By Ejike Umunnabuike Jr.General Editor, Newsdiaryonline
Since the formation of the largest political Party in Nigeria, the Peoples Democratic Party of Nigeria in 1998 by its founding fathers, the Party has only witnessed a somewhat credible convention in Jos, in 1998. Every other action of the Party and its activities ever since seem to have been geared towards the interest of a cabal.
This rag-tag and decrepit cabal has consistently ensured that those who occupy the Wadata Plaza office of the ruling party are stooges of their paymasters. They served as the officers who had degenerated to the level of becoming unmasked tax collectors from desperate politicians who would pay anything in order to secure tickets for elections.
Those who are conversant with happenings in the National office of the Party will testify to the fact that some of the officers presently occupying the place are not far from being corrupt. Unfortunately, those who have been their victims are unable to speak out for want of being maligned and exposed, since there is always a legal burden of proof between the giver and receiver.
Currently about five officers of the present PDP national leadership, are desperately seeking various elective offices in order to either occupy new or their former positions, to enable them return and continue their shameful and discreditable vocations of extortion, deceit and dishonorable behavioral traits.
In other words, for the People’s Democratic Party, to have clean break from a disquieting past of corruptive influences, the entire college of delegates as well as the high hierarchy of elders must halt the drift.
The college of delegates must also stop a likely drift these hordes of political office seekers whose dishonorable activities have huge capacity to drag the party’s fragile name further into the mud.
With a decisive electoral action by the delegates, the regime of unspoken “revenue generation drive” by these cabal who use “their projected anticipatory offices “to milk prospective aspirants clean and dry, must be stopped, come March 24th , 2012.
A cogent and verifiable case in point, which puts paid to this experiences and lasting impressions by this group of fortune seekers, is the experience witnessed by the former Governor in one of the Niger Delta states who allegedly paid huge sums of US Dollars to the same crop of National officers of the PDP, knowing that they were on a mission to extort money from him.
This same crop of political job-seekers,continued with this ugly corruptive trending and kept promising him that they were going to hand in the 2012 governorship ticket to him.
The ex governor was not alone as some of his colleagues, who stood for elections in their different re-scheduled 2012 governorship polls were reportedly subjected to some form of extortion.Of course when the lid was blown off, the party denied taking any form of bribe.
There are several ugly examples of naked deception and greed, which abound across the states where the PDP, has stake-holding interests and far-flung presence.
Narrowing these experiences and examples to the South- East geo-political zone, the instant rot and degenerated decay in moral, political values and preferences by certain decrepit personalities, who through their dysfunctional perception of politics, are bent on destroying the PDP, are at their familiar game again.
This time, they want to re-zone, appropriate as well as impose with impunity, candidates for national offices even as they are discredited members of their immediate environments or social milieu, in the zone they claim to represent.
Their major reason for wanting to re-zone, appropriate and embark on a campaign drive of imposition, is to await political developments that, would guarantee electoral upsets either in the National and State Assemblies or governorship electoral positions.
Instead of deepening the already troubled democracy at their respective states and the South-East as a whole, all that they are after is using the PDP platform as a springboard to actualize their self seeking mundane desired goals and prepare for “groundbreaking” financial haul between now and the year 2015.
All well meaning delegates from the six geo-political zones of the nation in pursuit of transparency, total cleansing and re-structuring of the PDP, reject dubious attempts aimed “ re-zoning, appropriation and imposition of candidates for national offices, come march 24th , 2012”.
Anything that should disenfranchise national delegates, deny them of an open access to a fair, transparent, democratic process, involving all major stake-holding interests come March 24th ,2012 national convention of the party, must not only be rejected out rightly.It must be discountenanced, if the integrity, prestige, respect, honor and positive perception put in place by the founding fathers of the PDP, are to be sustained.
National Delegates , would not want to vote in a cabal who would milk them dry through financial extortion processes in order to offer them ‘fake promises’ of “ ensuring that their names , make the list of candidates for election for either governorship, Senate, House of Representatives or State House of Assembly polls”.
National delegates , must rise to the big challenge of disallowing the coming back into the PDP National Secretariat, this crop of cabal who will dash their hopes and financial investments, which are neither refundable , verifiable nor recoverable from “attractive swindlers”, who unfortunately have found a source of daily livelihood through the platform of the PDP.
This ‘great party PDP’ has come of age and as such the idea of internal democracy should be highly encouraged and not consensus-driven selection of candidates, who do not have any values to add to the growth, functionality and development of the party.
