PDP’s GREAT BETRAYAL AND THE CHOICE BEFORE THE APC (PART 1)
With the emergence of a Northerner as its presidential candidate, I wonder how Afenifere, PANDEM, Ohaeneze Ndigbo, the Middle Belt Forum and the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum now feel about their favoured child known as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)?
The virulent and avowed opposition that these august and highly respected bodies had against a Northern presidential candidate has been overruled by their party.
Their call for an Igbo presidential candidate has been ignored and treated with contempt and disdain.
Their preferred party is fielding a Northerner and there is nothing they can do about it.
They have been misled, fooled and scammed and they have no influence or power over the affairs of their favoured party.
Despite their reverred age, wealth of knowledge, profound insight and depth of wisdom their PDP has tossed their collective counsel into the dustbin.
Permit me to welcome them to the world of ‘real politik’ and I advise that they stop allowing themselves to be so easily manipulated and deceived.
Politics is a game of numbers where words and the knowledge of history alone count for little and where only insight, passion, a firm resolve and a large war chest coupled with the ability to conspire and the courage to build bridges even with past adversaries and former foes are the keys to success.
In this game, like the words of Shakespeare’s witches in his famous play ‘Macbeth’,
“fair is foul and foul is fair: hover through the fog and filthy air!”
It is a strange and difficult game filled with intrigue, betrayal and treachery.
It is murky, it is foggy, it is dark, it is treacherous, it is full of intrigue and mystery and nothing is as it seems or appears.
They thought their PDP would produce a Southern candidate even if the APC failed to do so but now they know that the trust they bestowed on their arrant yet favoured child was misplaced.
This was a shocker to them.
And let me assure them that more shockers and surprises are coming.
I believe it is time that they start thinking differently and adopting a new approach in order to achieve their noble objectives of a fair, equitable and just Nigeria in which we are all equals regardless of ethnicity or faith.
Constantly supporting and relying on the PDP and hoping they will come to power to do something new, fix the problems and provide the solutions is an ill-placed illusion and dangerous delusion.
It simply cannot work.
I advise them to have a rethink and to realign.
In doing so they may well make a difference and achieve their noble objectives.
Now permit me to get to the meat of this essay.
It is interesting to note and quite an irony that the ruling All Peoples Congress (APC), a party that the opposition PDP has wrongly labelled as a bunch of Northern irridentists and hegemonists, are now the ones that could possibly provide a Southerner as their flag bearer.
Conversely, the PDP, the party that has always claimed to champion the precepts of equity, justice and Southern rights and that has always prided itself on its strong Southern base, has opted to give its presidential flag to a Northerner.
They turned their backs on the people of the South East who have given them more support than any other ethnic nationality in the country over the last 23 years.
They spurned the people of the Middle Belt who saw in them a hope of salvation and emancipation.
They rejected the people of the South-South whose sons and daughters stood firmly behind them through thick and thin.
Finally, they displayed their usual and utter contempt for the people of the South West who they have always regarded as nothing but the biblical “hewers of the wood and the drawers of the water” and the poor relatives of the party ever since President Olusegun Obasanjo left power in 2007.
