By Palladium
What started as a trickle of ‘deserters’ in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has become an avalanche threatening to bury the leading opposition party. In the past few months, and especially in the past few weeks, the PDP has lost a number of states, scores of national lawmakers, and hundreds of state legislators. It in effect allowed a small wound to become gangrenous, thus making the frenzied exits enormously difficult to curb and the storm almost impossible to quieten. Alarmed that its elective convention was days away, the party desperately tried to keep up appearances and force a healing. Unfortunately, that abrasive effort to paper over the cracks has exposed it to a chasm far worse than it ever imagined in nearly three decades of existence.
Of all the complications it feared, it is doubtful whether it thought the courts could take the wind out of its sail as peremptorily as it did late last week when it dismissed its preconvention formalities, judging them a breach of the law. Justice James Omotosho of the Federal High Court in Abuja, deploying idiomatic jurisprudence, ruled that the PDP had failed to observe its own constitution in planning its convention. He warned that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) should not recognise the outcome. But the party remains defiant, however, citing a Supreme Court judgement enthroning party supremacy in such matters. In the next few days, when push comes to shove, and the litigants push their rights in the face of a stalling appellate court, it will be determined whether that defiance is not just braggadocio.
The party will be wondering how it got to this pass. From the Olympian height of commanding about 31 states to a miserable and almost concessionary eight, it is not certain that the party would not imagine that more could still be taken from them, the biblical equivalence of ‘whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him’. The party should be cheerful that its case is not as hopeless as the African Democratic Congress (ADC), which so far cannot see the forest for the trees, or the Labour Party (LP), which is at the mercy of its infanticidal parents.
