It now seems like a lifetime ago when late Vincent Ogbulafor; the then Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) National Chairman audaciously boasted that the party would rule Nigeria for 60 years.
Not only did that statement exude an air of unbridled arrogance, it also echoed the shortcomings of our electoral and democratic credentials as a nation at that given time; a malaise which has even magnified itself today.
Not too long after that pronouncement was made in 2008, the party did not only lose power in 2015, it has been on a downward spiral since then. The once self-acclaimed biggest party in Africa is now at best, a penumbra of itself.
Badly balkanized by self-inflicted internal wranglings, perennial leadership ineptitude, total unpreparedness for its new role as a viable opposition and several other factors; it now appears that the party will go into extinction sooner rather than later.
To further rub salt in its already excruciating wound, recent developments in the polity suggest that the days ahead are going to be gloomier for the party. Only a terrible political forecaster will envisage otherwise.
For the party, the break of every dawn comes with its members at all levels leaving the party in droves as though they are fleeing from a plague. The motive behind these wholesale defections is definitely a topic for another day but many consider it an apocalypse of former APC Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole’s infamous statement in 2019 that “once you join APC, your sins are forgiven”.
Out of its paltry eleven Governors that emerged from the 2023 general elections, it is no longer news that the Governor of Delta State, his deputy, immediate predecessor and a retinue of aides and legislators have jumped ship to the APC.
What makes this occurrence really worrisome for the party is that Delta state was hitherto considered a fortress in terms of its guaranteed voting bloc and its enviable position as one of the leading oil-producing states in the country. Everyone knows what that means for the party.
Mention must also be made of the ongoing events in Rivers State, another oil-rich PDP controlled state with its fate currently hanging in the balance.
While many may argue that these developments are orchestrated by the ruling APC to cripple the party which it considers its main opposition going into 2027 via the hounding of its leaders by coercion, blackmail and subterfuge with an aim to plunge the nation into a one party state, it is also safe to postulate that the party is being administered a dose of its own elixir.
Without recourse to the yearnings of impoverished Nigerians and in brazen disrespect to the electoral processes at that time, it was this same medication that prompted the conceited hallucination that the party would rule for 60 unbroken years.
When one adds all these to the open endorsement of President Bola Tinubu’s second term bid by a PDP-elected Governor Umo Eno of Akwa Ibom state, the veil becomes completely lifted on the party’s future.
More likely than not, any effort to rejuvenate this dying giant will only amount to sprinting through a cul de sac. With the party’s lifelong stranglehold on the South south almost gone, what else is left?
The moral of this story is that the ephemeral nature of power shows no veneration to any individual, group of persons or organization. For the ruling APC, it needs no reminder that ultimate power belongs to God who uses the people as instruments.
Ohhh!! How are the mighty fallen!!
