.