Heat of the kitchen

“Enemies are not those who hate us, but those whom we hate.”

 P. Ustinov

Last week the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) a coalition of opposition political parties asked Alhaji Bamanaga Tukur Chairman of the PDP to stop beating the drums of war. The CNPP is angry that Alhaji Bamanga Tukur said that 2015 represents a “heavy” war the PDP has to fight, “because a group has come up and wants to sweep the mat off our feet.” The PDP, he is reported to have told a meeting in the south west, cannot allow that to happen.

The CNPP is outraged, it says, because it has not recovered from the effects of earlier drums of war which the PDP beat. In particular, it cannot forget Obasanjo’s declaration that the 2007 elections were a do-or-die affair. The PDP did the affair, and violence took many lives and limbs and mandates, the CNPP complains. The CNPP wants security agencies to query Alhaji Bamanga for his “unpatriotic, undemocratic and inciting statement.” It said many other things as well, including its belief that Nigerians want, and will vote for regime change in 2015.

Of course the security agencies will not query Alhaji Bamanaga Tukur. Some of their personnel have followed him around as he jetted around the nation to knock back a party in crisis into life. They would know that the words that the CNPP finds so offensive are the staple diet of PDP rhetorics. Veterans of electoral battles in the ranks of the CNPP will in fact be amused by the indignation expressed by Mr Okechuku, but they will not fail to note that Alhaji Bamanga’s comments were made in a region in which the PDP is facing virtual extinction, the southwest. Nigerians will neither tremble nor panic. They know already that 2015 will be a battle of sorts, and quite possibly one which will either usher in genuine regime change, or trigger massive upheavals. It could also do both, if much sweat and blood have to be shed to achieve regime change. But Nigerians have seen it all before. The difference now is that many more are unwilling to sit idly by and watch leaders emerge through questionable or outrightly fraudulent means.

The opposition parties are right to worry over what appear as threats from Alhaji Bamanga. But they may not be the target of his words, at least for now. The drums of war were beaten in a part of the country where the PDP is literary drowning. It was a good pitch from the chairman as well, in a context in which many prominent PDP people from the southwest are feeling the effects of being out of power. They will understand the language of war, having seen the obliterating campaign of the ACN in action, and the weakening of their ranks from massive quarrels and having too many generals in a tiny army.

The PDP is indeed fighting a war, but for now it is a war against its own members. The orchestrated campaign to reconcile members of the party has exposed the enormity of its internal problems. In fact, some senior members of the party must be regretting the high profile and open mature of the campaign to heal rifts, because all it did is to deepen rifts. Many governors, the real powerhouses of the party, largely boycotted public relations events targeted at showing unity, and then sent in apologies and excuses for their absences. Key members of the party in most zones made louder statements by being absent than they would have if they had joined the junketing. The reconciliation train lost more passengers than it picked, and by the time it stopped in Abuja, the party’s leadership would have been in no doubt that the opposition is unlikely to be its biggest problem.

All over the country, the ruling party has problems. In the north, few people are willing to even display their party membership cards in public. The region has suffered unprecedented regression in its fortunes, and most people hold the party and its governors responsible. Many people think President Jonathan is indifferent to the problems of the North because he thinks it was hostile to his 2011 ambitions. They do not hold him responsible for Boko Haram; but they blame him for refusing to look at options to his present strategies for dealing with them. Northern governors, 15 of them from PDP, are blamed for engineering the Jonathan presidency, and then retreating into their fortified residences and leaving the people with poverty and Boko Haram. The few prominent PDP leaders who benefit from its rule do not advertize their good fortune. Many of the party’s members are waiting in the wings to join the merging opposition.

In the southwest, the party is virtually non-existent for all practical purposes. The ACN is closing in for the total kill by aggressively pursuing the merger, and building fortresses in competence and performance which can be used as electoral currency in 2015. In the southeast, the party is fighting for space with APGA, and legions of star-gazers want to know if it is time for Igbo politicians to chart an entirely new course. The south-south is holding on to the PDP as a raft, and will do anything to stop it from sinking. It realizes, however, that the rest of the nation is drifting away from it, and is unsure over what it will take to regain the ground lost. President Jonathan’s record is not likely to be so dramatically transformed by 2015 that it will serve as a rallying point. Too much of his small circle has been taken up by his own people that other Nigerians have long relocated without the south-south managers even noticing.

On the whole, you could say that the PDP chairman’s war drums are not being beaten without just cause. But PDP does not just beat war drums. It prepares for war in all aspects. It will, for instance, watch how the opposition intends to wriggle out of the booby trap over its proposed name with INEC. It must be congratulating itself for the small victory over the time and energy being wasted on the name affair. The merger process is being hurt by the quarrels over a name, and playing perfectly into PDP’s hand. Chances are that they wont get the merged party registered as APC by INEC, but the parties are behaving like a child whose lolly has been lost, and is rejecting another one in its place. Every day it huffs and puffs over APC, PDP gains a strategic advantage. You would have thought a movement towards merger with some veteran casualties of the PDP will know some of its tricks by now, and would therefore know which battles to fight and which to avoid.

The real war drums that should alarm Nigerians will be those that may signal such danger to the PDP that it will have no option but to attempt to rig the 2015 elections, at all cost. If it cannot heal its massive wounds, or radically engineer an improvement in the performance of its elected officials, or damage the merger irredeemably, it may be tempted to tamper dangerously with the electoral process. It should not. Many people in the PDP find it difficult to image life outside the comfort of the PDP. But life will be infinitely more difficult for everyone if the PDP attempts to rig the 2015 elections because it cannot win them freely and fairly.