NEWS ANALYSIS: PDP as humpty dumpty, by Chris Adetayo

It’s hard not to feel sorry for the PDP. Once Africa’s “largest party”, it has spent the last decade waddling in a cesspool of its own making.

Pride goes before a fall. The PDP journey encapsulates this childhood adage. It thought itself too big, too powerful, too entrenched in office. It saw no chance of ever being brought down.

Down it came crashing in 2015; and like Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall, cobbling the pieces together has remained a Herculean task.

To see several of its elected Governors scrambling to join the APC is sobering. Delta, Akwa Ibom and now Enugu have joined. The Dancing Governor of Osun was also set to join but the local APC leaders, desperate to get back into Govt in 2026, were stridently opposed to him coming over. Of course countless number of parliamentarians at Federal and State levels have already jumped ship too.

It’s a sad spectacle.

There is no doubt that this over concentration of powers and governance in one party (the APC) is not good for our democratic progress. We need viable oppositions. One that will keep Governments on their toes.

But it will be easy to blame the APC. It’s not exactly doing anything wrong by absorbing talents from other parties. Even if the charge of using carrots and sticks to catalyse the gale of defections is true, the primary blame should still rest on the PDP and its abject failure to keep its members under its banner.

Make no mistake, the PDP still remains a beloved party in many parts of the country. It’s internal democracy, seen in how it chooses its candidates for elections, are largely more democratic than other parties. But it is that internal democracy, evident in how it chose its 2023 Presidential election candidates, that is part of what is now burying it.

I hope the remnants of the party can somehow find a way to rebuild it to serious contention and prominence. For it deserves better than to be a “Feeder Party” to APC – winning on Election Day only to lose half way through the governance circle. Nigeria deserves better too.