– BY FELIX OGUEJIOFOR-ABUGU, abuguf@yahoo.com –
THE news of Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo’s sudden resignation from office on Tuesday January 18, as the National Chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, (PDP), took many by surprise. Even more surprising was the fact that he was forced to resign. Needless to say, the development, which took place barely five days after a very successful special national convention of the party, which Nwodo’s National Working Committee (NWC), organised and from which President Jonathan emerged as the party’s presidential flag-bearer in the forthcoming April general elections, has generated much controversy with many asking, ‘what really happened?’
Ostensibly, Nwodo’s forced exit came as the climax (or anti-climax) of a lingering face-off between the office of the former national chairman and the governor of Enugu State, Mr. Sullivan Chime over the propriety (or legality) of the directive of the party’s national secretariat, reportedly given since 2008, that congresses be held to elect new executive committees of the state chapter of the party, as attempts to elect new executives at Chime’s ascension to power had left the party factionalized. The alternative, according to reports, was for the positions held by the parallel executive committee members to be amicably harmonized. Otherwise, it was further reported, INEC would not accept candidates from Enugu and seven other states, which had similar problems, for the general elections this year.
When Nwodo came in as National Chairman in June last year, this became one of his first major challenges, namely, how to bring peace to the party in his home state. Ironically, it was in the course of the peace moves by the Nwodo-led NWC that the bruising Enugu PDP crisis broke out. So, those who argue that the former PDP Chairman was consumed by the Enugu crisis (which, to be fair to the man, he earnestly tried resolving, starting with an all Enugu PDP stakeholders meeting in Abuja in August or so last year, where it was resolved that harmonization, not new congresses, was a better option for the party in the state but which decision the government in Enugu allegedly failed to implement), may well be right. But did he really fall to the Enugu crisis?
We may never know what actually led to Dr. Nwodo’s abrupt resignation as PDP Chair. What, however, cannot be denied is that whether he fell to the well advertised invidious political machinations against him by some unbridled forces in Enugu, his home state, or to plots from any other source, his exit at this point in time cannot exactly become a big gain for the ruling party; if anything, it is a huge loss!
Those who know the PDP very well would wager that Dr. Nwodo is one of the very few reform-minded administrators the party has produced since its inception in 1998, practically the only one with an abiding attachment to, and affection for, the party. When Nwodo talks about the triumphs of the PDP, he talks about them with the infectious pride and love of a father whose child has excelled in a particular field of human endeavour. When he talks about its failings, it is also with the pain of a parent whose child has become avoidably wayward. You can feel it, you can hear it in his voice, see it in his eyes when Nwodo discusses PDP, that the sentiments he expresses and the emotions he exerts about the party are all transparently genuine! The truth is that I am yet to meet any other chieftain who exhibits so much sincere affection for the PDP, which, to most other members of the party, is nothing more than an election winning machine that only requires routine maintenance, enough to enable it win more elections!
As PDP’s first National Secretary in 1998, who ran the party then as the National Chairman now does, Nwodo set up the party’s administrative structure, in line with international best practices in party management, determined that the PDP must function like the Democratic Parties and ANC’s of this world. He moved the party from an obscure secretariat somewhere in town to the famous Wadata House, which he bought for the party and which became a landmark in the highbrow Maitama area of the FCT. He established the National Democratic Institute (now moribund, no thanks to the disinterest of the party’s subsequent leaders in any such grand idea!), something of an incubator of theories and ideas on how best to deepen our democracy through effective party management (internal democracy) and transparent electoral processes. He also organized the much-talked Jos PDP presidential primary, which produced the Obasanjo presidency in 1999.
It seems to me, therefore, that when President Jonathan supported Nwodo to become the National Chairman of the ruling party in June last year, he knew that he needed a man who had enough passion and experience to bring to bear on the running of the party. The President knew that what the party needed was a man who could reinvent it, who could do things to inspire the people’s waning interest in a political organization which has been in power since 1999 with little, by way of political and or economic progress, to show for it.
Which was exactly what Dr. Nwodo wanted to do: reinvent the party. He began by publicly denouncing the old, much despised PDP practice of imposing candidates, of some anti-democratic Godfathers, rather than the ballot box deciding who should fly party flags in an election. He vowed that under him, every candidate for an election must emerge through the ballot box (primaries), insisting that the credibility of the electoral process could only be guaranteed if people were allowed to vote and be voted for. He then set out to reform the party’s funding process to free it from the stranglehold of such Godfathers who used funds as a tool of blackmail against the leadership, which became routinely incapable of taking independent decisions or asserting the supremacy of the party because it had no financial autonomy, hence the membership e-registration project, which was as much an attempt to get an accurate membership database as it was a step towards raising accountable revenue through membership dues (which could be quite big). It says a lot about the sincerity of the expressed desire of people at the highest level of leadership in the PDP to reform the party and our politics, that Nwodo’s e-registration project was shot down no sooner than it had been shown on national television by President Jonathan as the best way to go.
Once that happened, it became clear to all keen watchers of PDP politics that the former PDP Chairman’s reform efforts were doomed: the people who had the authority to drive the reforms turned out not to have the gumption to do so. Nwodo was soldiering on alone, as it were. How far could he go? Ask yourself, what ruling party would allow its national chairman to be subjected to the kind of humiliation that Nwodo suffered in the hands of leaders of a state chapter of the party? What ruling party would condone the frivolous litigations hauled at Nwodo by faceless members of the party, who were merely acting the scripts of party chieftains who knew their actions undermined the integrity of the party but brazenly went ahead to take them? To think that Nwodo got punished ostensibly for those same litigations when those who instituted them should have been reprimanded in the first instance for what were clearly anti-party activities, ignominiously booted out of his position barely five days after he organized easily the most transparent and credible presidential primary in the history of the PDP! Such sterling performance and the fact that gradually, the former NC was reshaping the party to begin to act like the change agent it ought to be, couldn’t mitigate the offence? The question resonates: what happened?
But, we cry over spilt milk! However, even as the era of Okwy Nwodo as PDP is over (for good I suppose), we the led must insist on some irreducible minimums for the party. One of them is, go on and try reinventing the ruling party as Nwodo passionately attempted to—with little success.
