PDP crisis: Sowunmi exposes why party lost 2023 polls, BoT’s wrong moves

The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has continued to lose its stamina as the main opposition party in Nigeria. Having lost to the All Progressives Congress, APC, in 2015, the party has struggled ever since, losing some of its states to the ruling party.

Segun Sowunmi, former campaign spokesman of the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and ex-governorship candidate in Ogun State, says the PDP might not have lost the 2023 presidential election if it had Atiku and the current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Nyesom Wike as flag bearers. He also weighs the possibility of an Atiku-Peter Obi or Atiku-Wike ticket in 2023. Excerpts:

Peter Obi was seen around Atiku a few days ago, is he returning to the PDP and what are his chances of emerging as the party’s flag bearer?

Anybody that wants to be president in Nigeria would have to cross two hurdles with the first being party primaries and then the general election.

For party primaries, they have different cultures for different parties but in the PDP that I have been a member of since its inception, we do not have that idea that people would not participate in primaries, anybody who wants our ticket will have to participate in primaries.

Yes, your argument can be very persuasive and we can rally people around to persuade others for you, we could be persuaded that yes we have a Southeasterner, especially now that we are hearing that the South should do eight years, there is a bet there for the PDP in the South and nobody in the South-south can tell us that we have not given him the ticket.

We gave Jonathan who completed Yar’Adua’s tenure in 2007 and got his own free ticket in 2011, we gave Obasanjo a ticket in 1999 and he got a second term in 2007, so as far as the presidency is concerned, we have never given the Southeast ticket and the Southeastern part of Nigeria cannot be cheerleaders to other zones in PDP, but if they leave it open and everybody is entitled to come and struggle for it, then may the best man win.

A party that’s in opposition must be more pragmatic in looking for where it can get numbers. That is my position. If anybody is saying that ‘o you got to be contesting and every political party has a rule that a serving governor and president have the right of first refusal except if they are not going,’ so you now have a Yoruba man in President Bola Tinubu as the potential presidential candidate of APC and you will be saying you can come to a Yoruba man’s land to come and beat him, that’s an exotic calculation, I may be wrong.

In the area of electoral spread, Atiku-Obi, Atiku-Wike or Atiku Saraki, which of these best positions PDP to wrest power from Tinubu in 2027?

You have asked a good question; in the 2023 election, if we had been wise and gone with the Atiku-Wike ticket, we may have been very lucky. You know that a hypothesis that is not tested is still a hypothesis.

In terms of the Atiku-Obi, we tried it in 2019 and we know what happened then; people like to say that the number Peter got in the last election and the number Atiku got you may just combine them and get the outcome you want. I put too much effort in this election-related analysis to buy that kind of jargon, some of those numbers are mutually exclusive, there are people who will get up because of Peter Obi and will not get up because of any other person, there are people who will get up for Atiku and not agree to Peter and of course, there are people intercepting in the middle for both of them; how large will that number be? I do not know.

I always tell people that every election you have to start all over again. You sew a garment for me and after four years, if you are smart you have to re-measure the person so that you can get a fit-for-purpose garment. If you assume that it’s just a combination and you are holding your breath until when you get to the next election and perpetually everything will be just as it is in the last election, then you will get the misery of a lazy person who does not want to deal with the hard work of listening to the electorates to know exactly where they are.

The dynamics may be completely different, and the issues may be different. If at all Tinubu is having problems which I’m not saying; maybe he will be looking at the North where they may have some very big issues as to the votes they contributed the last time even from his APC and probably how they are being treated. I’m not sure you can find that kind of hatred in the Southern part of the country now, not even in the Southeast. When you go to the Southeast now, you will be fooling yourself to say that you don’t understand that they had more space than they ever had before and you will be deceiving yourself by saying that they don’t have a bigger political gladiators and it will be foolish and foolhardy that if they take a position that the South wants to do eight years, it will be foolhardy to think that if it becomes a game between a North and Southern man, the South will not go with their Southern brother.

These are simulations and assumptions, but I’m just saying that anybody who wants to run elections in 2027, should be busy doing the polls, benchmarking, deep diving, going around the country listening well to where the people are, social media are not the greatest assessment of people because we have not seen a commensurate vote on the ground as you can use the off seasons to measure.

Atiku-Saraki ticket…

The truth about the Atiku-Saraki ticket is that it’s very difficult because it technically means that you are staying in the upper Niger to pick two candidates, maybe one of them would be a candidate while we look for someone to back the person up in the Southern part. But we can’t put a Southwest and Southsouth man that would be difficult, what would happen is that yes you can say Atiku can be a candidate, then you back him up with someone in the South or Bukola will be a candidate and we back him up with someone from the South.

I have never thought of it that way though, but we can bring back Bukola Saraki and Peter Obi; and like I said, my position is very clear and it’s ambiguous, there are 220 million people in this country and you can’t be screaming the name of only three people to be president of Nigeria. Our challenges have reached a point where we have to look deeply as to what they are offering beyond rhetoric, because it seems that we are not happy with any president.

For political parties, there is no assumption that just by popularity they would win elections, elections are far more scientific, deeper, penetrating, and for anything they want to say, they have to contend with the fact that Tinubu knows whatever they think they know in politics, whatever they think they can do and scheme in politics, he also can because he’s a politician; and it would be the dumbest thing to think that the only thing they have against him is tribalism because they would be shocked at the kind of human capital he has in other parts of the country, what if those ones stand in the gap for him? So deciding who would be the candidate is far more detailed, deliberate, painstaking, and deep analysis of what the citizens are saying.

Do the citizens want a Southern president? Are they ready for another Fulani four years after one Fulani? All of these questions must be asked and anybody who deceives himself that without doing a deep-down analysis and benchmark and they would win the general elections, I don’t know how that would happen. Some of us who are the younger generation are now beginning to get a bit worried, they should not think that we can’t tell them which way, if they want to be mad, let’s all be mad together.

You recently made some recommendations on how PDP should deal with Wike and Atiku, do you see the party adopting your recommendations in the next NEC?

I do not know, to be honest, one of the issues of a democratic institution is that everybody can put together and put forward their views and ideas, my prayer and hope is that they are able to sit.

I do not agree that a recurring problem will be handled with a simplistic matter, I do not accept that in trying to solve a problem, you must be blinded or deafened to what you consider to be one or the other side, I do not accept that you can be so self-righteous or fraudulent to see that none of them is all good or bad. I usually say to people, if you are to build institutions that would last, you must stay in the big middle because when you sieve it down, you see the extreme here and there, that would be an area that is difficult for people to operate.

But for you to be in the middle, it will be compromising here and there, a desire to forgive some issues, and it will mean the need to be practical in the things that would work. I think that those are very well-considered opinions, thankfully, for someone who has never left the party and has not stopped pushing, and believes we Africans can build a democratic institution that can last, I think that I’m right never minding if people want you to be their cheerleader or they just want you to go out every day insulting the people they want to disagree with without checking to see what point they are making. I want to lead the party if they allow me and anyone who wishes to lead must be prepared to be fair and balanced.

Will the PDP BoT meeting with Wike bring about peace in the party?

I have never imagined the consciousness with which the men calling themselves BoT now caused the problem in the country and this democracy, that they can solve it with the same consciousness. In the first instance, we will begin to ask them, why are they singling Wike out of the situation. Why haven’t we heard from them talking about other people who are more aggrieved? Is this the first, second, or third time they are going to visit him? Why haven’t we seen that they have the courage to scold him harshly given that most of them are older than him or are they in their illustration that as the conscience of the party are so unwilling or afraid to tell him that certain things are not acceptable?

We have styled them as the conscience of the party, so hopefully they have an institutional memory of where the party is coming from but I doubt if they have any idea of where the party is going. I wish them well and I pray they are able to come up with something that is reasonable but let’s encourage any effort in any direction that would bring help, though I would have preferred that they had a direct approach to the whole issue.

What approach do you think is most appropriate in resolving PDP’s leadership crisis?

I think an early convention is the most appropriate, with an early convention they can start primarily in the sense of the excos because I do not believe that the fixation of the conversation of replacing just one person in the exco is a smart way to solve a problem that has eaten deep into this particular executive. So I would have preferred that they should be able to say that we are giving time from this time to this time to prepare for an early convention which should take into consideration that you have reformed the party to some extent, listen to the citizens of the country who decides who gets the ticket, and draw the line wherein this type of thing would not be accepted and make it very clear.

The reason why I said that is – the issue that led us to the 2023 challenge had its root in 2015 and it’s almost as if an invisibly do-me-I-do-you in, you know, in our local language is on the table. There are those who feel that some people left the party and caused the party to lose an election in 2015 and there are those who believe that 2019 should have been zoned to another part of the country, so what are they talking about, and there are those who believe that one man in the person of the former Governor of Rivers State is the issue and I do not agree.

I feel that our issues are a bit more systemic, I started noticing it in 2011 when I was the Director General of Jonthan-Sambo’s campaign in 2011, I saw clearly that as the person in charge of the presidential campaign in Ogun State where the challenge of the party is and I have been screaming on the needs for reforms but ironically, what they have always assumed is that they should just manage to be a ticket bazaar platform so that anybody who gets their ticket will just assume that they can harvest votes.

And of course, they tried it in 2019 it didn’t work, in 2015 we lost, in 2023 it didn’t work and I marvel at how they think the conversation on the table now is a ticket, which I don’t agree with.

The conversation on the table now is how they could reform the party to an extent so that there would be an introspection to what exactly is the party all about now, and how do they differentiate their own position and their programmes from their rivals. And how do they ensure whatever it is that they are calling their desire either to get a ticket or be a candidate is in tune with the Nigerian people?

Do you see February’s NEC meeting as a catalyst for resolving PDP’s crisis?

It depends on what the NEC is meant to answer, if it’s that the NEC is meant to be a test of who has the better number to force that position, even forcing that position wouldn’t solve the problem. If NEC becomes something that does not allow the status quo to remain without a commensurate understanding of everybody coming to the table, it will not solve the problem. What can solve the problem like I said is for us to be clear in our mind that the injury done has been too much and we should be willing to say let’s start afresh.

For instance, if you want to discuss Damagum, what about the others, have you accepted the lies of all the others without mentioning them, lest they think that I’m criticizing them for being inefficient? I do not accept it.

So, I do accept that whatever the argument for and against Damagum does not solve the challenges that I see, we need a people’s purpose executive when we are in opposition, we need to find new energy, we need to find something that would bring us to the upstream and it does not include those who make statements that are difficult to prove bothering on defamation and label just because they have the opportunity and the might.

People who make allegations that can’t be proven are best fools because they run the risk of the person they are alleging drag them to court to show cause and when you make claims that you yourself have no evidence, they start saying the party is comatose and using some of the most inappropriate adjectives to describe the party; I think those ones deserve better condemnation.

Because at the end of the day, what exactly was expected of the PDP that it has not done, it has done about five or six primaries for the off-season elections and none have been contentious with candidates emerging, it has done ward elections, it has done LG executives, state government executives and most of them are not contentious, at the end of the day, the one sticking issue does not reflect the totality of the matter. I think Nigerians must be a little bit sympathetic to PDP for democracy is noisy because everybody is trying to push their own interest and agenda.

And it’s in that context that you hear all these arguments of going to court and in organizations where all these things are not allowed, where when one person barks, everybody agrees without complaining, that would not be democracy.

As much as it may seem noisy, that is the evidence that the party is democratic and this is why some of its issues demand bigger levels of understanding, if somebody feels aggrieved and is in a democratic party, he is entitled to go to court and if you have a case in court, can you now go ahead and pretend as if it’s not in court?

If you do that, you run the risk of your case being subjudiced; so you can see how complicated it is, that’s why I feel that they should put more energy and try to see if it’s possible for an early convention so that we can use that early convention to go through the entire process of horse-trading, in the process, some of the issues of where do you want to zone to? Who is the best man to do this? Some of those issues will be settled and if they do it well and all-encompassing, and do not use exco positions just to favour weak people who they consider to be their friends or those that would listen to them, everybody will be better for it.

Is Wike’s grievance with PDP due to any hidden presidential agenda?

I’m not his spokesperson and do not have the power to speak for him but the truth of the matter is that Wike is not a pretentious character. He is even so unpretentious which is part of the problem, so I don’t think that if Wike wants to run for the presidency he will be hiding; that’s not who he is. At least, I have been in this party since he has been here and we have been seeing ourselves, we’ve had the benefit of lots of good positions in the party, he’s not made of that kind of pretentious material to say he wants to be president when he doesn’t want to be or being afraid to say when he wants to be president.

At least, for the 2027 circle, I have not heard anything to that effect and if he wants to be president, he will obviously say it at some point; but certainly, you can’t be accusing him of such because it will be uncharitable to do so.

What I think is going on is that everybody has a way they react to what they consider to be a hurt or an injustice for the breach of their right. And if people have the ability to fight or react to the breach of their right, you may not like it but it will be a bit too much to say they don’t have the right. When you injure people, you can only be sure of your own action and not predict the action of the person who feels injured.

This particular matter, when you talk people expect you to follow their narrow prism, its not so, the truth is that 2023 became complicated as a result of what we call the Delta Accord – Asaba Accord where governors of Southern extractions went to Asaba hosted by former governor Okowa and they came out with a communique claiming that the presidency of Nigeria should go to the South in the next election.

If you had followed me or searched through the internet, I was on television the very day screaming and shouting that PDP should not be forced into zoning that will not be to their advantage, after all, for a political party to be able to run, it needs to run where it can have some advantage and numbers.

And like I said in case, it becomes compulsory that it wants to zone South, then they should simply say we are going to the Southeast because at that time, I said we have gone Southwest with Obasanjo, gone South-south with Jonathan, so nobody should pretend to PDP that we do not know where our liability is; and I said our liability as far as Southern presidency is concern is with the Southeast. I said that very clearly but you know people like to think that they are smart and at the end of the day, they create a complication.

With its plethora of issues, can PDP withstand Tinubu in 2027?

We have to reinvent ourselves and in doing that we have to go back to the drawing board and in doing that some of these problems we keep having will just disappear because why are people scheming to insist that they must control the exco, is it not because they are assuming that whoever owns the exco totally owns the ticket? Atiku was not in the country when they were putting together the 2018 exco yet he won the ticket in 2019, those who had the powers to put the exco together – the Secondus exco – if you know how hard Wike fought all the Western leaders to install Secondus, that didn’t stop Atiku who was not part of that exco scheming.

I don’t know why people don’t learn from their mistakes, I think that for a political party, anybody who wants to be president must make himself so presidential and attractive to such a point that by the time you get to any party, it’s almost accomplished so long as the party primaries and process are clean. When they open up the forms, people will buy and crisscross the party. All those thinking that they can eliminate or joke with Atiku’s political capital by the time he gets to the primaries again and he beats them all the case will be settled once and for all.

What are the chances of Tinubu winning in the 2027 election?

There is a pathway for anybody who wants to win, if you want I can show you the pathway for the president which is easy. For the pathway of Tinubu’s victory, first, count all states he has governors, especially in the North, then count all those who are first-term governors who would be looking for a second term; then count the ones that are second-term looking for successors; then discount it by asking yourself is there anybody the opposition is bringing that can stress them to the point that they would subject their own election to the risk of losing their party’s election which would include Senate and Reps so that they can lose their own seats.

The biggest loss that happened to PDP was in 2015 and the reason was that a lot of our governors and senators lost their seats due to people claiming that they wanted to prove a point, some of those people who proved a point have not recovered till today. What makes you think that the governors on APC’s table would be so childish to prove that point and lose their own ticket?

Have you asked yourself if the younger elements, I can list them if you want – the NSA of this world, the Vice President of this world, the Zulum of this world, the El-Rufais of this world, and such younger elements who may be interested in becoming president after the turn of the South – have you asked them if they are ready to push their presidential date further than the worst case scenario another four years?

So, what I’m trying to say is that anybody who rules out Bola Tinubu that he won’t win the next election is a fool, these things are not as easy as that. To beat him, you need to get down to the drawing board, running helter-skelter won’t work.

For instance, by now you need to start settling platform issues, platform issues are why we are talking about the PDP. If you are going to do a merger, you need to all come to the table now without an overacting assumption that somebody is going to take the ticket as nobody will sit in a merger to ‘merger’ themselves as of their own advantage if you have already predetermined who will get the ticket, these are all practical issues of politics.

When you look at the economy for those shouting when it was good, did you give the poor Northerners money? Did you give the poor Nigerians money that you will now say when the economy is bad they would leave, you don’t know that. That you are stimulating tribalism in the country does not mean that others cannot stimulate something else, others forget that he’s the Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of this country, within now and the next one-and-the-half years; he has enough opportunity around.

What if the economy picks up and people can see the tangible things, how would you be able to beat him? What if we get to election day and it becomes an issue of money? What if you can’t mobilize enough money like the president? He can be beaten but not by this melody of misdirected activities where those working hard to give us strength are being disrespected, while others are sitting in their houses drinking Fura thinking that the presidency will fall on their laps.