PDP needs repositioning –Babalola
Engineer Femi Babalola is a PDP chieftain in Oyo State and a governorship aspirant in the last general election. In this interview with journalists in Ibadan, he discusses the failure of the party in the March/April election, efforts at positioning the party for future polls and the re-election of Oyo State Governor, Abiola Ajimobi, among others. AYO ESAN brings excerpts:
Your political party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, lost the last general election and many of the members have left for the All Progressives Congress, APC. Do you still see PDP as a viable political party?
The PDP by its intrinsic characteristics will remain a viable political party in the country. In fact it has greater capacity for viability than the APC notwithstanding outcome of the last general election. You have to understand the makeup of the party to appreciate its strength. Components that constituted the PDP dated back ahead of the present fourth republic. These components were generic and quite tangent to the nation. The PDP is built on very strong foundation and it will be very difficult to break the sinew. It will be simplistic to doubt the party’s resilience or write it off. But this is not so with the APC. We cannot forget the fact that the APC is a marriage of convenience. Throughout our political history, we have seen that mergers of political parties have never really worked. Though we have seen the APC apparently breaking that jinx by winning the federal election, it is not certain how long that amalgam would work. That fabric is not neatly knitted and anything can happen anytime. The PDP will be more capable of intrinsic rejuvenation than any other political party in the country and it will definitely bounce back. The party’s loss generates interest because nobody expected it to lose because of its size as the second largest party in whole of Africa, but loss of elections by a big party is not new to history. India’s biggest political party the Congress Party has severally lost election and it is presently out of power. In US, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have variously lost election at times least expected. At a time, serial victories of the Republicans almost pushed the Democrats to the background. But that had not undermined the viability of these political parties. In spite of panic exit, the PDP will remain the largest party in Nigeria. It will take years of exit of members for the party to plummet, but we will not allow that. Recently, those in APC admitted that there are still many good people in the PDP. That is very true. Efforts of these good people will save the party. I do not only expect the rebounce of the PDP, I expect it sooner than later. That optimism is premised on recent resolution by elected members of the party and some other bigwigs not to defect.
Are you contemplating leaving the PDP?
I do not need to leave the PDP to offer selfless service to Nigeria. Those leaving the PDP have not considered the dialectical implication. A politician would have been most insulted if he is considered to be unprincipled. Politics is principle driven and I remember Senator Bola Tinubu mentioned that recently. So I don’t envy those going to the APC. Besides, political parties should not be reduced to shifting coalitions. But then, the Nigerian polity is ripe for bipartisanship and the polity will benefit immensely from across party collaboration. As Nigerian political parties embrace détente and intensify bipartisanship, the political environment will become less acrimonious and defection will be discouraged because you are able to contribute to national development whatever your political party. A clear proof of my point was the President Buhari’s endorsement and push of Dr. Adewumi Adesina for the presidency of the African Development Bank AfDB when Adesina was essentially in PDP as incumbent minister in the President Goodluck Jonathan administration. This should be the new attitude among politicians in the interest of the country. If you recall stalemate in the US that led to the shutdown, matters were resolved through resort to bipartisanship. If party rigidity had been sustained; the shutdown would have lingered with adverse effect on that country. In Oyo State here, I have advocated all party support for Governor Ajimobi in order to move the state forward and allow it attain its full potential. Politicians across political parties in the state must be willing to collaborate with the incumbent notwithstanding how they feel about the governor or the ruling APC. It is high time politicians came to synergize in the interest of the masses that look up to the political class for gains of democracy. The political class has a duty to ensure that democracy works. Democracy must be made to meet the yearnings of the people. That is why I call for aggregate support for the present administration in the state and by extension the President Muhammadu Buhari administration. It is not enough for the opposition to criticise, it must proffer solutions too. The incumbent occupies the driver’s seat and those of us in the passenger seat should be there to guide him by pointing out potholes, sharp bends among other hazards.
So what are your suggestions for Governor Abiola Ajimobi?
The governor should champion bipartisanship and interact with politicians across party lines. Ordinarily, there should be no problem with Ajimobi’s triumph. The governor only needs to put up the best civil behavior and encourage politicians in other parties to work with him. He should know God put him there and should conduct himself as governor of all. I will implore him this time to look inward in selecting his aides. He can no longer expect that problems of the state can be solved by outsiders. He should work with aides who are familiar with the state and understand the cultural context they operate. A second term governor who has no eye on the next election should function as a statesman whose gaze is on the next generation. He simply has to devote himself to policies and programs that will position the state for the future. He has to deliver more on welfare and improve quality of life. In this respect, he needs a sense of empathy and his aides must also be empathy sufficient. They must think that children in public schools are like their children, patients in public hospitals are like their family members and the people struggling on the streets are like themselves. He must seek to expand opportunities. It is not time to bruise the feelings of the people. If the government fails to help in this respect, it diminishes itself. Besides that, the governor must devote himself to creating jobs. This he can do through deliberate engagement of the Lebanese business community in the state. The Lebanese are the largest employer of labour in the state. He can engage them in fashioning strategies to widen the scope of job opportunities they offer. The governor should also consider infrastructural expansion in agriculture. Enhanced mechanization of agriculture and deliberate deployment of industries to harness value chain in the sector will lead to expansion of job opportunities on farms. That will engage all categories of workers from machinists to doctors, accountants, engineers among others. Education in the state must move from the hyped free education to that which instills in students the tools to adapt and innovate in a climate of constant technological change. The founding fathers had placed education in the heart of the bargain the state government has with the citizens. The people will still require the quality of authenticity from him; hence, he must live up to character and promises he made to the people. That will determine the value of service he renders. That enormous duty will require that he enjoys aggregate support of all politicians in the state.
For a party that has called the shots for 16 years, how would the next four years be like for the PDP?
The irony is that the PDP will more or less still rule the country from outside office. It will still be the party to look up to. Nigerians may pretty turn to the party for hope that would see the nation through the next four years. The country will witness for the first time brilliant alternatives and options a very vibrant opposition could offer in a democracy. We will deepen competitive political system the way opposition has never done before. Options the PDP comes up with may be the mainstay of our democracy in the next four years. For instance as the nation’s economy limps due to poor performance of oil in the international market, the PDP may lead in profiling policies for post petroleum economy in the country, while the ruling party grapples with the daunting task of socio-political delivery. You can see that the PDP will be able to drive public life from the back bench so to say.
Do you back calls for clean sweep of the party’s NWC?
It is important as a party that we avoid hasty generalisation and value judgment. I do not think the party so far has investigated how it lost the general election, so how come we apportion blame? I think it was defeat trauma and from the look of things, it is subsiding now as we come to terms with the reality. Even if we had won, the party would still have investigated the victory vis a vis electioneering and expenditure among others. And now that we lost, such inquiry is still called for, and I am aware a post election committee was set up. There and then there could be sanctions otherwise, we would be witch hunting. We must shun irrationality or else we will throw the baby away with the bath water.
As a politician, what is your take for 2019?
It will be too early for anyone to be talking of 2019 now. We have just had a general election with severe aftermath for the PDP. A reasonable preoccupation now is how to rebuild the party and fix its features. I am going to be part of the national contrivance to reposition the party. The problem appears rather simple in Oyo State, but it is not so in other parts of the country. And since the party is one strong national body, we in Oyo State are concerned with the right therapy to restore the party to its boisterous health.
But you said that the problem in the Oyo PDP is not as serious as it is elsewhere. Do you really think so?
I am not denying the fact that party in Oyo State has its share of the overall crisis in the PDP. Without mincing words, that played out here during the last general election. But right from the time the Baraje splinter group emerged, we knew the party had a big problem to grapple with but the party here maintained neutrality. The Oyo PDP was not part of that problem at all. What we sought to do then was to make all sides to the crisis see reasons and we appealed for calm. You can see that the Oyo PDP has always been mature the way it handles issues. When I positioned that the PDP has no serious problems here, I am saying it is not something outside our capacity to resolve. We have what it takes to resolve crisis and not allow it to snowball. I am aware that the party in the state will come up with a machinery to reconcile all members, seek return of those who left and forge a common course for the future. By the pattern of the last governorship election in the state, it became clear that the PDP is still the preferred party except that we splintered our votes. All the votes that went to the Accord Party, Labour Party and the SDP were all PDP votes. You can see that what the APC scored, in spite of the expected bandwagon effect of the Buhari’s victory, was a minority vote. So you can see what I mean that the PDP does not have serious problems here. All we have to do is to reach out to all aggrieved individuals and fashion a truce.
Source: APC VS PDP NIGERIA NEWS
PDP needs repositioning –Babalola
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