“A group without a leader is a mob”.
Late President John Kennedy, 1917-1963, of the United States, in his classic, PROFILES IN COURAGE, recalled a Senator who told anyone, who cared to listen, “I never quarrel; but I fight. And when I fight, a funeral follows”. From the second year of PDP in Nigeria, the party had left a trail of blood.
They never quarrel; but they fight. Till today, over twenty murders remain unsolved as a result of PDP members fighting as elections approach. What we are witnessing now is probably the warm-up to 2014 mayhem. By this time next year, a few funerals would have followed the fights. There is absolute bedlam in that “ship”.
On any other ship, the Captain’s word is law – but not here on SS MUTINY. Three weeks ago, the Captain ordered the Chief Engineer, CE, to hand over to somebody else and get off the ship. Two days after the order was given, the Chief Engineer, not only announced to everybody, including the Captain, that he was going nowhere; he made good on his defiance by calling a meeting of the engineers and mates who asked him to stay on.
That shows how much control the Captain has over the ship. Unfortunately, the Captain did not consult us, Area Boys, we would have advised him that, “it is useless pushing a drunkard; he will fall down all by himself”. Captain should have waited…He should wait; the CE will end up in the sea. Mark my words.
Meanwhile, Chief Engineer, who defied the Captain, is experiencing revolt from the crew himself. He recently ordered two cabin heads, one in the Southsouth and the other in the Northwest wing of SS MUTINY to leave the ship on suspension.
The Southsouth cabin head ignored him (perhaps because he believes that “silence is the best answer for..”); the Northwest cabin head sent a reply to the suspension order telling the Chief Engineer that the fellow is not only unfit to be Chief Engineer but should go and jump in the ocean; and suggesting that Chief Engineer should be thrown overboard if he refused to take a dive willingly. Can you now see why Captain should have waited for Chief Engineer to do himself in?
Bedlam is the only way to describe what is going on in the rest of the PDP ship. One Southsouth cabin head, scheduled to get off the boat, in 2015, suddenly coveted the bunk of another cabin member. Without consultations with the owner of the cabin, Southsouth cabin head announced that the owner had conceded the bunk to Oga of Southsouth cabin; he appointed the bunk owner as the “Manager” of his cheerleaders.
Bunk owner, taking that as a slap in the face, responded with an upper-cut to the jaw of Southsouth Oga. They are still going at it and blood might flow or someone might disappear any time soon; this is happening at one of the kidnap states of Nigeria; reminding historians of what happened there in 2009-2011.
Southwest wing of SS MUTINY is undergoing low violence free for all; the palaver there might not remain non-violent for much longer. Three of the combatants are retired, but not tired, military men – a full General and former PDP ship Captain, a Colonel and a Commodore – all are, by training, as stubborn as donkeys. The former Captain, unlike Mandela, Bush, or Blair, who left partisan politics, when their days were done, had refused to stay on his Hill top mansion.
He labours under the illusion that he is indispensable and he is totally immune to insults. Because of the obstinate refusal of the ex-General to go and rest, the Southwest wing of the mutiny ship is in full disarray. Any meeting called by one faction is sure to be challenged by another faction. “A group without a leader is a mob”; as we all know. The Southwest wing is leaderless; so you know what they are; or don’t you?
Out of the thirty six power-holders in Nigeria, PDP has twenty two as cabin heads in SS MUTINY. As at last count, seven of them are not on speaking terms with the Captain. Six of them combined with outsiders to hand the Captain a black eye and a bleeding nose when he poked his nose into the affairs of the thirty six power-drunkards.
His tag team partners returned to the Captain’s cabin bloodied and booed by spectators. Altogether, it has been a “bloody business” for Captain. Never in the history of Nigerian politics had a Captain of a ship faced such mutiny as this one. Yet, he still has duty to bring the ship safely to port. Can he?
JOKES APART.
“A political deserves the approbation of Americans [or any country in the world] only as it represents the ideals, the aspirations and the hopes of the [people]. If it is anything less, is is merely a conspiracy to seize power”, President Dwight Eisenhower, 1890-1969, November 7, 1956.
That the PDP is in disarray can only be disputed by the greatest liars on earth. The same individuals would probably deny that the PDP, which prides itself on being the largest political party in Africa, has never and probably will never represent the “ideals, the aspirations and the hopes of the Nigerian people”. Right from the first day of former President Olusegun Obasanjo in office on May 29, 1999, the PDP had constituted itself into a conspiracy against the people of Nigeria.
Three PDP presidents, from three different zones of Nigeria - the Southwest, the Northwest and, now, the Southsouth – have occupied the presidency at Aso Rock from 1999 till today. Over N50 trillion had been budgeted and spent, yet today, fourteen years after we started out on the new democratic dispensation, all we can see is the same internal struggle within the party to seize power and to loot the public purse.
My first book on the PDP, titled PDP: CORRUPTION INCORPORATED, covered part of the Obasanjo years in office. It was a shameful episode in Nigeria’s history. Some of those who are leaders of PDP today were also top members of the biggest of Abacha’s political parties, UNCP, and, would have gladly supported Abacha becoming the civilian president in 1998. Foreign governments, even now, are still returning Abacha loot to Nigeria. So what has changed? “Show me your friends……”.
Obasanjo’s administration has not been called to come and account for the about N8 trillion of public funds. Jonathan has had three years to do it and he is clearly not interested in accountability by his predecessors. Obviously, the only way we are ever going to get Obasanjo and others, who handled public funds from 1999 to 2007, to account for them, is to have a new political organization in the Federal government.
The second volume of PDP: CORRUPTION INCORPORATED will cover the periods between 2006, tail end of Obasanjo’s government, to 2012 which covers Yar’Adua’s two and a half years plus two years of President Jonathan. From all the evidence available to me, nothing has changed.
In fact, more trillions of public funds have disappeared without trace in the six years. The continuity, which those supporting the PDP government seek, is nothing more than the licence to continue in office for personal gain of top party insiders, the parasitic private sector and their close associates.
One quick glance at the raw figures, so far compiled raises the question: “what has changed?”
There is one obvious conclusion, as long as the PDP is headed by those who were there to support Abacha’s looting, Obasanjo’s unexamined tenure of office (including where the money came to allegedly bribe NASS members N50 million EACH to influence the third term vote), who authorized disbursement, of funds long after Yar’Adua was brain dead, and who were the recipients of our money and how our finances have been managed since May 2010, we will get nowhere.
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