Seriake Dickson, Obidients and the NDC’s marriage of convenience — by Bamidele Johnson
Watched a bit of Senator Seriake Dickson’s interview in the earliest hours of this morning and I think he spoke with a firmness suggestive of the fact that the NDC is not just going to hitch up its skirt, bend over and allow any group with Alpha inclinations within it to penetrate it at will.
Dickson sounded a bit like Atiku did in his interview with the same interviewer back in the days of the coalition. Just a little. Dickson’s remarks, I think, hint at what are probably integration issues within the NDC. Hardly surprising. The union is still new. The various tendencies are yet to become familiar with one another. They are still feeling each other out, establishing boundaries and trying to determine where influence begins and ends.
But there may also be deeper issues, one of which is an apparent refusal to understand that this is a completely different vehicle from the LP or the NNPP, each of which had one dominant tendency and a tiny collection of legacy members willing to be dominated in what looked from the outside like a consensual BDSM arrangement.
In both parties, everyone knew who the dominatrix was. Everyone knew who held the whip. There was little ambiguity. The NDC is different. There are, at the very least, three significant centres of influence within it: the Obidients, the Kwankwasiyya movement and the Dicks (which would be X-rated), Dicksonites or whatever they eventually decide to call themselves.
By my assessment, none of these groups is more important than the others, even if two of the three can boast significantly larger followings than the Dickson tendency. That, I suspect, was partly what lay behind Dickson’s remark about how forming a party is no cakewalk and that no one is doing the other a favour.. It sounded less like an observation and more like a reminder that popularity should not be mistaken for ownership.
The sensible thing would be for all the tendencies to understand that they need one another like flowers need rain and to tone down the superiority complexes. The Obidients, especially. A political project of the kind they say they want to build is not a winner-takes-all contest within the project itself. It is an exercise in mutual dependence.
For success, numbers matter. So do structure, reach and networks. Every group brings something to the table and every group lacks something another possesses. Without that understanding, the NDC could end up splintered before the elections or, worse, become one of those parties in which people invest more energy sabotaging the party than defeating their opponents.
Messi, great player that he is, still needs teammates. A football team made up of eleven men who all think they are Messi will end up achieving the impossible feats of losing possession to itself and self-nutmegging, AKA Toros.
