Obituary for the PDP

The diminution of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) reached a symbolic pinnacle this week when wave of defections swept through the National Assembly. Several PDP senators, including former Sokoto State governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, formally dumped the party for the African Democratic Congress (ADC), while multiple members of the House of Representatives also abandoned it for the ADC or the ruling APC.

Not every PDP legislator has left yet, but at this point it’s only a matter of time. With only two term-limited, lame-duck governors in Bauchi and Oyo states (whose continued membership in the PDP can’t even be guaranteed until 2027), I think it’s safe to say the PDP is officially dead.

For people of my generation who followed Nigerian politics closely in the early years of the Fourth Republic, the extinction of the PDP feels surreal. There was a time when the party seemed as permanent as the Nigerian state itself. It governed Nigeria for 16 uninterrupted years and so completely dominated the political landscape that opposition parties looked like pitiful ornamental appendages to the system.

At its height, the PDP controlled 31 of Nigeria’s 36 states, similar to today’s APC. Governors, senators, representatives, ministers, retired generals and career political jobbers all gravitated toward it. It was the ultimate receptacle of power and influence. In those days, joining the PDP was the closest thing Nigeria had to acquiring political insurance.

The arrogance that flowed from that dominance was legendary. In April 2008, the party’s then national chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, boasted that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years. He added, with startling candor, that he didn’t care if Nigeria became a one-party state. At the time, the statement sounded like the confident exaggeration of a man who believed he was speaking from the center of history.

It turns out he was speaking from the edge of a cliff. Today, the PDP that proclaimed itself, with egotistical airs, to be Africa’s largest political party is a shell of its former self.

The previously expansive PDP umbrella now effectively shelters only two governors and a sprinkling of legislators (about seven senators and 17 representatives) who are plotting exit strategies from it.

That is a dramatic, never-before-seen political evaporation in Nigeria. But the PDP did not die suddenly. Its collapse has been a long, drawn-out process of self-sabotage punctuated by opportunistic defections, personal vendettas and spectacular displays of elite treachery.

The first decisive blow to the party came in 2015 when the party lost the presidency to the newly assembled All Progressives Congress (APC). For 16 years, the PDP had been the gravitational center of Nigerian politics because it controlled the federal government. Once that power vanished, the coalition that sustained it began to unravel.

Many Nigerian politicians do not join parties because of ideological affinity or programmatic conviction. They join because of proximity to power. When the PDP ceased to be the custodial party of federal authority, it also ceased to be the natural home of political opportunists.

The defections began almost immediately. Ogbulafor, who had said PDP would rule for 60 years, was one of the first PDP politicians to visit the APC secretariat in April 2015, a month before the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as president.

Politicians who had sworn eternal loyalty to the party discovered overnight that their political convictions had changed. Governors defected. Legislators defected. Party chieftains switched allegiances with a speed that would impress Jamaica’s Usain Bolt.

Nothing captures the PDP’s institutional collapse more vividly than the fate of its own former leaders. At least four former national chairmen of the party eventually ended up in the APC: Barnabas Gemade, Audu Ogbeh, Ali Modu Sheriff, and Adamu Muazu. In other words, men who led the PDP at the highest level later abandoned it for its main rival.

What remained after 2015 was a wounded party that still had a chance to recover if it had managed its internal conflicts with maturity and discipline. Instead, it chose fratricide. No individual embodies the party’s self-destructive impulses more distinctly than Nyesom Wike.

Wike’s quarrel with the PDP became especially bitter after he lost out in the struggle for the party’s presidential ticket.

What followed was a prolonged campaign of internal destabilization that culminated in the notorious rebellion of the so-called G-5 governors, who are now at odds with each other.

During the 2023 election cycle, these governors effectively turned their backs on their own party’s presidential candidate and openly fraternized with Bola Tinubu of the APC. It was one of the most extraordinary acts of partisan self-immolation in Nigeria’s democratic history.

A ruling party undermining itself from within is not unheard of. But a major opposition party actively assisting the ruling party to defeat itself is an entirely different category of political absurdity.

The strange part was that the PDP never summoned the courage to discipline the rebellion. Instead, it spent months pleading for reconciliation with politicians who had already crossed the psychological Rubicon separating loyalty from hostility.

The party leadership appeared incapable of recognizing that the rebellion was not a temporary disagreement but a permanent structural rupture.

In Nigerian politics, when a politician begins to work openly against his own party’s presidential candidate, reconciliation meetings are unlikely to restore trust.

The result was predictable. The PDP entered the 2023 elections deeply fractured and emerged from them even weaker.

Since then, the party has existed in a state of perpetual crisis. Leadership disputes, court cases and factional rivalries have turned the party into a theater of endless internal conflict. Instead of projecting the image of a credible national alternative to the APC, the PDP has appeared increasingly like a quarrelsome family fighting over inheritance while the house burns.

Nothing illustrates this political dysfunction more vividly than recent events in Abuja’s local government elections. A candidate who won a chairmanship seat on the PDP platform reportedly wasted no time switching allegiance to the APC. That act captured the party’s predicament more eloquently than any formal political analysis.

Winning an election under the PDP banner now appears to create immediate anxiety about political survival.

It also reflects the ambiguous political posture of figures like Nyesom Wike, who continues to claim PDP membership while acting in ways that frequently align with the interests of the ruling APC.

The cumulative effect of these developments has been the gradual hollowing out of the party. The PDP still exists as a legal entity. It still has offices and officials. But its actual institutional authority has vanished. What remains is largely the disguised extension of the APC.

There is an irony in all this. The PDP helped normalize the culture of defections that is now destroying it. For years, it enthusiastically welcomed defectors from rival parties, rewarding them with positions and privileges. Party loyalty was never a particularly prized virtue in its political culture.

The party’s strategy was simple: absorb everyone and expand the coalition of power. That strategy worked for as long as the PDP controlled the federal government. Once it lost that advantage, the logic of opportunism that benefited it began to operate against it.

Politicians who previously defected into the PDP now defect out of it. In other words, the PDP became a victim of the political habits it cultivated.

The party’s decline also illustrates a larger truth about Nigerian politics. Political dominance should never be confused with institutional strength. APC will do well to learn this elemental truth.

For 16 years, the PDP looked invincible. It won elections easily, controlled most state governments, and occupied the commanding heights of the federal state. But it never built a durable institutional structure capable of surviving the loss of power.

It was essentially a coalition of powerful individuals held together by access to the resources of the federal government.

Once those resources disappeared, the coalition gradually disintegrated.

What we are witnessing today is the final stage of that disintegration. For a political organization that had proclaimed it would rule Nigeria for 60 years, this is a remarkably brief lifespan.