By Umar Ardo, Ph.D
If my late good friend, Dr. Onukaba Ojo of blessed memory were alive, he would have perfectly given the Ibadan PDP Convention a most befitting theatrical production, staging it under the genre: Tragicomedy of the Highest Order, or something even better.
Not because the actors lacked costumes or a script, in fact they were well attired in the traditional PDP costume, but because the entire cast forgot the plot the moment the curtain rose.
2. To begin with, the convention’s appointed ringmaster, Governor Ahmad Umaru Fintiri, clearly entered the arena not as a chairman but as a spectator who accidentally wandered onto the stage. Tradition demands that the chairman opens the convention with a grand speech. Procedure expects it. Common sense begs for it. But Fintiri, perhaps consumed with the thought of how his political benefactor would react to his action at the convention, chose silence. He sat through the proceedings like a man watching a poorly made home movie of his own political family, only to rise at the end and wash his hands so vigorously one would think he was auditioning for the role of Pontius Pilate.
3. With solemn ambiguity, he declared: “It is not within my prerogative to continue with this exercise. I leave the convention delegates to decide.” Of course. Why lead a convention you have already agreed to lead when you can instead disown it with philosophical detachment after all the heavy lifting has been done? Didn’t he know that there were litigations on the matter? Didn’t he know that INEC wasn’t coming? Of course he did! Yet, not only did he attend, but prior to that he got his state party chairman to boast that “there is no power in this country that can stop the Ibadan Convention.” How so boisterous!
4. But here lies real the comedy – when the delegates decided, among other things, to expel Nyesom Wike, the FCT minister, Fintiri, the chairman of the event, suddenly rediscovered his voice. Not to endorse, but to denounce the decision. Not to guide, but to flee the convention. Not out of democratic principle, but out of gratitude to his benefactor dressed as political morality. After all, a man must protect his benefactor, especially when that benefactor who watered one’s political garden with lavish generosity, can be rash, brash and irascible. Thus, in that grand moment of political self-contradiction, the chairman who presided over the process rejected its outcome, invalidating both his authority and the convention itself. A man cannot preside over a procedure and then repudiate its product, unless, of course, he is in the PDP, where eating one’s cake with the right hand while expecting it to reappear magically in the left is a time-honored tradition. But Fintiri’s theatrics were merely Act One.
6. Act Two featured the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the umpire of Nigerian democracy, refusing to attend the convention. Not out of spite, but because the PDP’s internal judicial confusion resembles a family quarrel where uncles from different villages issue conflicting proverbs about who owns the ancestral farmland. When federal high courts say one thing, and Oyo state high court says another, INEC wisely stayed home, locked its doors and pretended to be asleep.
7. Act Three was the attendance sheet. Of the remaining eight PDP state governors in the country, three boycotted the event entirely, perhaps preparing to leave to the APC: Rivers, Taraba and Osun. Of the five who attended, two – Adamawa and Plateau – took exceptions to the proceedings and repudiated its outcome. In the end, the party was left standing with only three lethargic governors – Bauchi, Zamfara and Oyo – who I am sure were unsure of how to proceed. At that point, the PDP was not a national party; it became a political WhatsApp group struggling to form a quorum!
8. Thus, the Ibadan convention did not merely descend into chaos; it achieved the rare distinction of being a historic, poor, unmitigated fiasco. It was the worst convention the PDP has ever organized, and by extension, the true reflection of what the party has in fact become. Indeed, even the party’s obituary writes itself. For a party that once strode across Nigeria like a political colossus, boasting of ruling for 60 years, it instead spent 16 years laying the foundation of the country’s dysfunction, then spent the next decade perfecting its own destruction. Illegality, corruption, dishonesty, incompetence, selfishness and betrayal were not PDP’s unfortunate occurrences; they have been its institutional principles! They were not its mistakes; they have been its traditions. They were not its deviations; they have been the blueprint of the party. These have been the elements embedded in the party that some of us saw and fought against for some two decades ago, and failing to change made us abandon the party. Now the chickens have finally come home to roost!
9. And with the ongoing court cases, parallel factions and perhaps parallel conventions (with Wike threatening to hold his own), what remains is the final burial ceremony. The corpse is ready. The obituary has been drafted. Only the undertakers are debating the color of the coffin.
10. The honorable path for anyone left with any modicum of dignity still trapped within the party’s ruins is clear, even if steep: follow our path; step down, walk away and perhaps reclaim your dignity. For in politics, as in philosophy, one cannot serve both principle and convenience. The shifting winds of personal benefit in vainglory and dishonesty cannot coexist with the enduring architecture of sacrifice and integrity.
11. For those who are beneficiaries of the sleaze of the PDP, their choice between gratitude to benefactors and allegiance to institutional order will define not just their political legacy, but the final chapter of a party that once had the opportunity to build Nigeria but instead helped fracture its spine.
12. As a trained Historian, I know History is never neutral; it not only remembers but it also judges – it either quits or convicts, it either commends or condemns! And History remembers the PDP as once mighty, and now records its exit not with thunder but with laughter. A tragicomedy and a well-deserved finale.
