By Otunba Segun Showunmi
We are a full year past the quarter of a century and one year on our journey to 50 years.
Our activities in the first 25 years were a mixed bag of sadness and joy. We won elections and presided over the country for 16 years.
We did well all in all in terms of how we managed the country, its economy, our national cohesion and diversity, we did great in terms of our management of democratic culture and management of the civil space after the initial hiccups of the first few years at the beginning our high point were our great belief that any ambition was not worth the blood of anyone let alone the blood of our citizen.
We showed great skills in managing global challenges like financial meltdowns, the Ebola pandemic, and tribal conflicts to mention a few.
We succeeded in keeping our colours, our symbols, our motto: power to the people and certainly our grassroots appeal, while others did not see the need to be consistent, we have been.
We supervised the transfer of authority from one party to another with the passing of the baton in 2015 taking us into the next phase as a leading opposition party. In opposition, we witnessed as it were our revolving doors that have allowed members to decamp and return as they like with its attendant advantages and disadvantages.
We started as a right-of-centre party ideology with a huge dose of pro-people initiatives that saw us guarantee free universal basic education for every Nigerian as a right, we did the same with building primary healthcare centres in every ward in Nigeria.
Our pro-people ideological underpinnings are clear and we believe in the idea of life-abundant for all.
We have now come to the stage where we must reform for slowly we are becoming a platform of anything goes, a cult of human personality that struggles to obey its own rules, regulations or culture.
We have become an excessively litigation-prone organization and lost our hitherto “family affair” principle of solving problems, we have become a cult of human personality as against our highly appreciated “party supreme” ethos.
We have become a grouping of unagreeable bedfellows and indecent descent who use the most unacceptable bully tactics on each other in a strange but unprofitable manner where highly placed members boast of their anti-party activities without consequences or reprimand.
We cannot continue this way, for us to survive till our 50th anniversary we must reform, we must rethink our differentiating ideology as it seems all parties have adopted our philosophy leaving citizens little or nothing to differentiate us and our rival as it seems we are all on a neoliberal development framework of privatization.
We must rewrite our rules and guidelines with clearly spelt out consequences for actions that are unambiguous for what really constitutes anti-party or what is the reward template to motivate our teeming members, especially in an environment where so much of their time, energy and resources are needed to stand in the gap for us across platforms.
How do we become a tribe so that it is not easy for people to jump about from our party and only to return upon discovering that the grass is hardly greener on the other side?
We cannot do nothing and expect things will just fall into place. Organizations must from time to time review their fundamentals in such a way that they take stock and prepare themselves for the future.
We must come up with a clear succession plan for it makes no sense to think that old men will continue to insist against nature that they have the grit and vitality of their younger years.
Experience is wonderful but it can also be a guide to the next generation of leaders while the experienced generation can still offer guidance for power will certainly change hands for where are your parents who passed the torch to you, gerontocratic sit-tight leaders? A meticulous succession plan helps to preserve ideals from one generation to another.
Here is to PDP on the way to 50 years.
There is the urgency of now before it is too late.
Otunba Segun Showunmi
PDP Chairman Hopeful.
