By Fred Onyeoziri
The delegates who will be voting at this Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) convention will be putting into practice PDP’s slogan of “Power to the People.” The delegates will represent our people and, to justify the party’s pride in giving them power on behalf of the people, they must vote to protect the interest of the party. The best way to protect the interest of the party is to vote for the best candidate of the party. Vote for the candidate who will best represent the interest of the party to move our party forward. In order to protect the interest of the party, the delegates must vote according to their conscience for the best candidate.
Since all the delegates are mature party members, we expect them to listen to their conscience and the interest of the party and resist being teleguided by so-called stakeholders or godfathers. Since the voting arrangement is by open-secret balloting, the delegates must insist that the secret component of the voting be enforced so as to protect the confidentiality of their vote. This requires that a cubicle be provided, where voters can go in to mark their ballot paper before coming to put their ballot in the box in the open. This is the only arrangement that protects the delegates to vote according to their conscience and not in the open, which is monitored by representatives of godfathers and stakeholders.
Delegates owe our party the responsibility of voting according to their conscience to promote the interest of our party, and the way to do this is to vote for the best candidate. The best candidate for the interest of our party in the chairmanship race is Professor Tunde Adeniran from Ekite State in the South-West. He is the best for the interest of the party for the following reasons:
1. Professor Tunde Adeniran was a founding member of the PDP from way back in 1998. He quite naturally wants to restore to the PDP those values for which the party was originally established. This is necessary to move the party forward and promote it into the politics of 2019.
2. In addition to being a founding member, he has also remained to date very committed to the party even when he has suffered provocations for which some people have left the party. He is a very reliable and committed party member.
3. He is a professor of political science, who has taught democracy, practiced democracy, and is morally committed to democracy. This automatically makes him a very big asset to PDP’s commitment to internal democracy. He is in the best position to give our party very good political education.
4. The professor has also been a political mobiliser of great experience. He was a member of the Political Bureau of the military era, He was a chairman of ASUU, and he was also a national secretary for the famous MAMSER. And to cap it all, he helped mobilise both the South West and Ekiti State for the PDP at the beginning in 1998. Therefore, mobilising PDP for 2019 will be like another meal of amala and ewedu for him.
5. He is highly principled and has strong views, but because of his modesty, he is not a loud or noisy person. This seems to misrepresent him as soft and quiet, but, truly, he is a strong character.
6. He has had a variety of political experience in many fields. In addition to the political mobilisation experience we mentioned earlier, he has also been a minister of education of the Federal Republic, Nigerian ambassador to Germany, and chairman of a variety of political platforms both in and outside of PDP. He can now combine this great administrative experience with the moral tidiness of a great diplomat.
7. On top of all these, he has personal integrity and does not have any of the black spots that can be an embarrassment to our party. Under his chairmanship, EFCC or ICPC or DSS will not have any reason to come visiting PDP!
8. His sense of justice and fairness is very high, and he frowns at those irregularities that have bedevilled the PDP such as impurity, imposition, godfatherism, etc.
9. Professor Adeniran is pained by the loss of power for PDP. Reclaiming that power is his prime motivator for running for the office of the national chairman.
The beautiful thing about Tunde Adeniran is that he has all these qualities and yet he is not boastful. He is not boasting to be the saviour of PDP as some people whom integrity would refuse to be named after them are doing. On the contrary, Adeniran promises to lead the revitalisation of the party with the cooperation of other likeminded party members.
We expect our delegates who themselves are men and women of integrity to vote for this quality candidate. We expect our delegates to resist the attraction offered by cash cows and redeem our party from the disasters of cash-and-carry politics of the past. Contrary to some unpopular views, politics is not a dirty game. It is individual players that rob their dirty hands on politics. Left on its own, politics is a noble activity, which aims at promoting the public good. Our delegates are hereby called upon to clean up their hands and make our politics the noble activity for promoting the public good, which our party can offer the Nigerian nation.
This is the challenge before our delegates: to clean up their hands and vote with integrity and according to their conscience and in the interest of our party.
Vote for this best candidate who is a man of ideas and persuasion not a man of force and impurity.
• Prof. Onyeoziri wrote from Abuja.