PDP’s Port Harcourt Renaissance Convention

The Peoples Democratic Party holds a strategic convention in Port Harcourt to elect new officers to steer its rebirth and end an awful season of stormy weather. North Central Bureau Chief, CHAMBERLAIN ODEY previews what a lot of people have described as a make or mar convention

Three months later, it is Port Harcourt again, as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), meets at the highest party get-together, national convention, to breathe new life into itself, rediscover its spirit, and recapture its focus in the aftermath of monumental electoral rejection and intense internal strife and bewilderment. Prefatory to this soul-searching effort was a review of its internal failures and contradictions that enabled the party’s defeat in the 2015 general elections. The post-election committee that reviewed the template of the party’s fall from power uncovered several internal contraptions and archetypical practices leading to imposition of candidates, subversion of popular will and choices, collapse of party ethos, and flagrant depletion of party supremacy and internal democracy as basic to the party’s flounder and poor electoral showing. With the expiration of the tenure of the National and State Working committees early this year, the opportunity availed bountifully for the party to heal itself by commencing its own reconstruction with much benefit of hindsight. More determined than deterred, the party’s reconciliation committee set out early to soothe the angered and quarrelling, revamp the party’s depleted rungs, and provide a road map to depart from the past and steer renewed ideological confidence within and without. Among several recommendations, the formula of zoning and rotating party offices among the different geo-political zones of the country was adopted and endorsed by the party’s Board of Trustees, with implications for the States and Local Government Areas. Accordingly, during the build up to the congresses that will culminate in the forthcoming convention, the party used and accepted zoning as a consensual way to popular representation, and for candidates to emerge to steer the affairs of the party at the ward, Local Government, State, and Zone levels. Zoning was largely the principle used in conducting recent Ward, Local Government, and State congresses of the party. The experiment achieved an appreciable level of calm in the party, especially states like Plateau where the party was adrift due to acute internal strife, malcontent, and agitation for justice and basic party ethos. Building on this success, the party had to rethink an earlier convention held in May in Port Harcourt, the main cause of disapproval being that the imperative of zoning was significantly corrupted as the positions of National Chairman and party presidential flag bearer for 2019 were zoned to the North. In the revised document which subsumes the modus operandi for the forthcoming convention, the position of National Chairman has been zoned to the South – and then to the South-west, as the party presidential candidate for 2019 is to come from the North, notably North-east. By and large, all the positions that make the national working committee and the national executive committee have been zoned to different zones, and the zones have further conceded positions allocated to them to certain states of the zone drawing from history and to fulfil the principles of fairness, equity, and political balancing. In the roll call so far for the party’s plumb job of National Chairman, a cream of aspirants have emerged even as the South-west zone is said to further consigned the opportunity to Ogun and Lagos states only in the zone. Curiously however, Chief Raymond Dokpesi from the South-south zone has since bought nomination form, damning further zoning of the position to the South-west. Chief Dokpesi has been very rigorous and serious with nationwide campaign tours and its believed by analysts that irrespective of the strength of his mobilization and size of his war chest, he will be humbled in Port Harcourt by the delegates, who appear overwhelmingly resolved to respect the zoning arrangements and shun a culture of impunity that seemingly torpedoed the destiny of the party in recent past. In other words, the chairmanship contest will be a mercurial duel between Raymond Dokpesi, Timi Agbaje of Lagos State, and Bode George of Ogun State. In the North-central where the PDP revival potentials are high, magnificent, and effervescent, with party faithful in the zone in high spirit and in a state of constant political activism, positions have been zoned among the states with those of zone chairman going to Plateau State, while Kogi State will produce the National Publicity Secretary of the party. In the South-south zone, the position of National Legal Adviser has been zoned to Cross River State. In a move that has been celebrated by many as matching quality with professional fitness, Barrister Sunday Gabriel Odey has bought nomination form, and is favoured to emerge. Speaking about his nomination, Odey told journalists that “It is official. Sunny-Gabriel Odey is PDP candidate for National Legal Adviser, bringing with him 30 years of successful legal and political experience”. On the parlous state of affairs in the party, Odey retorted: “as an unrelenting advocate for unity of Party and Country, I believe that PDP members across Nigeria and around the world are not in conflict, only in a temporal leadership tussle”. From the footfalls and the drum beats, a new PDP is possible and underway – from the Port Harcourt convention. A new spirit, attitude, zeal, love, respect, cooperation, understanding, and subordination to party authority and supremacy are the new virtues that the party will pursue as the Port Harcourt convention will ignite all-party processes towards 2019. But the real standard the PDP can set from this convention for other parties and democracy in Nigeria is for the convention to abrogate the position of party leader to allow the party chairman remain the custodian of party conscience.