For PDP, it doesn't just rain...

Few Nigerians hold out any hope that the minor opposition party, Labour Party (LP), would survive the tectonic moves triggered by its apparatchiks after they lost the presidential election. Increasingly, however, more Nigerians fear that even the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the ageing and dystrophic party which held power for 16 years since 1999, may face irreversible decline if its leaders do not show imagination in rearranging their party. They were yet to resolve the controversy over who their chairman should be: Umar Iliya Damagum, who is in office in acting capacity and appears in league with the intransigent spoilsport Nyesom Wike, or another unnamed candidate from the North Central geopolitical zone who would be expected to throw out Mr Wike and his crowd. While they hesitated, the Court of Appeal sitting in Enugu threw a spanner in the works as they upheld a High Court ruling invalidating Samuel Anyanwu's position as the party's national secretary. The appellate court declared Ude Okoye Ude as the genuine national secretary. But Mr Anyanwu stays resolutely in office, resisting deposition.

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The acting chairman, Amabassador Damagum, stands indomitably pat; and now Mr Anyanwu joins the league of intransigents. They occupy two of the most sensitive, if not the most sensitive, positions in the PDP. For the party, it does not just rain, it pours. This year was fraught with tales of apocalypse for the party; next year could prove gloomier if reason does not prevail. How to make reason prevail will preoccupy party leaders all through next year. Should they try to cut the Gordian knot, hoping the mere act of wielding the knife would prove therapeutic, they might discover too late how surgical quackery kills patients effortlessly. Unfortunately for them, the only decisive man in the party's leadership, Mr Wike, is not in lockstep with them. He sneers at them. The other leaders in the party are not only mediocre; they seldom put their money where their mouths are. This is a self-made tragedy whose seed was planted in the President Olusegun Obasanjo era, leaving the party with little choice but to contend with the leadership malady for much of next year.