PDP factionalisation exists only on pages of newspapers – Nnamani
By ONUOHA UKEH
Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Nnamani Pix: Sun News Publishing

More Stories on this Section

Enugu State governor, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani, says that there is no factionalsation in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
According to him, while speaking with group of editors in Enugu, the PDP is becoming stronger, citing the recent defection of the governor of Jigawa State, Alhaji Saminu Turaki, as a sign that the party is in a growing instead of breaking up as some people want Nigerians to believe.

To buttress his point that the party is intact, he said that none of the people who control the structures of the PDP in the federal, states and local government level is among those talking about discord in the party.

"I just gave you the clear picture of the structures of the PDP and what they represent among Nigerians, within the national scheme and I took it for granted that you would have seen clearly that for a political party producing 27 governors, now 28, with majority presence in the local government setting, and in which none of these people who actually control the structures giving no hint of discord, any other person talking is merely posturing. Or, let me ask you, of all the so-called heavyweight that are part of the dissident group, which of them is a governor of a PDP-controlled state, which of them is a National Assembly member, which is a council chairman or even a councillor?," he said.

The governor said that the supposed crisis in the PDP exists only on the pages of newspapers, saying: "What they attempted to do was to signpost a condition of discord and skirmishes, all aimed at attracting sympathies among irresolute and shallow-minded members, who would believe that so much had gone wrong for them to provide the foundation for factionalisation. They attempted to pretend that they had rebelled and others should join, but the point non-politicians miss is that you do not build a political base on the pages of newspapers. Those who knew they were off target were those who asked, where are the states joining? Where are the local governments? Where are the wards and their executives? None of these followed and real politicians knew it was all air and no substance. That is real political calculation, not screaming newspaper headlines."

PDP, Ahmadu Ali’s leadership and future elections
I stand by my earlier view on the leadership and I will restate my view under some premises you will soon understand. But, first of all, let me formally welcome you to Enugu State, one of the PDP states and one which is clearly unwavering about our inclusion in PDP; one which clearly stands along with the other 27 states controlled by the PDP, to say that we know no faction and we have heard of no fragmentation. Let me take you through the power base of the PDP.

Our party is a national party, which forms the national government. It has control of 27 of the 36 states of the federation and has recently added up Jigawa State, whose governor has just joined our great party. This is a party whose leader is the President of the Federal Republic, with the distinguished Senator (Dr) Ahmadu Ali, as the national chairman. It is also a party, whose presence in the 774 local governments is clearly in the majority. As it stands today, there is no hint whatsoever that there is any shift in this equation. There is no news yet in town about any kind of rupturing of this composition. So, it becomes difficult for me to place your heavy-weight-pull-out and factionalisation!

I just gave you the clear picture of the structures of the PDP and what they represent among Nigerians, within the national scheme and I took it for granted that you would have seen clearly that for a political party producing 27 governors, now 28, with majority presence in the local government setting, and in which none of these people who actually control the structures giving no hint of discord, any other person talking is merely posturing. Or, let me ask you, of all the so-called heavyweight that are part of the dissident group, which of them is a governor of a PDP-controlled state, which of them is a National Assembly member, which is a council chairman or even a councillor?

Remember, when we talk of PDP governors, we also talk of 28 PDP state structures and none is a part of what you called factionalization. When we talk about our clearly heavy majority in the local government, we also talk about controlling the structure in that political theatre. Again, we have not heard anything like factionalization in those countless zones.

Mind you, we are politicians. We know who is worth what and we can tell you that those men who maintain heavy media presence, but who have no form of control of the structures of the party, from the national through the state, the local government and the wards, are only limited to their media pretensions, not the real thing. The real thing is structure. How many wards can come with you? How many local governments can come with you? That is before you now boast of what state you have base. Can you tell me, Mr. Editor, which of the PDP states can be said to be controlled by the promoters of the media presence which excite you? None!

What pains me most is that the media seems not to understand, pretends not to know or knows and is powerless against the fact that this is a mind war that these people are fighting. They know that the PDP, for them, is a lost battle. They know that structures make a party and they do not have them anywhere in the country, but they are equally aware that there is capital to be harvested from noise-making. As things stand now, they are affecting the language of the Press in the description of the PDP and themselves. Some newspapers are already saying, so, so and so person is chairman of the faction of PDP!

That is all they want, not recognition, not anything, which they are sure would not come! In the frequency and currency of their appearance in the media, they could curry some empathy and sympathy and at the last minute, go wherever they are going with the accumulated dissidents they must have garnered. It is a strategy, it is a covert attempt to build up a hegemonic base and they are well aware that the newspapers are the most potent base for the flowering of the hegemonic base they desire. It is a phantom collection or if you like, a dissident group sustained through media creativity and attention. They know it won’t work, but they are sustaining it as a stimulus and with the media’s constant lap up of a supposed faction, they would remain in business. They could sustain a vehicle of make-believe. That is where it ends.

But Sir, much as your argument is convincing, you cannot dismiss what is happening as not disturbing the leaders and players under the PDP platform?
Disturb? No. Let me help you. What you see today, which I repeat, is a clearly media issue without foundation, was a failed pre-factitionalizing effort of some people. There is no factionalization. What they attempted to do was to signpost a condition of discord and skirmishes, all aimed at attracting sympathies among irresolute and shallow-minded members, who would believe that so much had gone wrong for them to provide the foundation for factionalisation.

They attempted to pretend that they had rebelled and others should join, but the point non-politicians miss is that you do not build a political base on the pages of newspapers. Those who knew they were off target were those who asked, where are the states joining? Where are the local governments? Where are the wards and their executives? None of these followed and real politicians knew it was all air and no substance. That is real political calculation, not screaming newspaper headlines.

Your Excellency, are you alluding to these men not having real political bases?
In politics, especially party politics, the issues are not really matters for boastful claims as they are practical in terms of how many people you can get to follow you. How much control do you exert? Which level of structure comes along when you say lets go.Often, politicians lose sight of the truth of their trade, the practice or call it profession, if you like. It is not for me to say which person has this clout or the other, but there is one trend you have to pick as you report politics.

The issue is always who would get the structure going? Who will deliver Enugu State when the chips are down? Whose voice is more reliable when we say we are speaking for any chapter or level of the structure of the party? It is practical, and very easy to ascertain. And I hope you do not forget that what you promote today on the pages of your newspapers was an after-thought. I have no doubt that it is like a fall-back plan preceding the debate on constitutional amendment. That it is mentioned today is one other striking confusion among the political elites.

All right, Your Excellency, how would you place the brashness of Dr. Ali in the last few months; in speeches and interviews which are clearly against democratic ethos? Some people are even drawing similarity in the gruff emanating from him and a perceptibly militarised democratic dispensation that is in place now?
Well, you are entitled to your opinion.

That is why this is a democracy. To me, the chairman has not gone beyond the confines of expectations of him as the chairman of the biggest party in Africa, with all its attendant Babel and the irritancy that would expectedly come from such a large family. Where you see gruff, I see decisiveness and firmness of an administrator per excellence who knows his onions. One thing you can say about the chairman is that he does not know how to posture and says his minds over an issue and moves on; no residual acrimony. And I think such people are preferable to vipers who shroud their venom and pretend as if everything is well. Look at the way he humbled himself before the Senate after he was accused of being gruff: Not only did he write them to explain his position, he apologised if his views were perceived as wronging anyone. You don’t get that quality from a militarised polity.

Here is an administrator who has held a divergent party like the PDP since last year in an excellent and clearly fatherly way, in a unifying and decisive manner. His meetings are devoid of the usual hypocrisy and swashbuckling of a Nigerian politician but short and straight to the point. Everybody expresses his opinion and they are approached in a clearly intellectual and fatherly manner. Maybe there is a misplacement of semantics here because clearly what you call gruff is what I call the decisiveness of a senior colleague in medicine and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Your Excellency, the fact that it seems to miscarry does not remove the fact that many were justifiably upset by your leader, Mr. President. Was that not enough reason to pull out?
Yes, Mr. President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, is the national leader of our great party, and he has done so well as both party leader and President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic. Elsewhere, I have had to review the administration and I can tell you without mincing words that we have had tremendous and bold initiatives, especially the reform policies, which successfully commenced and carried out for the good of the nation.

Most importantly, Mr. President embraced the tenets of globalization, realizing, as he carried the nation along, that we must act to be included in the new values which underscore globalization – stakeholder-driven democracy, free enterprise economy and information technology. He led us gainfully full blast into these and we are the better today.

Take, for instance, the silent revolution going on in the polity today. Nigerians tend to forget where we were in 1999 and where we are today because of the convenience of the present time. Could we have forgotten so soon that the country was literally not worth anything in the eyes of international assessors? We were being rated non-existent in virtually all areas of developmental index, things were falling fast, which led Karl Maier to come to his judgmental conclusion that the Nigerian house has fallen! But look at the same indices today; you would notice a clear and marked departure from the rot of decades.

You may be right to say that we have not reached El-dorado, but you would be grossly wrong to say that we are still in the Hades. No. Look at the reforms. Look at the spate of globalization in virtually all ranks of our lives. Is it the expansion of the telecom sector? Have you forgotten that six years ago telephone was used as status symbol? Only the few rich could think of owning telephone lines. Mobile phones were clearly not for the other Nigerians. What do you see today? Every Nigerian can do businesses on phone.

Okay, is it the increase in enrolment of students in our schools under the Universal Basic Education system? And do not forget that the last such explosion in education enrolment came as a result of the then Universal Free Primary Education (UPE) of the same Obasanjo, though as a military Head of State. Why is it that it is only coming back long on the way as he returned to power. That is consistence in interest in the good of one’s country.

Is it the fact that Nigerians are now aware that if we must move forward, corruption must be wiped out of the polity and its attendant gradual removal of the tendency to swim towards gratification? Is it the systemic and systematic enthronement of gender empowerment and equality in the public service through the President’s clear look-out for women with high cerebral make-up to administer key and vital sectors of the economy? Tell me, how unprecedented in the history of the polity that women are the engine of key and fundamental places in the economy? Can anyone claim not to understand that the Ngozi Okonjo-Iwealas, Oby Ezekwesilis, Irene Chigbues, Dora Akunyilis and others too numerous to mention are manning strategic aspects of our lives is not the tokenism that we were used to about the female gender?

Of course, we all know about the liberalization of the downstream oil sector, the public sector reforms in the civil service, the banking sector reforms, a significant of which are the consolidation of the banking industry, along various other reforms that percolate virtually all aspects of our economy are not just accidental or mere fluke. Common, let us give kudos to this man! Agreed, as the president and the leader, we must grill him and probably not tell him to his face that he is doing wonders so that he does not relapse, but no harm is done by giving him some pat on the back for moving Nigeria forward.

That is why till today, you journalists cannot even come to terms with how he publicly commended the so-called Third term debate. You probably expected him to demonize the dramatis personae of that civilian coup but he has so far bonded with them more than ever before. These all show a president that is clearly ahead in all things. Mr. Editor, let us be sincere for once with ourselves and put sentiments apart, tell me of a Nigerian leader that you know of, who has made half the impact of the President in the administration of this country? Tell me, I am listening! None!