Even in those days of baby innocence when they made us chant alien nursery rhymes about this awkward fellow sitting on a wall and having an irreparably great fall, Hardball had so much trouble fathoming why that articulated ball-head chose to sit on the wall in the first place. As one grew older, one learned another twist in the tale that Humpty-Dumpty may have actually been pushed as part of a larger political plot by all the king’s men and all the king’s horsemen who pretended to seek to mend him after his calamitous fall.
The Humpty-Dumpty tale may well be child’s play but does it not seem the verisimilitude of what is happening in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party ( PDP) today? PDP is in the midst of a great fall, though an opposition member like Senator George Akume believes it has not only fallen, but that it will never rise again, the party would soon be buried and nobody will ever hear of it again, the former governor under the party was quoted to have said. But if Hardball is asked, PDP went into decline immediately after its birth thereabouts 1998 and not many of us would be surprised if it takes its final gasp 15 years after.
After the Group of 34, the founding fathers who were driven by the passion to oust an embarrassing military junta from power morphed into PDP and grabbed power, that seemed to have ended their ambition. The group which comprised some of the elite and tested politicians in the land quickly returned to their old ways of power, perks and the pleasures of office. Sadly, they learnt no lessons from the horrendous years of the military and did not muster the commonsense to set some ground norms, ideological leaning or even imbue the fledgling with a viable manifesto. They simply returned to their prodigal ways which result is being reaped today. The selfsame licentiousness that led to the fall of the first republic and the attendant turbulence of about three decades of military rule was being re-enacted by the PDP in the last 15 years.
PDP started its decline from day one as has been asserted earlier because founding fathers like Dr. Alex Ekwueme, Chief Sunday Awoniyi, Chief Solomon Lar, Chief Bola Ige and Audu Ogbeh, to name a few, were soon sequestrated if not hounded out of the party, making room for a horde of hawks, power mongers, kakistocrats and megalomaniacs to flood the party and mould it in their image. So the party had really drooped southwards for nearly as many years as it has existed. The party became known more for its numerous and endless crises than lofty ideals for building a modern Nigeria. In fact, Nigeria has been in decline in real terms in the last one and half decades having not witnessed much improvement in any sphere of life.
Will PDP fail irretrievably? Most likely so because what is at stake is the 2015 presidential election. It is simply a tussle between President Jonathan and the North over the top job and the main condition for peace is a renunciation of the desire for a second term by the President. That is not likely to happen; the PDP umbrella is therefore caught up in a violent storm that is likely to rent it into at least two parts. So Humpty-Dumpty has fallen to his fatal end? Well so many Nigerians would probably say good riddance, what the heck was it doing sitting around on that damned wall anyway?
Source: The Nation
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