After 16 years of uninterrupted endorsement by the masses of our people, our great party was in April this year roundly and overwhelmingly rejected at the polls and disgracefully evicted from power last 29th day of May in this same year of our lord. This is no longer news sir.
While historical undertakers in the years to come will continue with the arduous task of trying to chronicle how a party once so popular and acceptable by the people crashed with so much ignominy losing virtually all its electoral advantage to a less organized ragtag party like the All Peoples Congress (APC), those of us in the rank and file of this once great party can simply summarize our undoing in three words: impunity, arrogance and crass injustice.
Having been entrenched in power by the strength and grace of the votes of our people, our party and more appropriately its leadership began to delude itself that we are now impregnable and invisible with the license to perpetrate and dispense mass injustice as it pleases. In this delusion members were perceived as trapped and helpless with no recourse to redress or reprieve. Those who dared to protest were either frustrated to leave or even routinely expelled.
Despite these glaring draconian treatments we won elections after elections for the simple reason that members who had the courage to call the bluff of our inebriated leadership and seek other platforms for the actualization of their ambitions, after having been robbed of their mandates or ticket, still came to grieve in those alternative platforms which were ill equipped to deliver them at elections.
These trends of events further emboldened our leadership to continue with the regime of abiding injustice, crude manipulations of nomination exercises and barefaced process fraud leading to routine imposition of unpopular candidates. The Nigerian people remained patient with our party and gave us a rope that was 16 years long. In April this year, this party unraveled and we garroted our electoral superiority over all other parties losing the general elections to a ragtag unprepared APC.
Sir we don’t need statistical experts to know that over 70percent of the candidates that won election on the platform of the APC were Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members who crossed to pick the APC’s unpopular tickets only days to that election. In Kogi State for instance all the three senators returned on the ticket of the APC were card carrying PDP members!
Sir the mass routing of our candidates in April was the ultimate verdict of the Nigerian electorate against a party whose commitment to values that are viciously repugnant to natural justice and good conscience stank to high heavens. A party that has lost its soul, where conscience, decency, morality and integrity in politics was considered a weak attribute in leadership.
Sir, with all due respect the leadership of the party beginning from the regime of Chief Audu Ogbe to your present interim unelected tenure is the undisputable culprit of this misrule and entrenched injustice that has brought us to this sorry state.
Sir, even the outcry of our compatriots that our elected governments over the years have failed to be responsible to the yearnings and aspiration of the people for economic development, social justice and the widespread allegations of corruption are traceable to this selection process of our party which is largely determined by manipulations, fraud and imposition. For candidates that emerged through a dubious process could not have possibly offered anything better in governance.
Any wonder then that the electorate embraced the APC even without any known alternative agenda? A party whose flag bearer’s basic qualifications remained curious even to this day? Like one compatriot was alleged to have tweeted “I will vote for him even if he presents NEPA bill as his certificate.” Not even our demonstration of his fanatical and sectional antecedents could dissuade an electorate that holds the value of a multi-religious country and unity in diversity from endorsing him.
Worse than that, the said party has spent over four months since it was elected and well over 100 days since assuming power without demonstrating the it has the faintest or most basic idea on how to even kick start a government. Yet Nigerians are willing to excuse them and allow them experiment and blunder with our destiny in a clear declaration that anything is better than the PDP!
Sir a careful reflection on how we degenerated this low should have been sobering enough to the leadership of our party particularly the National Working Committee which is considered the culprit of these serial frauds and injustice to commission a forensic analysis into our foibles and failures. On the contrary sir, this National Working Committee it would appear has learnt nothing and to all intent and purposes, has no interest whatsoever in learning anything.
Authenticated reports reaching the National PDP Councilors’ Forum indicates that its business as usual as Kogi and Bayelsa states prepare for the Governorship Candidate Nomination Exercise. In the case of Kogi particularly, we are aware that the evil that has reduced our party from a fledging ruling party to the reactive opposition toothless tiger is still been perpetrated with crude abandon.
- The congress conducted and supervised by this same NWC which members trustingly participated in and elected their delegates to participate in the election of a governorship candidate has already been manipulated. The NWC we have been reliably informed has been procured to arbitrarily alter and distort the delegates list and unconscionably the NWC is executing this fraudulent agenda with relish and its styling it as “harmonization” of delegates list!
- Sir, “harmonization of delegate lists” to impose delegates that either never stood for the delegates election or where defeated in the polls? Where do we find the justification for such a brazen manipulation in our party constitution or in good conscience?
- How do we explain to our loyal members who defied the downpour in several venues of the congress in Kogi on that fateful Thursday September 3rd to participate in the process that the delegates they elected have been jettisoned by the almighty NWC and another strange lists of unknown persons has been complied to participate in the primary election to foist a predetermined candidate on the party obviously for pecuniary reasons?
- Why is this National Secretariat never disturbed about the perception of our party as a behemoth of injustice and fraud even among members? How do we inspire these same members to continue to be loyal and trusting of a party that so callously rape their wishes – even at times like this when we should be desperate to rebuild our image that is so abhorrent that Nigerians are prepared to embraced a totally blank party that denies even its own published agendas and manifesto rather than trust us?
- Sir in the event that our leadership obstinately proceed with this fraud to produce a predetermined candidate do we seriously expect the same party members whose democratic decision was discarded with such immoral resolve to rise and work for the success of such a candidate on November 21?
- Sir, our party or rather this leadership no longer enjoys the blatant luxury of the impunity it has become dishonorable for all these years, for we have descended from the party to beat to the party to be beaten. That is why this national secretariat must immediately retrace this shameless fraud that is already causing disquiet in the rank and file of the membership of our party in Kogi State.
- To do otherwise will amount to awarding the election to the APC in Kogi on November 21. Notwithstanding the believe out there that the current NWC is an undertaker out to finally nail the coffin of the party, at least for the millions who have resisted the lure of political opportunism to defect to the new party in power, our leadership is invited to prove skeptics wrong this time around and do the right thing.
- To do otherwise will be indeed a validation of the charge of undertakers being hanged on the necks of our national leadership. For the sake of history and the names of your families and communities, we the councilors elected on the platform of this once great party are inviting you to let justice reign this time around.
Please accept the renewed assurances of our loyalties .
Hon Onogu Collins Monday
National Chairman