PDP, APC and Social Contract with Nigerians

Going by the Babel of reactions to the outcome of the 2015 election by chieftains, leaders, members and supporters of the newly minted Nigerian opposition party, the PDP, it is certain that the party cannot fathom what really struck it during the just concluded general election. From tearing at each other, picking holes with their methodologies of politics, calling themselves names, blaming the opposition, the international community and other sundry impediments to its suzerain rule, the PDP seem not to know where exactly to lay the handle for its disastrous outing. Get me right, the party members and leaders may be individually right in the causes of their woeful state today but they seem to technically avoid the two single greatest factors that led to the downfall of the party. I do not get to hear these from the cacophony of reasons the members advance for the glitch that hit PDP. This furthers the notion that is trending in Nigeria’s discourse today that the PDP is marching to its grave. Even in its sordid state, the members decide to live a lie and avoid telling themselves the truth.
PDP’s fall remains a natural trajectory of a party that has been in power for 16 years and left the country worse than it met it. What befell PDP is a natural reward for a party that had been so carried away with its capacity to manipulate the process to continually return it to power that it had treated the people; critical determinants in a democracy, to heightened contempt and scorn. The outcome of the 2015 general election was a payback to a party that had tried to subvert the democratic rights of a people and replace them with its own crooked means of culling flattering electoral results at every election. The result of the just concluded election remains a good referendum for the PDP and it risks further damnation if it pretends the message did not sink. What happened to PDP in the 2015 general election is the expected reaction from a people to a cabal that treasures power for its own stake and which has removed the people’s content from political power.
Perhaps, with the exception of the members and beneficiaries of the PDP, other Nigerians saw what happened to PDP in this year’s election coming especially with the successful formation of the APC as an agglomeration of legacy parties that have been in opposition since 1999. With APC presenting an alternative platform to the arrogant PDP, it was obvious that PDP’s days were numbered. Given the dirty and dangerous way and manner the PDP campaigned in the just concluded election, there is little doubt that the leaders of the party did not see the Tsunami that hit them. Given the way and manner the party threw money into the election campaign, given the indecent manner it threw hate, character assassination, lies, blackmail, insults, abuses and invectives into the campaign, it was obvious that only a threatened and unsure ruling party that will resort to such underhand practices in prospecting for a re-election in an election it was supposed to campaign on its lofty achievements.
Nigerians scripted the scrolls of what happened in this year’s general election and the precepts was drawn from the grand failure of the PDP in sixteen years as well as the mind boggling corruption that oiled that leviathan. It was not an act of happenstance or a mere accident. In fact, the electoral decision of 2015 built up over the period PDP was walking with such big swagger through our national shores, leaving ordinary Nigerians kissing the dust in its uncaring gait. As it honed in rank arrogance and petulant contempt of the Nigerian people, Nigerians made the final decision that for the country and democracy to survive, the PDP must be done away with. It is obvious that the PDP was oblivious of this resolve until very late in the game hence its failure in arresting its ouster even with the welter of harried moves it launched as the election neared. That its members are sounding so disoriented and confused as to what caused its disastrous electoral fortunes is proof that the PDP hierarch allowed it to be benumbed by the façade of unaccountable power that it lost touch with reality in a country it claimed to govern. Methinks it will take PDP several years to start building a new platform again, as it evades the principal reasons for its failure; the PDP is merely furthering its years in the cold.