Segun Sowunmi is a stalwart of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In this interview, he speaks on the party’s redemption plan ahead of the 2027 elections, rebuilding trust with Nigerians and presenting a credible alternative, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
You have been very indefatigable at a time when most of your colleagues had run away from the PDP and one wonders why at a time when the soul of the party has been sunk into very deep waters of uncertainty. Does the party have the political will to reinvent itself?
No courts can confer legitimacy. What the courts can do is explain the law and the issues before them.
The courts in Nigeria, especially the President of the Court of Appeal, and personally on behalf of the people that have ever used the platform PDP, thank her for consolidating those nine cases, because that would have been a mess. That ordinarily should give the PDP a second lease of life, because all the cases are consolidated and judgment is in play. Whatever PDP does from this moment, it will carry the burden of its own funeral by itself.
If you look at the Nigerian space today, you will see that almost all political parties are struggling even to justify access to be able to provide credible alternative. The PDP having been registered in this country since 1998 and having survived this long, producing three presidents, has a bigger burden to understand that it must get its act together.
Yes, people come and people go, but the principle underneath which a political party must manage itself has come in full play. The big challenge I see going forward is if those who win in courts interpret that to mean that they are right, they are delusional. Those who have lost must be considered for the quality of humans that they are and find a way to go back to the drawing board.
We get your sentiment that political reality would always overcome the legal pronouncements, but even internally, your party had not adhered to simple internal democratic tenets like zoning principle and other principles of equity within the party…
That’s precisely the point I’m making if you don’t do the right thing by yourself. Yes, you can carry your matter to the court, the court can look at what you’ve presented, it can give you judgment based on the fact, based on the statute, based on your constitution, based on the Electoral Act, but it can’t force you to get the right type of legitimacy. We are in trouble; I make no pretense about that.
The PDP as a political party is in trouble. Our trouble stems from the fact that there’s a crisis of confidence now. If those who have won have already taken a position that they do not desire a presidential contest, the implication is that you won’t have a strong push for Senate and you won’t have a strong push for House of Representatives.
The presidential election will not be able to cascade everybody to prepare them for the first election. PDP has a burden to understand need to get its act together –Sowunmi Now, it’s up to them. There’s enough time; they can snap out of their madness and make up their mind on the politics.
Which of the PDP governors, who defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC) are you most shocked about and what do you have to say about your former party members, who have now gone somewhere else where some have said they were induced in order to cross over?
Every political party, including the ruling party, must try to attract people. If you call it inducement, if you call it campaigns, if you call it invitation, if you call it gentleman’s arrangement, those are legitimate instruments to get people. What has happened to us is that three things have been in play, and that’s why it’s difficult to blame those governors.
The first is that there are a lot of people in the country who accept the principle of the pendulum, which is that when power is in the North, it stays for eight years and when it comes to the South, it stays for eight years. That is creating an overwhelming desire for people to do that. The second is that anyone who desires to have either re-election or to arrange himself towards success, getting out and putting people, must be worried about unending litigation that can bring a fait accompli.
The third is that as the PDP by its origin is not a political party where one man sits on a high table and barks orders to people that are probably even more superior than him in terms of intellect and probably more reasonable in terms of how to manage the grandiosity of power. Some of them will just get to the point where they will say they’ve had enough.
People who go to the ruling party, to the president, at least in their thinking, he has the stature by virtue of how long he’s been in politics, and they’re mostly younger than him. So, it’s a lot easier for them to probably obey him. But when they sit in a meeting with one of their own and then he’s overplaying his hand, people can be tired. But if you ask people like me who have been staying up till now, we have stayed because we believe that a political party must build itself to last.
The PDP by its origin is not a political party where one man sits on a high table and barks orders to people that are probably even more superior than him in terms of intellect
And thankfully, the PDP has survived by getting the judgments. Imagine how it would have been if they were going to court every day to take a different judgment at a different time. So, I thank the judges for that. But the PDP must know it is not doing anything to prepare itself for the next election.
At some point in time, we’re going to have to accept that the African Democratic Congress (ADC) has taken over the heart of the people in terms of the struggle for opposition role. And if it comes to the point where a legacy is going to shrink in your hand, then be ready for the verdict of history. No one can force anybody to act right. No one can force anybody to behave well, especially when you have this elephantine idea that gangster misbehavior is the new order of the day in this country. But hey, that’s where we are.
What would you say, in your opinion, is the true intent of those that are trying to redeem the PDP?
When we use words like redemption, when they have not cured themselves of their madness, you begin to wonder if we have converted the PDP into a skit making machine. You cannot be talking about redemption if you are not going back to the drawing board to figure out what is happening. We have confounded ourselves in a situation now where they make a rule today, they change it tomorrow, and they make another tomorrow.
Take the case of my beloved Ogun State for example, out of nowhere, they dissolved it and asked that they wanted to set up an executive. We put an executive that could easily bring everybody back. Not quite two, three, four days later, they canceled it.
Then we tried, okay, what are we going to do with this? They imagine that the madness that has been going on for more than three seasons will make people come back. Look, if you want your name posted on a poster, but you want to lose, you can do it that way. The law will not stop you. But what I can guarantee you is that the goodwill of the Nigerian people is already ebbing and it’s ebbing very fast. We are lucky. We have a bit of time because the ruling party is just about now going to do their own convention. And we do not know what the fallout of their convention would be.
Maybe, if the fallout of their convention robs their own people the wrong way, and we have prepared ourselves to be the receiver of people who want to push, because we have a lot of historical energy in the grassroots, but hey, nobody is going to allow a cowboy lead a nation like Nigeria. It’s not going to happen.
The PDP is going to have to be reduced to a portmanteau briefcase party where one man talks and everybody jumps around, and that’s it. Everybody would then say, we have led you to where we could. It’s time now to leave the sinking ship. So, the President is right. If you insist that you’re going to have a sinking vessel, then politicians will have to make up their mind what’s the best next thing.
And I keep saying that opposition is having a problem, cannot be the burden of the ruling party. It is the duty of opposition to stem its own madness and come together. You have a voting public of about 90 million. Of the 90 million voting public that you have, and all you want to do is fight yourself, pretending as though whoever owns the structure of the PDP automatically owns the people. I don’t know in what world that kind of logic works.
Shouldn’t we be asking, who are those responsible for this deep crisis the PDP had fallen into and is there any solution in sight?
After the judgment, I wrote a piece for us and I said, the judgment is in now, every man must climb down from his high horse, and that the only way around it is to understand that the facts have been adjudicated by the Court of Appeal.
There was not a single dissenting judgment. That means that we have to now be telling ourselves, our father is about to die, and our family land we have been quarreling while he was alive. Now that he’s at his death bed, are we going to keep quarreling until strangers take our family land? If we insist that all is fair in war and politics, then we should know, before the Jonathan loss in 2015, we were the only true pan-Nigerian political party. Right now, we have three potential pan-Nigerian parties.
Clearly, the APC is a pan-Nigerian party, so if anybody wants to do APC, he can’t be guilty of unnecessary tribalism. Secondly, we are having a scenario where Peter Obi can produce a third pan Nigerian party if he gets his act together and anchors, and of course, you must be kidding to think that people like Atiku Abubakar of the ADC cannot produce a pan Nigerian party.
