Ini Ememobong is the National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In this interview, he speaks on the gale of defections by political actors, including some governors and National Assembly members from the party to the All Progressives Congress (APC) and how the party is rebuilding, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
Who is left in the PDP because within the space of one week, you lost the Governor of Osun State, you lost the Governor of Rivers State, and in both states, the governors left with their supporters and allies into other parties, Do you think that the PDP still stands a chance in the 2027 election?
When you look at the reason most of the governors gave for leaving, they said, they said let’s connect to the centre. It presupposes that the central system is running a nepotistic system where governance favours are dispensed on the basis of political partisanship.
That calls to question whether that is how we should run it. A political party, primarily being a vehicle for the assessment of power, becomes the ideology through which people who aspire to those offices should execute the mandates of the office. But you now see the situation where people just come to the public space to say, we are connecting to the centre so that we can take benefits back home.
The unsaid thing is that it means that if you do not connect to the center, you don’t take things home. That is clearly undemocratic; that is clearly anti-development and that is where we need to begin the discussion from. But for the people who are still there, remember that in 1998 when we started politics, we didn’t have governors, we didn’t have senators, but we built all of this.
And that is why we are going back now to say that when did we get it wrong? Remember also that even between 1999 and 2007, there were pressures like this but you found people who were able to stand their ground and to exert that, look we belong to a political party. We can’t shift grounds like that but maybe it speaks to the morality of the people we handed power to. It speaks to their inability to stand for what they believe in.
The question is: How did we get to where we are? It’s vicarious. Yes, we have internal issues that have led us to where we are. But we also have external pressures that nobody can deny have also led us to here because you hear people say, we don’t want problems with the centre, we want to be able to attract things.
Others said we’ve been outside the centre for long and we are not able to attract things to our people. So, we need to connect our people to the centre, so that they can begin to benefit. Should a federation run like that? It goes to the question of the type of federation we’re running and the type of political system that we are running.
Let’s talk about the internal issues in the PDP and how this might have been curtailed if the PDP was firm enough to have expelled or punished erring memWe’re rebuilding PDP –Ememobong bers who worked against the party. What do you have to say about this because it seems like the internal struggles are even more than the external pressures?
It depends on the spectacles with which you are looking at an action. Some people may see reluctance, some may see giving time for wounds to heal.
But clearly at this point now, and you only know the result after the fact, because if they had also rushed to take the decisions that we have taken, people would have said, no, you didn’t give time for it to heal. I mean, you don’t beat a baby and expect that baby not to cry. So, at this point now, it is termed reluctance.
But at that point, it was termed as forbearance, it was termed as perseverance, it was termed as understanding, in the hope that negotiations, people will be able to get off the heat of the 2023 elections, the wounds, lick their wounds, come back and resume rationality. But clearly, every passing day showed that the people were doubling down instead of reconsidering their position. Yes, decisive decisions should have been taken in 2023.
But you know that you look at issues per time. At that time, you saw that we had issues surrounding should the national chairman of the party and the presidential candidate have come from the same place. Those things sounded logical and reasonable. But we didn’t know that people were hiding under those reasons as a facade to undertake activities for which they had already purported in their mind to do so.
And saying that we are not exculpating ourselves from the responsibility of the internal issues that have brought us here, which is why the current administration is saying, can we build back again from the grassroots? Can we begin to have principles that the voices, while we respect the voices of strategic stakeholders like governors, and eventually when we get to power, ministers and the president, but that the voice of the people must always be heard.
We are beginning to manage quality and quantity because one should not outweigh the other
So, it was a neglect of the voice of the people that got us into all these crises that we are in, which is why you could see that two governors objected to an action on the convention ground. The convention overrode them and still took. And I must appreciate the fact that they accepted it to say these are my own personal observations, but the convention has overriding power.
They overrode them. If it was in the past, the position of those quality voices, minority voices would have overridden the quantitative voices of the people. And we are beginning to manage quality and quantity because one should not outweigh the other.
While we understand that a person who is of the high standing of a governor and holds a public office and holds the mandate of the people on the basis of a party, his voice is qualitative, but we must juxtapose that qualitative voice with the quantitative voice of the real owners of the party.
As uncertainty rages on in your party, is it safe to say PDP has lost control of it internal structure?
The dialectics between certainty and uncertainty happens even in human life. As we sit here, we’re only certain about that which we have and uncertain about that which we don’t have. I’m sure that if you had spoken to Senator Iyiola Omisore two months ago, he was certain about certainty.
But I’m sure that uncertainty has become his definition. So, there is usually certainty within uncertainty and uncertainty within uncertainty. It depends on the capacity and caliber of people, the moral fiber of people. Now, when we go to the issues of the people who are complaining uncertainty today, they were leaders of the party who should have taken this decision at a time.
And in fact, from the information available, just by the fact that I just got in a few weeks ago, I am aware that there were plans to have taken some of the decisions we are taking now, early on in 2023, 2024. But I mean, they just thought, and in the thinking that they had at that time, that maybe a little bit of placation will work. Even in 2025, when we took the decision, you still see that some people did not agree with us.
I mean, so to that extent, when personal interest attempts to override the public interest of saying, look, we have a cancer, and we need to have an operation. In having that operation, blood must go. I mean, we must tear open the body, we must undertake an operation, and no one leaves an operation table and goes to run a sprint.
So, when we finish the operation, you need to recuperate. If this operation had happened in 2023, the uncertainty that has befallen them would not have been. So, who is to blame for this? We are not taking the blames, we are rebuilding, which is why you saw that some days ago, we called the state chairman, and we said, look, what is the situation of the party in your state? And we’re beginning to address the issues that have beclouded the party in the state.
We called the ex-official members, we called the members of the House of Representatives, and we had an excellent discussion. Some of these issues came up, and we showed them the strategy that we’re having. We’re only hoping that the issues before the Court of Appeal, which eventually may end with the Supreme Court, should happen very quickly so that relative certainty will come again. But in life, there is no absolute certainty. There’s usually the air of uncertainty within certainty.
There seems to be some confusion about which of the factions of PDP is legitimate. How certain are you, how clear are you about which of the factions is authentic?
When you look at a political party, the establishment starts from bottom to up, and the legitimacy flows therefrom. So, when you ask yourself, which is why it’s not solid to say that there’s a faction, it’s just a few persons who are not happy with the general flow of things. I mean, and that’s what a democracy is. The majority will have their way, while the minority will have their say. So, when you look at even the gentleman called Samuel Anyanwu, and you ask him, on what authority could we have convened a meeting that would have sacked Umar Damagum, you see that it falls flat in the face.
And so when you look at the fact that the staff of the party, I mean, even administratively, is under the control of Kabiru Tanimu Turaki, you look at the fact that the ex-officio who were elected long before we are under the control, the state chairman of the party, the BOT, the organs of the party, all the organs of the party, you see that. So, you see where stability is. And when you also look at, if you push all of this and you say, which of these people are working in the interest of the party, if we put out a vote for Nigerians, they would vote that it is Turaki. We challenge them.
Can they, for once, do what an opposition party should do, which is to challenge the action of the government in power? They cannot, because that also shows that there’s an umbilical relationship between them and what they want to do. And they’ve come out openly to say that, most of them have come out openly to say, look, we are supporting the president in 2027, and that looks like the main root cause of all of the problems that we are having. But again, the issue for us is not about them.
The issue is we’re trying to rebuild. We are Peoples Democratic Party, so if people think they are very powerful and those people have been expelled, what they should probably do is to form a new party and call it their own name and add Democratic Party to it, take it to the polls and see whether they can win elections. But for this party, the quantitative voices of the owners of the party, which are the people, will compete favorably with the qualitative voices of the elites in this party.
