An oft repeated line of the lamentation of the Peoples Democratic Party since its unexpected exit from power in 2015 is that if it had stayed in power, its rotation of power among the regions of the country would have since seen someone from the Southeast become president thus laying to rest a grievance that is as ancient as it is atrocious.
The circumstances under which the PDP slumped to a historic defeat in 2015 are now well documented in the archives of history: lulled into a false sense of security by the corruption of the political office holders elected on its platform and the tendencies of the Nigerian ballot box to churn out what was not put into it, Africa `s biggest political party became complacent and at ease.
Thus, when scandal after scandal plagued the government of Mr. Goodluck Jonathan, the Peoples Democratic Party paid deaf ears. When Nigerians cried out that insecurity and poverty were eating up the last reserves of their monumental fortitude, the PDP responded with nonchalance and even defiance.
While the PDP slept, its eternal foe the All Progressives Congress -a collection of aging and expired politicians, many of them disgruntled former PDP members -cranked up its propaganda machinery ceaselessly whipping out a potpourri of truths, half-truths and outright falsehood. While all these went on, the PDP slept on its watch. Thus, when defeat came upon it like a thief in the night, the shock ran through its vast party structures. Unexpectedly shunted out of power and onto the slippery slope of opposition politics, the party has never managed to come to grips with the peculiar mechanics of opposition politics.
Now, with the 2023 general elections so close, political conversations are thick about which zone of the country should produce Nigeria` next president. Of all the major ethnic groups in the country, it is only the Southeast that is yet to give Nigeria a president.
Now, those who prefer to combine the hypocritical with the political would be quick to argue that it is ethnicism to fret over which region of the country gives Nigeria a president as long as the country is led in the right direction. But given that practically all former Nigerian presidents have proven themselves to be cut from the same cloth, that argument has become cliched.
Now, it has emerged from the camp of the PDP that plans are in the offing to throw open the its presidential ticket to all comers. This has prompted an outcry from certain quarters of the country and it is here that the PDP must tread with caution.
There is no doubt that Nigeria continues to stagger under the weight of its own diversity. At inception, the stunning diversity of arguably the most diverse country on earth was supposed to engender unity which would in turn have precipitated a rich harvest of benefits for the country. Things rolled on smoothly until the poison that ethnicism was slipped into its cocktail.
It was the ethnicism that cursed Nigeria into the clutches of a cataclysmic civil war in 1967; it was ethnicism that hampered the full reconciliation and reintegration of the country since the civil war ended in 1970.Today, it is ethnicism that continues to fire the valves of nepotism and cronyism that run into the uppermost echelons of Nigeria`s halls of power.
And because ethnicism necessarily precludes equity in a country as diverse as Nigeria, it has acted to ensure that sections of the country have been left behind in the national politics of the country. The two main political parties in Nigeria are to blame for this.
There is no doubt that for Nigeria to continue to forge a path to greater unity in 2023 and beyond, its diversity must be accommodated in every manner possible. Without politics that seek to include rather than exclude, this would remain an impossibility.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
