As the All Progressives Congress (APC) continues to make and break promises to the country and its members, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) finds comfort and its voice in railing against the ruling party’s chaotic party administration and inept leadership of the country. The APC has for years been unable to decipher the country’s insecurity code, with each year, nay month, accentuating banditry and insurgency activities. The ruling party has also made heavy weather of organising its elective convention, which has been postponed about thrice, and its membership drive and congresses. Having ruled for more than six years, the APC has also complicated the country’s economic distress, and managed it so chaotically that the entire country is anxious and agitated. And finally, and worse, the party has no social agenda, and its political agenda, assuming it exists in clearly defined format, has been subverted by the executive branch and bastardised by the legislative branch.
It is, therefore, no surprise that the PDP seems buoyed up by its conviction that even if it is capable of doing little to win the next general election, the APC appears to be doing much more and so valiantly to lose it. The opposition’s logic can hardly be faulted. Unable to find an answer to insurgency and banditry, a failure ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo attributed to President Muhammadu Buhari’s lack of depth and general limitations, the ruling party has floundered from one dangerous and incompetent panacea to another. And unsure what to do to vivify the limping economy it inherited in 2015, the party has crippled it, raided pension funds, compelled the Central Bank of Nigeria to print money for the central government, and borrowed from abroad with embarrassing vivaciousness. It is against this background – this unending administrative stasis – that the PDP feels sure that it can do so much better. The opposition believes that with the people pauperised by the APC government’s policies, and unsafe anywhere on the highways and their homes, they will be disposed to drastic change. It remains to be seen whether the president and his party can, in the remaining months of their stay in office, midwife the change for the better which the executive, legislature and party continue to promise.
But what gives the PDP most hope that change is afoot, and that in 2023 they will win and form the next government, is the anticipated implosion in the ruling party. The APC was supposed to organise their convention last year after illegally sacking the Adams Oshiomhole-led National executives; not only has it been unable to do that, it has virtually given itself an open-ended deadline to conduct the exercise. After much ridicule by the opposition and Nigerians, the party has finally set an unconvincing February 2022 date to hold its convention. Neither the members of the party nor its leaders are convinced that the date is feasible or sacrosanct. However they hope to fumble and wobble their way into holding the convention in about two months. The PDP had deployed the method of consensus for its own convention, and they seem sure that whatever method the APC uses will end either in deadlock or catastrophe. How to prove the opposition wrong will be uppermost in the minds of APC leaders.
So far, the PDP is preying on the incompetence of the APC, hoping to win the next polls by default through the ruling party first losing it. It is not certain that such methods would yield the desired outcome, but the PDP seems bent on trying. Had they the gumption to reform themselves and come to terms with their own abysmal failures in 16 years in office, and combine radical internal and organisational reforms with taking advantage of the incorrigible failings of the APC, their chances might be considerably enhanced. But they are used to gambling as much as the APC is used to brinkmanship. The APC will not do much better than it has done ruling the country aimlessly, and the PDP will not so much as take a glance at its woeful past failures. In the months ahead, and particularly in 2023, it will be up to the country to pick between the sentimental gambling of the one and the foolish daring of the other.
