by Idowu Akinlotan
The massive defections enacted in Delta State by elected Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) officials on April 23 have inadvertently triggered the rethinking of former vice president Atiku Abubakar’s 2023 presidential election loss. Immediately after President Bola Tinubu was declared winner of the election, the PDP candidate and many of his supporters cried foul, swearing that their party lost unfairly by an indeterminate stratagem orchestrated by the APC candidate and his supporters. The PDP candidate, not to say the Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi, anchored the loss on the APC candidate’s alleged lack of integrity and academic qualifications. Ignoring the argument that pre-election matters could not vitiate an election victory, the PDP went ahead to spend inordinate amount of resources and devoted huge social media, advertisement, and legal campaigns within and outside the country to prove that the APC lost. They pilloried the judiciary, stridently called for a coup d’état, while protesters and labour unions orchestrated industrial unrest and intensified a massive movement for unconstitutional change.
For more than 15 or 16 months, there was no let up in the effort to stir up a national revolt. Despite the clear statistical import of the voting outcomes, in which the PDP and LP split the votes, not to say the PDP which was split into three factions going into the election, the exponents of the protests appeared convinced that there was no way the APC candidate could have won. They simply ignored statistics, and even tried to rewrite constitutional provisions undergirding the polls. Unperturbed by, or perhaps unaware of, the eerie danger of reenacting the 1993 presidential election with all its unpredictable and attendant tragic consequences, former president Olusegun Obasanjo weighed in by calling for the abortion of ballot collation. But shortly after the electoral umpire declared the winner, he called for mass action. He was also convinced that the APC did not win. However, nearly two years later, the same Chief Obasanjo began calling for a coalition of political parties to defeat the APC, suggesting that the balkanisation of the PDP led to its loss, and a merger or coalition of parties would do the magic.
The man at the centre of the massive legal and social media challenge to the poll outcome, Alhaji Atiku, also recanted and began to campaign for a coalition to unseat the APC at the presidential level. The former PDP candidate’s pursuit of a powerful or mega coalition presupposes that he has finally succumbed to the logic that his loss was a result of the factionalisation of the party on which platform he contested the poll. He has not openly admitted that reality, but his actions indicate it. If he thought his loss was unrelated to the size and unity of his party, which he is projected to abandon soon for giving him cold shoulder on the coalition subject, he would not be advocating for coalition partners to unseat the APC. His search for a coalition, which he is pursuing without getting a consensus from the PDP, has, however, put him at cross-purposes with his party. His fellow party men, including many of the party’s governors, had whispered but are now saying it openly that they lost the 2023 poll, not because of any rigging by the APC, but because over the years, and unknown to their standard-bearer, he had become jaded and unelectable. They decry the idea of a coalition, and insist that had they reformed their party and respected their own zoning arrangement, they could have won. It has taken the Delta defections to welcome some of these reappraisals.
No one voices this new reality so powerfully like former running mate to Alhaji Atiku in the 2023 poll, Ifeanyi Okowa, a former Delta State governor. In a remark last week, he asserted that Alhaji Atiku lost the poll because the party violated its own zoning arrangement, a violation he claimed he now regretted because he did not realise it was so overwhelming during the poll. According to him, “Even when we were campaigning, I realised our people were not interested in having another northerner come into power. But the decision had already been taken at the federal level by the party, and I had been nominated. Still, in retrospect, I now believe I should have gone with the will of my people.” He attributed this alienation to the loss of his state during the presidential election and the regaining of the same during the governorship poll.
Senate minority leader Abba Moro did not dispute the PDP’s loss of the election in his response to Dr Okowa’s recrimination. Reflecting on the new reality suffusing his party, the PDP, from top to bottom, Sen. Moro instead argued that it was in fact the selection of the former Delta State governor that caused the loss of the party’s presidential bid. He was unsparing: “It’s unfortunate today that at his level, having been a senator and governor before on the platform of the PDP, I think it’s uncharitable for him to be expressing regret about being the party’s running mate. He was not forced. He asked for it, and he was given…With the hindsight that we have now, some of us think that the party would have won the election if another candidate — other than Okowa — had been picked as the vice-presidential candidate from the South…I think there was an error of judgment on the part of everybody that was involved in the choice of Okowa as the candidate.”
It has taken nearly two years of massive shifts in the polity, including defections and factionalisation, and the final realisation that no amount of threats to the republic would cause the collapse of the government, to compel opposition party leaders to accept their loss, whether they like President Tinubu or not. They have also slowly begun to accept the need to re-examine their methods and tactics, which failed them in 2023. It has taken the Delta defections to unearth uncomfortable truths many PDP leaders knew but were reluctant to voice out. But more than 15 or 16 months of living in denial, not to talk of the rebellion they irresponsibly tried to foment, the PDP thankfully failed to provoke anarchy, fracture the country, and orchestrate the collapse of the country in a replay of the 1993 tragedies that cost hundreds of life, birthed two dictatorships, and set the democratic clock back by decades.