With the expected consequences flowing from the People’s Democratic Party’s reinstatement of Senator Samuel Anyanwu as its National Secretary against the position of South East PDP and the exodus of the party’s heavyweights into the All Democratic Alliance adopted by the coalition movement, Deji Elumoye writes that the days of the PDP appear numbered.
In a popular interview with a national newspaper way back in 2008, at the People’s Democratic Power’s height of power, the party’s National Chairman at the time, late Chief Vincent Ogbulafor, boasted that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years. At that time, the power was already showing some signs of dysfunction. But it did not matter to him.
He said, “Some time ago, I used to read in the newspapers that the umbrella of the PDP is torn. Each time I read that, I would laugh and then say to myself that the umbrella is still strong and very intact and ready to accommodate more people.
“The PDP is a party for all and it is set to rule Nigeria for the next 60 years. I don’t care if Nigeria becomes a one-party state. We can do it and the PDP can contain all.”
Such impudence, one may say. But his confidence was understanding. After all, in the general election of the preceding year, 2007, the PDP won the presidential seat and clinched 262 of the 360 seats in the House of Representatives, while the main opposition party, All Nigeria People’s Congress could only secure 62 seats, mostly in the North. The PDP also controlled the overwhelming majority in the Senate, winning 85 out of the109 seats. The ANPP, on the other hand, could only muster 16 seats, while the remaining parties shared the rest.
As the African adage goes, when death beckons on the dog, such a dog loses its sense of smell and refuses to heed the whistle of the hunter. Thus, rather than retrace its steps and mend the cracks created by impunity and injustice, the party groomed into chasms. The height of the party’s excesses was in 2015 when former President Goodluck Jonathan not only ran for reelection contrary to the pact he had with the North, but the party only printed only one presidential nomination form for its presidential primary, thereby shutting its doors against other contestants, especially from the North.
However, the difference of the PDP of today under Ambassador Umar Damagun of today and the PDP of those days was that the leadership headed by the National Chairman, Prince UcheSecondus, set the 2015 Post-election Review Committee headed by former President of the Senate, Senator Ken Nnamani. The party deployed its members to the six geo-political zones to ascertain why it lost the presidential election and National Assembly seats. The panels for the three zones in the north came back with the finding that the North worked against Jonathan and the PDP for upending the zoning formula and ditching their agreement with North, thereby usurping their remaining turn to run for the office of the president on the platform of the PDP after the death of Alhaji Umar Yar’Adua.
Excerpt from that report submitted on 30th September 2025 reads, “It is also recommended to the party to strictly apply the zoning principle at all levels. In particular, since the last President of PDP extraction came from the southern part of Nigeria, it is recommended that PDP’s presidential candidate in the 2019 general elections should come from the northern part of the country.”
Meanwhile, most analysts agree with the South East PDP that the party’s 2023 presidential ticket should have gone to that zone. Not only does the region, which is the home of Chief Alex Ekwueme, a major co-founder of the PDP and Chairman of the Steering Committee during its formation, it is a zone that has given its all to the PDP. Unfortunately, nobody from the region has flown the PDP presidential banner.
Indeed, many believe that PDP’s troubles of today could be directly traced to the party’s refusal to zone its presidential ticket to the party. In fact, in his April 2022 piece entitled “PDP and the Consequences of Sailing Against the Wind in 2023,” a prolific analyst and columnist, MajeedDahiru, warned the PDP vehemently that denying the South, particularly the South East, PDP’s presidential ticket would sound a death knell for the opposition party.
“If the PDP goes ahead to sail against the wind in 2023 by fielding a Northern candidate, the ship of the party will capsize, sink into oblivion, as the party will lose in the North and in the South to the APC and go into extinction in post Buhari Nigeria,” he had said prophetically.
It was this denial of PDP ticket to the region by throwing it open that led to the exit of Mr. Peter Obi and the then governor of Ebonyi State, Dave Umahi to the Labour Party and All Progressives Congress, respectively. Expectedly, South Easterners, who were very much angered by what they saw as their mistreatment of the region, raved with holy anger by casting protest votes against the region. When the dust of 2023 settled, PDP’s presidential candidate, AlhajiAtikuAbubakar, performed poorly in the region. Only Senator OsitaNgwu of Enugu West senatorial zone made it to the Senate until one other person eventually joined him via the court.
But even more instructively, since after the 2023 general election, PDP has not recovered from that injustice done to the South East – as predicted by MajeedDahiru. With former governor of Rivers State, NyesomWike fighting on all fronts over his hurt regarding the outcome of the PDP presidential primaries and, some say, his alleged denial of the vice presidential ticket, the war over the position of the National Secretary, which is indeed the struggle for the soul of the PDP, appear to have finally imploded the PDP.
Following the nomination of Senator Anyanwu as the PDP governorship candidate in Imo State in April 2023, PDP National Working Committee (NWC) had subsequently directed the South East zone to nominate his replacement as the National Secretary of the party. This process produced Hon. Sunday Udeh-Okoye. However, Anyanwu, regarded as FCT Minister, NyesomWike’s ‘Man Friday,’ has refused to yield the position, as he sought to remain in office after losing the gubernatorial election. This did not sit well with the South East Caucus and 11 members of the NWC, who have continued to insist on Udeh-Okoye. Matters came to a head when South East PDP rose from their Zonal Executive Committee meeting attended by most the who-is-who in the region, issuing a communique that the zone would be left with no choice but to reconsider its future with the party if their choice of National Secretary was not recognised.
The ambiguous judgement of the Supreme on the matter, which ended up at their bench, did not help matters. After much back and forth by the PDP Governors’ Forum, Board of Trustees, Damagun, and National Executive Committee, the NEC at its last meeting announced that Anyanwu has now been fully reinstated as the National Secretary.
But contrary to the notion that Anyanwu’s reinstatement had calmed the storm and put the PDP on the path of recovery, many believe it marked the end for the PDP. For instance, the National Alliance for Democratic Governance (NADG) in a statement last Thursday, described his reinstatement as a step towards the party’s “final burial.”
The statement entitled “Damagun to be Remembered for Presiding over PDP Final Funeral,” and signed by the group’s President and National Coordinator, Comrade James Ezema, likened PDP’s treatment of the South East to a husband mistreating a loyal wife in favour of “wayward concubines.”
Ezema said that by reinstating Anyanwu, the PDP had effectively handed over its internal structure to individuals aligned with anti-party interests and external forces working to weaken the party.
“The reinstated National Secretary is one of the fronts of these external forces, led by the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, NyesomWike, whose ultimate goal is the destruction of the PDP,” he said.
According to him, the reinstatement gives such individuals control over key committees and structures that will oversee the party’s national convention — if it ever holds.
“The products of that convention will, in turn, shape the process that produces a presidential candidate — one who will likely be weak and incapable of challenging the APC in 2027, if the PDP even survives until then,” he stated.
Ezema reasoned that PDP’s failure to address what he called the injustice meted out to the South East in 2023, and its refusal to respect the zone’s stance on the national secretary position, had now culminated in the party’s current internal collapse.
The group also described as nemesis the recent outflux of the party’s chieftains such as former Senate President, Senator David Mark; former Vice President and the party’s presidential candidate in 2019 and 2023, AlhajiAtikuAbubakar, among a retinue of others, and their romance with the opposition coalition, which has adopted the ADC as its platform, while Damagun had been reduced to chairman of PDP’s burial committee.
“With key leaders from the region already defecting and more likely to follow, the PDP’s disregard for the South East caucus will have far-reaching consequences,” the group warned.
He concluded by stressing that history will remember the PDP’s Acting National Chairman, Ambassador Umar Damagun, “as the man who presided over the final funeral rites of the party.”
While a day in politics is still almost like a year, difficult to predict with certainty, political observers are watching with worries to see how the PDP would chart its way out of the mashy ground it walked itself into.
