Akwa Ibom PDP- Just before the funeral begins

BY DAN ETOKIDEM

There is a Yoruba saying that the dog that would be lost would never hear the  hunter’s whistle. But the hunter must blow his whistle all the same in the forlorn hope that his woebegone kennel might be some chance picks a strain of it. The Akwa Ibom PDP Governorship primaries which was spiced with a cocktail of irregularities was recently held. 

The result was the coronation of the biggest pretender, a genuine fake, and for some inexplicable reasons, both the process and the outcome were aborted by the initiators(s). Indeed, the mediocrity of the principal actors who tried to undermine the people’s choice was superb. What they forgot to think about was that there are some politicians who will think twice before sabotaging, undermining or scheme out. The forgot  that the 22 aggrieved aspirants who walked out of the farce called primaries, project the deterrence, that implacable force and  power that would make it unattractive for anyone to manipulate the process and the outcome.

Sadly, the Paul Ekpo- led Akwa Ibom PDP has presented us with another drama of political rascality by making the party a consistency of naiveté, a tragedy of errors and missteps. But we must separate the man who suffers from the act that creates. It is obvious that the party is now afflicted by lack of insight into how a modern and complex society should be governed, and its leaders also lacking the temperament to bring groups together and forge a harmonious whole out of them.  

What happened at the Akwa Ibom International Stadium on December 8th, 2014 was surrender to institutional decay. It was a cynical rejection of progress for the collective but triumph for individual greed. Indeed, at no time in our life as a state has radical change become more urgent, especially against the background that the fate of a state is more important than the fate of two individuals however important or self important they claim to be.

 As I have never been tired of insisting, Akpabio, Udom, and Paul Ekpo are not the problem. We must move beyond individual manifestation of national contradictions if we are ever to arrive at the real source of our problems, though Akpabio’s personal imprimatur in the current phase of Akwa Ibom PDP crisis has been very disturbing, marked as it is by a feckless and reckless disdain for consensus building and the childlike relish with which he seems to delight in cooking a smoke against the party to achieve self interest.

But it is now clear as daylight that the PDP in the state is about to witness a historic retribution. There is therefore an urgent need for a referendum about certain disability fundaments that have hobbled PDP’s march to lead the state to authentic nationhood and rendered government very amendable to depotic arbitrary rule and the tyranny of the dark age. This certainly is not the civility we expect from a party that prides itself an African’s largest political party.

If the creepy meltdown of the PDP in Akwa Ibom is not to become a fait accompli, the National leadership must help it experience revolutionary changes necessary to reclaim the state from its local and foreign oppressors and reposition of people for greater competitiveness. If things remain as they are much longer, the image of the party will be battered and its chances of securing victory come 2015 compromised.

Akpabio may boast to have successfully manipulated the process to favour his anointed son by rendering the balloting process a barren exercise, but to boast of having a united PDP capable of winning the 2015 Governorship election under the present circumstance is a questionable claim better left unspoken. The truth is that any sound democrat who genuinely loves the PDP and Akwa Ibom should be alarmed by the event of December 8th. Are we still in a democracy or the rule of despotic strong men who do not give a damn about the fundamental tenet of democracy? This has nothing to do with Udom Emmanuel succeeding Akpabio however crude and cruel the process. Udom is a mere epiphenomenon in a consuming and engrossing drama of the political forest. 

Like Akpabio, Udom himself is a product of a determinate historical process which must eventually unravel before our very eye. It is the process and the political occlusions as they unfurl that must be of concern to patriotic Akwa Ibom people. The present crisis that is threatening the soul of the party did not just start with the Governorship primaries. It began with the Ward Congress and State House of Assembly primaries. Both were exercised in sustained brutal duplicity unleavened by neither redeeming vision nor intellectual sagacity. But what the actors of the ongoing electoral fraud lacked in intellectual sophistication and ideological subtlety, they made up for raw political cunning. 

But you cannot bequeath what you don’t have. What Akpabio was looking for was not a visionary idealist or transformative leader who could take Akwa Ibom to the next level but political correct journeyman sworn to protect the statue quo. This sharply conflicts with the collective aspiration of the people. This is what is currently playing out with seismic reverberations across the length and breadth of the state. It is not a revolutionary upheaval but the volcanic impulsion of a party that has come face to face with the fatal contradictions of its origin, roots and foundation.

Let us no longer quibble about the situation, Akwa Ibom PDP is faced with a grave emergency. The earlier we recognize this fact, the better for us. It is no longer possible to sustain Akwa Ibom PDP under its current configuration. Because of the action of just a few, fear stalks the land. There is trepidation and  uncertainty over what will befall the state should the approaching apocalyptic meltdown happens. No thanks to an ever growing, ever powerful reinvigorated rival APC waiting to benefit from the political implosion of the PDP. 

Too bad that the present state PDP leadership lacks the depths of understanding, political ingenuity and moral fortitude needed to galvanize the people away from the looming apocalyptic path.

I must commend the aggrieved Governorship aspirants for exhibiting maturity, discipline and civility in their approach to the unwanted systematic provocation which saw some of them not even finding their names as delegates on the list.
The onus now is on the party in Abuja to do the needful if they want the party to remain as the ruling party in 2015 since Political terrorist are using the power of political ascendancy and incumbency to unleash a reign of terror on the state in order to secure and safeguard their temporary and transient advantage. They have broken all the rules of sober and civilized governance and we are still counting.

With their undemocratic conduct, they constitute the gravest nuisance to the party and the peace and stability of the state.

Hope may not be scattered to the four winds but it has been evicted from its dwelling place. Is the PDP National Leadership ready to begin to attend to the conditions precedent to this crisis as the state moves from the possible dawn of a new day into the darkness of right already long passed?

With a revived APC in the state waiting in the wings  come 2015  these are questions Wadata Plaza must urgently answer just before the funeral begins.