By Onyedika Agbedo
Last Tuesday’s decision of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to set up a Standing Disciplinary Committee for its erring members during a meeting in Abuja may have opened the chapter for another crisis in the party. The party had begun moves to reconcile all members barely 24 hours after the July 12 judgment of the Supreme Court that declared the chairman of its National Caretaker Committee, Senator Ahmed Makarfi, as the authentic leader, by granting amnesty to its former chairman and factional leader, Ali Modu Sheriff, and his supporters. But it made a critical volte-face at the NEC meeting following pressures from some influential members who wanted Sheriff and his cohorts sanctioned.
Spokesman of the party, Dayo Adeyeye, who announced the decision, had said: “People know that this party was rocked by very terrible disciplinary issues which nearly brought the party down completely. NEC decided to set up standing Disciplinary and Reconciliation committees; and the National Caretaker Committee has been directed to establish and inaugurate these committees immediately.”
Nevertheless, a day after the party announced the decision, the South-west chieftains of the party loyal to Sheriff quit the party and joined the newly registered Mega Party of Nigeria (MPN).
The defectors cited uncouth and inflammatory statements of some of Makarfi’s loyalists, the decision of the party at its 74th NEC meeting that a disciplinary committee be set up to whip Sheriff’s people into line, and unchecked and ceaseless talks and comments of Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State as the reasons for their defection.
At MPN’s new secretariat situated on Old Ife road, along Airport, Rd. Alakia, Ibadan, the South-west chairman of the group and former chairman of PDP in Ondo State, Ebenezer Alabi, flanked by other party chieftains from across the six South-west states and Director-General of the MPN, Adeleke Adekoya, said the South-west PDP was resolute to leave the party for Fayose and his cohorts.
Alabi said: “We are all aware of the outcome of the Supreme Court judgment which confirmed Makarfi group as the authentic group. We have our reservation on the judgment but we believe in the judiciary and we have the intention of cooperating with the Markafi group before they started making inflammatory comments. They said they wanted to give us amnesty as if we are Boko Haram militants.
“We heard that when Fayose was coming from Abuja, he had a stopover on his way to Ado Ekiti, and said if the judgment had gone the other way, he could have set his party card ablaze. Is that the kind of uncultured party man we are going to work with?
“Last Tuesday also, the duo of Fayose and Omisore went to Abuja and removed the names of the leaders from South-west, including the name of the chairman of the party in Ogun State, Bayo Dayo, who belongs to Makarfi’s faction and replaced them with the names of the people who didn’t contest for the office. The standard bearer of the party in the Oyo State governorship election, Senator Teslim Folarin, was also manhandled to the extent that his phone was stolen.
“We thought the outcome of the judgment of the court will teach us a lesson, rather, the party is being taken over by vampires. Now, those of us who believe in the leadership of Sheriff have now decided to move out and join forces with the MPN.”
The defection of Sheriff’s loyalists in the South-west chapter of the party came contrary to the recent assurance by a former Deputy National Chairman of the faction, Dr. Cairo Ojougboh, that members loyal to the former national chairman of the party would not defect to other political parties.
He had noted: “Our interest all this while is to resuscitate the PDP. This has been Sheriff’s desire. So, we are not leaving the party. We are going to strengthen the party from states to ward levels and if the Makarfi-led National Caretaker Committee can do it, we will be very happy to see that internal democracy is returned.
“If all party members are treated equally, we will all be very happy and work for the party. The most important thing is that the party is supreme and that’s what we recognise and it is our position.”
Commenting on the development, a conflict management expert and public affairs analyst, Dr. Nick Idoko, warned that the decision of the party to discipline the Sheriff faction was an invitation to fresh crisis.
“I think that at this stage, the matter is beyond setting up a disciplinary committee to sanction those they think are errant members. Those ones can justify themselves too because it was a struggle for leadership. And struggle for leadership is not about you being wrong and I being right. It’s power game. So, if they start by saying they are going to discipline the members of the other faction, they will create more problems for the party. I think what they should be looking at is how to bring a new lease of life to the party and be accommodating to whosoever would want to be part of the process. The key players who wanted the party dead could be identified, because they are known. But it’s not about pronouncing disciplinary measures on them. In fact, the party could even ignore them and keep moving on,” Idoko said.
Idoko, who is the President/Lead Consultant at Africa Network for Peace and Justice (ANPeJ), advised leaders of the party to hire conflict management experts to help them in the reconciliation and re-building process.
“What I think the PDP should do going forward is to hire experts in conflict management to guide the process of reconciliation for them. They have to talk to the stakeholders. I don’t even know the stakeholders they have but in conflict management, there are primary, secondary and tertiary stakeholders. So, they need to agglomerate all these stakeholders and begin to build a new party. The structures are there but they don’t have the spread anymore. They will need to inject new ideas into party operation and that is not something they will do in a day or in a week. You know that managers are not patient in Nigeria. But they need to sit down and look at what has gone wrong in the party and work hard to get it right. You see, it is only the PDP that can provide opposition to the APC; all the other parties exist in name. And it is unfortunate that members of the party allowed it to be engulfed in a prolonged crisis. But I think if they should hire experts to study what has happened and how to move on, they may have some respite in times to come,” he added.
A chieftain of the party in the South-west and former Minister of works, Senator Adeseye Ogunlewe, however, told Sunday Sun that of the party’s decision to set up a disciplinary committee was in order, saying it is aimed at measuring the culpability of those who wanted to destroy the party.
“The setting up of a disciplinary committee by the party is good because some people went beyond the normal confrontation that occurs in a party to scuttle the progress of the PDP; and it was unbelievable. Let me give you an instance, the entire South-west executive of the party under Sheriff went to court to undermine the overall interest of the party. They supported the opposition in Edo and Ondo states to scuttle the success of PDP. So, their culpability in the destruction of the party must be measured. That is the essence of the disciplinary committee. Everybody that was actively involved in the crisis would be invited and you will now prove your innocence,” he said.
Ogunlewe, however, posited that the erring members might not necessarily be punished. “It is fit to paddle. It’s not compulsory that they must be punished. If they appear before the committee and repent and apologise, it will be okay. In the process of fighting, you cannot determine the network of arsenal your opponent will have to fight the battle. They (Makarfi faction) used the arsenal available to them to fight that battle and that is what the committee is going to preach,” he noted.
Ogunlewe further said those leaving the party after the Supreme Court judgment would soon realise their mistake. “I have read that their leadership is not going. They are going to stay with the PDP even though some of their supporters will definitely go. But at the end of the day, precisely before the end of the year, they will realise that the better they stick with the PDP, the brighter their chances of winning elections. The smaller parties are hardly relevant in this system. So, those leaving or contemplating to leave are just being anxious; they should settle down. It’s not all of them that will be found guilty by the committee. Even some of those that will be found guilty can plead for leniency and I can assure you they will be heard,” he said.
Meanwhile, Makarfi had last Wednesday said those who defected from the party might not benefit from the ‘no victor, no vanquished’ policy the leadership declared after the Supreme Court judgment.
Makarfi, who spoke when he received the Governor Seriake Dickson-led National Reconciliation Committee, which wound down its activities following the directive of the NEC, had said: “No victor, no vanquished applies only to all the happenings before the Supreme Court ruling, that no individual will be punished for merely disagreeing, or not seeing eye to eye with one another before the matter was settled.”
From the foregoing, it is clear that the National Caretaker Committee of the party has won the war but still have a lot of work to do to win the peace in the party. And unless it does so, the party’s dream of reclaiming the presidency in the 2019 general election may amount to forlorn hope.