BY DAN ETOKIDEM
The gift of sincerity is one of the most wonderful assets a man can possess. However, a man who is sincerely wrong and is blissfully unaware of his predicament is in a very precarious situation. This is the situation the PDP finds itself as the crisis rocking the outcome of the December 8th,2014 Governorship primaries in Akwa Ibom state enters a critical point of no return.
The gift of sincerity is one of the most wonderful assets a man can possess. However, a man who is sincerely wrong and is blissfully unaware of his predicament is in a very precarious situation. This is the situation the PDP finds itself as the crisis rocking the outcome of the December 8th,2014 Governorship primaries in Akwa Ibom state enters a critical point of no return.
The PDP founding fathers obviously meant well for the country when they fought to establish a party that will herald an egalitarian society free from graft, ignorance, oppression, victimisation, socio-political and economic backwardness. A party that will uphold the rule of law and the fundamental norms of democracy. They never envisaged that their noble and patriotic vision and dreams for their fatherland would be hijacked by new entrants whose actions has reversed all what the founding principles and ideals of the PDP was at conception and birth.
The party’s major problem began when it lost its identity soon after it was hijacked from its founding fathers. It wasn’t originally conceived as a conservative, not to talk of reactionary party, but it has since become both conservative and reactionary. Much worse, it has become so formless and menacing that it effortlessly takes the shape and vices of the strongest man, in Akwa Ibom’s case, Governor Akpabio- the hijacker of its soul.
Presently, the Akwa Ibom PDP has been its own worst enemy. Betraying an ideological poverty and intellectual aridity of the worst type, portraying itself as being a tribute to power racketeering at its most ruthless summit, proving incapable of rising above the limits and limitations of its original foundations. The Paul Ekpo-led PDP is running a party that is merely democratic in name, but exhibit some of the greatest travesties and parodies of democracy we have ever seen in the land.
A case is as noble as the manner in which it is prosecuted. It is indisputable that the PDP Governorship primaries was crudely rigged to favour Udom Emmanuel, a man who has done little to prove he can be a man of his own. For one, he owes his transient mercurial political ascendancy to Akpabio’s arbitrary benevolence, not through any merit-driven or democratic process. This is what you get when your politics is not defined by any high principle, but expediency. The PDP is set to implode with maximum combustion, yet the crisis is avoidable and preventable. One of the drawbacks of our democracy is that its political landscape is teaming with lies, fraud and self-service. Sincerity, uprightness and service for the good of the people have become strangers.
A leader that is known for anything will be remembered for nothing. The great parties of Western democracies go through endless and ceaseless self-inventions but the ideological fundaments remains. There is a limit of power pragmatism. Even in advance liberal democracies, ethnic profiling and racial colouration often rear their ugly head. But it is never done at the expense of party coherence and cohesiveness.
While Akpabio may bask in the euphoria of the power of incumbency, undaunted, the G22 are also prepared to demonstrate that both Akpabio and Udom Emmanuel met them in the game. With the G22 patriotically resolute in rejecting a configured political arrangement that is rigged against rationality and political modernity which can only throw up a leadership lottery which is structured to produce only the grossly ill-equipped and manifestly unprepared, where lies PDP’s survival. The party is thus confronted by the evil of military assisted democracy with all the possibility of a conflagration and seismic convulsions if not well-managed.
To insist that the primaries was free and fair is childish. It is not just the fallaciousness of this claim that offends the sensibility of Akwa Ibom people but the distortions and arrogance that accompanies it. The party leadership must urgently realise that the G22 are no pushovers. They are not the kind of political actors you face in combat without serious electoral consequences no matter how solid you claim your rapid evacuation plan may be .
Unfortunately and highly regrettably too, like a monstrous organism that has overgrown its own capacity for coordination and dynamic mobility, the Akwa Ibom PDP seems unable to move itself forward or the state for that matter, forgetting that it will eventually face an electorate that are more enlightened, politically conscious and merciless come February 28th,2015. The truth is that whoever emerges as Governor of the state next month would have been elected because Akwa Ibom people are ready to vote against somebody than for somebody. With the G22 threat to shift alliance which the party continues to dismiss with a wave of the hand, the result may be an electoral outcome that may leave all astonished with consequences that may reverberate beyond the shores of the state. Also with 2015 shaping up to be principally a contest between an internally weak, divided, fragmented, factionalized and polarised PDP VS an ever increasingly strong, virile, aggressive and revitalised opposition, arrogant and insensitive posturing from the party leadership won’t help the situation.
Forcefully tampering with the destiny of a people in the name of God but without the consent of God can prove fatal. With the PDP like a sick patient in an Intensive Care Unit of an hospital that needs urgent and professional medical intervention to survive, will the party leadership rise above board and urgently administer the correct medication to revive this dying patient whose conception, birth and growth many have suffered and laboured since 1998?
Peace to my fatherland!
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