Chief Olabode George
The People's Democratic Party is now at a critical crossroads between
survival and extinction. We stand between a forfeiture of all the
astounding dreams, the hopes of our founding fathers and the disgraceful
submission to perfidy and damnation. The choice is ours. The truth is
clear. We must make a move now! Let us ask ourselves: how long can we
fold our hands and pretend that the current crisis afflicting our party
is merely a political dispute that can be resolved on some round table?
Again, At what juncture do we stand up and acknowledge that the very
grave matters that are now hobbling the progress of our party for almost
two years are indeed issues of fundamental importance to the survival
of the democratic space in our nation? Can we afford to fold our arms
and stand in a neutral corner and pretend that the whirlwind will go
away? Can we boldly jump into the fray, lock horns with the matters of
the moment and affirm our position in the state of things? There are
too many queries.
There are too many appealing choices. But we must
stand up firm and fast. We must make a stand to confront the many
maladies now confronting our party. We must be counted to be on the
righteous and the redeeming side of history. We must take the hard and
the most enduring choice. We must never shy away from the bitter truth.
We must talk to one another with sincerity of purpose and with constant
purity of focus. There are no pretenses anymore.
As I see it, from my
own personal prism as one of the leaders of our great party, we have
lost the focus and the vision that once earned us high praises, the
hurrah and the accommodation of the Nigerian people. We have derailed
in a mournful way from the guidance, the nuance and the formative
directions of our founding fathers. We have upturned and disturbed the
normal building blocks and the structures of an orderly organization.
Our value system has changed. The normative foundational logic that
once held our party in firm discipline, in genuine constitutional norms
and processes of succession have all been abused, maligned and thrown
into the wind. There is confusion everywhere. There is no semblance of
clarity anymore.
There is no visible and acceptable guiding momentum to
move us beyond the cliff of disaster. It is as if we are all frozen in
one grand confusion and imperiled by our own collective contributions to
the present crisis. But the party must move clearly and firmly beyond
the current state of muddle and the encroaching darkness. We must tell
ourselves the bitter truth. We must confront the pervading ills, the
legitimate grievances and the screaming aberrations that are holding us
back. We must boldly return to the foundational principles where merit,
morality, justice, fairness, truth, impartiality, hardwork and
excellence defined the logical articulations and the pristine anchor of
our founding fathers.
The issue at stake now is: who is the rightful,
legitimate and validly entrusted entity that the constitution of our
party recognizes to lead the party presently? Ordinarily there should
not be a dispute on this matter if we are all correctly attuned to the
constitutional guidance and the stipulations that are etched in our
collective norms, in our practices and traditions.
Let us start from the
beginning. After our Presidential Election debacle in March 2015, our
chairman at that particular time, Alhaji Adamu Muazu resigned his
position to pave way for a new horizon. To fill this vacuum, Senator
Alimodu Sheriff was appointed in an interim capacity to carry on with
the business of party administration. Abinitio, Sheriff's position was
to act as a stop-gap until a formal convention is organized to elect a
constitutionally tenured and proper chairman.
In this wise, a new
convention which was to elect new managers of the party was slated for
May 21, 2015 in Port Harcourt, River State. Our acting –chairman Senator
Sheriff came out to contest for the chairmanship position. He collected
the nomination form, paid for the form, filled the form and submitted
it to the appropriate election committee. Senator Sheriff equally
appeared before the screening committee which was authorized to examine
the aspirants for suitability.
According to our electoral guidelines
Sheriff as an acting chairman was deemed to have vacated his seat as
soon as he submitted himself for the nomination process at least 7 days
before the convention. Had he been a substantive chairman, the
guidelines stipulate 30 clear days for him to leave the position before
the convention. Either in law, in logic or in the rational platform of
democratic practices, the electoral guidelines explicitly affirm and
resolve the key ingredients of fair play, equity, critical balance and
moderating impartiality in the partisan contest.
It would have been
virtually unfair, indecent, crude and primitive for an incumbent
chairman or any office holder for that matter who wishes to contest for
an office to now sit in arbitrating supervision over the process of his
own election! We can be sure of what the outcome of such illegitimate
process would be!
The electoral guidelines then were basically
implanted to ensure the purity and the impartiality of the process.
Thus, going into the convention as an aspirant for the chairmanship
position, Sheriff in all legalistic and in all moralistic
appropriateness had ceased to become chairman and had transmuted into an
aspirant! Nothing more.
From here, the relevant convention committee
had effectively graduated into the position of ensuring the continuity
of party administration and the steering of leadership in an interim
capacity before the substantive officers emerge from the national
Convention. That was the state of things on May 21st 2015 at the
Convention ground in Port Harcourt.
At this juncture, let me emphasize
that the National Convention itself was authorized by the National
Executive Committee of the party. Thus, no single person can convoke or
dissolve a National Convention. It is always a collective responsibility
of the NEC, which is the second highest organ of the party.
As the
Convention process was gathering steam while the various aspirants and
the delegates from all the states were duly assembled for the nomination
process, Sheriff who apparently perceived his own vulnerability that
the contest might not go his way, decided to “cancel the Convention” and
ordered everyone to go home! That was clearly a screaming aberration.
It was an illegal, offensive and dictatorial statement that wrongly
assumed that one man can choose and pick the general directions and the
guidance of the party!
This absurdity was encouraged further by a
rushed, unreflective court injunction that restrained the party from
electing anyone in the Convention. Let it be stated emphatically that
the National Convention of the People‘s Democratic Party is the highest
decision making organ of the party. It is the most supreme arbiter whose
decisions are sacrosanct, binding, ultimately overwhelming in the
vastness of its reach and capabilities that it can even dissolve the
party itself! It is only another National Convention that can change or
amend the decision of a previous National Convention.
In schedule 10
section 33 item 2 of the party constitution the functions of the
National Convention is firmly stated : “the National Convention shall be
the Supreme and the controlling authority of the party …… and it shall
be the principal representative, policy making and administering body of
the party." Item 3 of the same schedule reaffirms that “the National
Convention shall have Supremacy in all matters pertaining to the party
and all officers and organs of the party shall be bound in the exercise
of their functions by the decisions of the National Convention.”
Again
in the same Schedule 10, section 4, item (e), the National Convention is
empowered by the constitution to “appoint such committees, as it may
deem necessary, desirable or expedient and assign to them such powers
and functions as it may deem fit.” The National Convention gave the
Makarfi Care-taker Committee a three month duration to organize a new
convention where new elected party managers would emerge. Immediately,
the Care-taker Committee swung into action by setting up the Senator
Ekweremadu Committee which was detailed to handle the zoning of the
party offices.
Equally, a Reconciliation Committee was also convoked
with five members from both Senator Sheriff’s Camp and all the other
organs of the party which stand behind Senator Makarfi. But here
again, the peace overture was scuttled as Senator Sheriff’s group
suddenly pulled out of the reconciliation process by heading to the
Appeal court. But adhering to the constitutional legitimacy of its
mandate, the Caretaker Committee fixed a new National Convention for
August 17, 2016 in Port Harcourt. Again to avoid any constitutional
crisis, the National Convention which hurriedly held at the River State
PDP Secretariat gave a fresh one year mandate to the care-taker
committee with the binding challenge to sort out all the root causes of
the party’s problems and the possible solutions to rectify all the
anomalies.
Here, the Jerry Gana’s Strategy, Research and Planning
Committee was given this very difficult task. The Committee has since
submitted its report after very exhaustive and thorough exercise.
Indeed, the Committee has done a very good job in the total
comprehensive essence of its recommendations and its vision. This is
where we are before the new ruling of the Port Harcourt Appeal Court
which has practically distempered the vast majority of our members who
believe that justice was not served!.
I have gone to this length to
quote copiously from the relevant sections of our constitution to
demonstrate the wide and far reaching powers of the National Convention
and equally to affirm that the People’s Democratic Party is an
organization that operates on valid rules, norms and practices as
enshrined in the party constitution. It is an organization whose
character, vision and pursuits are firmly anchored upon well
thought out guiding principles as embodied in our grundnorm. It is in
the spirit of this constitutional path and legalistic appropriateness
that the National Convention responded to the exigency of the movement
by reaching into the constitution itself to apply and enforce the
function which authorizes the National Convention to “appoint such
committees, as it may deem necessary…. ’’
This naturally gives
constitutional validity and binding legitimacy to the Senator Makarfi
led Care-taker Committee which is a product of emergency created to
avoid a constitutional crisis where the party would have been thrown
into a rudderless ill-wind without administrative guidance and
leadership. This is where we are now!
The Appeal Court in Port
Harcourt in a split decision has muddled the issue by ruling in favour
of Sheriff. There is indeed a lot about this ruling which ridicules
rationality, which distorts and negates the norms and the fundamental
articles of voluntary association. The judges in their wisdom appear to
be dictating, remolding and recasting the spirit, the tenets and the
foundational principles that are the very structural pivot of party
identity. The judiciary is a very powerful tool in the stability and
in the endurance of a democracy.
It is the neutral arbiter that ensures
the faithful interpretation of laws, resolved and established on
principled purity that compels fairness, impartiality and strict
adherence to the principles of equity. The building blocks of more
enlightened societies are invariably anchored on the moral integrity and
the industrious probity of the judiciary. Its inherent predications are
the instinctive fixity on ensuring that truth is not abused, that the
purity of the law is not distorted to suit the parade of friendship or
the corruptive influences of partisan manipulations.
For any democracy
to work in full exercise of unrestrained, agreed equitable testament,
the judiciary must be fearless, firm and sincere, doggedly determined
that no one, no matter how powerful, should sway the scale of justice.
No doubt the root cause of the festering crisis in our party has an
unveiled external linkages. There are veritable intrusive conspirators
out there who do not wish us well. There are indeed agents of fury and
storm who are bent on provoking the destruction of the PDP.
The
conspirators who are out there beyond the confines of our party have
found pliable tools, the aggressive fifth columnists who are without
conscience or principles and who are willing to mortgage the truth for
personal acquisitions. The ultimate aim of these conspirators is to
decimate the opposition organ, annihilate the structures of dissent,
vanquish all alternative fora of pluralistic contributions and therefore
reduce the nation to a one-party monolith. And what does that augur for
the deepening of the democratic space and the entrenchment of Liberty?
What does this portend for the necessary widening of the expanse of
freedom and the permanent cultivation of diverse contributions to the
governance of the state?
Without competition, without plurality of
thought, without tolerance of alternative voices, there is no democracy.
There is no freedom. A virulent monolithic state is the quickest road
to chaos and societal destruction. The stern lesson of the First
Republic still stares us in the face.
We who are members of the older
generation are still much reminded of the reckless orchestration of the
crisis which erupted in the Western Region in 1962, 1963 and 1964 and
whose culminative effect not only engulfed the entire nation in a
whirlwind of uncertainty and political turmoil, it eventually dovetailed
into a destructive civil war which claimed millions of lives and
paralyzed the national cohesion.
And yet it all began with an
hegemonistic intrusion upon the affairs of the Regional party known then
as the Action Group. An internal leadership crisis between Chief
Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Ladoke Akintola was hijacked by external
forces who manipulated the dispute between the two leaders and triggered
series of domino effects which first shattered the party itself beyond
redemption and graduated into the glaring compromise of the judiciary
which abetted the unjust conviction of Chief Obafemi Awolowo by Justice
Sodeinde Sowemimo who at Chief Awolowo’s sentencing claimed that his
“hands were tied!”
From there, the Western Region knew no peace as
thugs, partisans mercenaries and the Agbekoyas flung themselves into
internecine destruction that resulted into unbridled arson and murder.
The end result was the first coup of January 1966 and the counter coup
of July 1966, and the eventual civil war that almost ruined the Nigerian
Union. And it all started with the intrusive attempt to wipe out the
opposition. Whereas the Action Group was a much smaller party with
confined regional relevance, the PDP is a pan-Nigerian ideal, an
unprecedented rainbow coalition of all tribal stripes and all possible
ideologies congregating to form a truly national platform with the vast
reaches stretching from the Savannah to the Atlantic shore.
The
consequence of the destruction of such pan- Nigerian platform may
provoke a sweeping cataclysm whose end result no one can predict. My
clear submission is that the ultimate resolution of the PDP crisis
resides in the Supreme Court which has proven time and time again as an
organ of responsible, intelligent, integrity conscious and morally
upright men and women whose purpose and vision is to protect the dignity
of the Judiciary. There can't be any half measures anymore. We need a
clear, firm and binding total solution. This can only be obtained at the
highest court in the land.
Nothing else will do! The sustenance of
every enduring democracy is the effective opposition. It keeps the
ruling party alert. It provides a platform for alternative vision for
the governance of the state. In the striking continuity of the
oppositional refrain, the nation engages itself in perpetual, vigorous
debate, therefore preventing any slide into a tyrannical, omniscient
leadership. In the end, an effective opposition is not only the
heart-beat of democracy, it strengthens the ruling party by a conscious
and constant reminder that it needs to perform and meet the aspirations
of the people to remain in power.
Therefore, the survival of the
People’s Democratic Party is crucial to the survival and the longevity
of our democracy. As an opposition party, the PDP must remain strong and
healthy; vigorous, independent and conscionable. It must be faithful to
its foundational ideals as well as to the Nigerian people in ensuring
that ultimately it is the will of the people that must prevail over
personal and selfish pursuits. This is the time we need men of matured
wisdom and strong moral fiber to lead our party beyond the present
tumult.
This is the time we need men of exemplary leadership and
disciplined commitment to set us on the right, redemptive course.
There is relevance now in the words of Thomas Jefferson: " May God grant
us men of principles so that we can have principal men to lead us."
That was true two hundred years ago and it is still very true today.
May the good Lord guide our party and our Nation on the path of rebirth
and genuine healing and shining glory. I thank you all.
Chief Olabode George, CON Atona Oodua of Yorubaland
March 21, 2017 Lagos
