allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Deconstructing Ogbulafor's Declarations (Page 1 of 1)

Prince Vincent Ogbulafor may not be a philosopher in the mould of the great Roman thinker and speech maker, Cicero. Ogbulafor is a political scientist and an economist.

Like philosophers however, it appears he has learnt not to engage in bombast. Words are meaningfully deployed. But as a politician, he also chooses his words to fire up imaginations, arouse inner-speech, inspire and indulge fulfillment, even if momentarily to party followership. So, the national chairman of PDP has bombarded national discourse with statements, quotes, some controversial in such a very short time.

Well, let's start from the least disquieting. While receiving the handover note from his predecessor, Ahmadu Ali, Prince Ogbulafor declared that the "PDP is a house on the hill which cannot be hidden". Good . No common sense could have contradicted him. PDP is indeed a house on the topmost Nigerian hill. And as a house on the hill, the party is positioned to show the light so that people can find their way. Ordinarily, it means PDP should be a a pathfinder setting national agenda with concrete examples.

However, what the Prince of Olokoro - Umuahia did not add was how faithful his party has been to this role. He did not add that a house enjoying such a geographical position of advantage also poses a grave danger if it looses illumination and abandoned to preying elements. In such a situation, the society is at great risk. The pillar of emulation can easily turn into a paragon of deceit. If this house crumbles, its particles can violently hit far flung cities. Casualties may be hard to quantify. It is rhetorical merely to ask whether the PDP came close to such a house. Perhaps, Prince Ogbulafor visualised this scenario, hence his warning to party men and women not to "allow anything happen to PDP".

One major feature of the speeches of PDP national chairman is his mastery of imageries. He employed much of this at the inauguration of the committee for the review of Dr. Alex Ekwueme Report on PDP reconciliation when Ogbulafor said he was taking the party "back to the people". It is simply a euphemism if you understand. I did not expect the PDP national chairman to go all out telling the whole world how the PDP master plan suffered a deluge of distortions. How the popular agenda of a supposedly people's party was unhorsed by the febrile ends of few from whose control Ogbulafor is gradually untethering the party. Even when the chairman of the review committee and the deputy national chairman of the party, Dr. Bello Muhammed said his committee was not out to handover PDP to any group, he tactically avoided saying his committee would retrieve, for fair and neutrality sake, the PDP structures from the Mamluks to whom the PDP became a vassalage of personal business.

Earlier, Ogbulafor had hinted on the shape and vision of his administration when he pledged in his acceptance speech "one hundred and one percent loyalty to the president". This generated various reactions from far and wide. Not a few labeled it an act of obsequiousness. However, many agree that Ogbulafor's declaration is not a gaffe. The correctness of such a statement is best understood in the context of our emerging democratic locale.

Ogbulafor possibly cannot afford shirking support from President Yar'Adua who many Nigerians agree reawakened confidence in the nation's leadership. There has been laud applause for his style though some disagree with his speed. There is no hundred percent loyalty anywhere. It is merely a political statement. If there is anything, Ogbulafor may have been referring metaphorically to an unalloyed loyalty he owes to the nation and her constitution, whose symbolic guardianship in Yar'Adua is purely a PDP creation. So, Prince Ogbulafor only pledged one hundred and one percent loyalty to the nation and the PDP both of whom Yar'Adua leads.

Prince Ogbulafor has not caused more disquiet than he did recently at a media dinner in Abuja where he declared that PDP would rule Nigeria for sixty years and that he would not mind a one party state. Honestly, I do not see why he should be crucified for this statement. It is a very old one. I remember clearly that it was Chief Barnabas Gemade,PDP former national chairman, who first said in 2000 that PDP would rule Nigeria for forty years. It is an ordinarily wish which a good party leader in power would employ in exhorting party membership to greater victory. There is no party chairman who would wish his party to lose power. The happiness of the people is, however, what should concerns you and I. That is, perhaps, why Ogbulafor added in his exhortation, "once the nation is peaceful and progressing". The conditional strand in his desire means he would not be a party to a PDP where the people of Nigeria are unhappy and are restrained in the exercise of their democratic rights. In other words PDP's sixty years in power will only be guaranteed by quality performance. So, why change a performing party, Ogbulafor would have enthused.

It would have been an irony for Prince Ogbulafor, as humble, open and democratic as he has been in both public and private life, to advocate a one party tyranny. The resistance of such a tendency was the major reason he was forced out as PDP National Secretary in 2006. If one has studied closely enough events at the PDP national secretariat since the return of Ogbulafor , it would be very easy to understand the impossibility of advocating for one party tyranny for the nation as many have interpreted him. I verily think that the way he runs PDP today is an indication of a democratic Nigeria of his desire. Need it be stated that hundreds of estranged party men have found their way back. Need it also be stated that the PDP is once again a virile party where all issues are thoroughly ventilated through wide consultations.

Lest we forget, if the PDP rules for sixty years, it is the direct consequence of the failure of opposition. In a country where all the opposition parties fall over one another to join the mainstream in quest for perks of office rather than give a credible alternative, why blame the PDP for wishing to rule forever? Tell me one political party in Nigeria that has tabled before Nigerians, a credible alternative to any of Yar'Adua's programmes and actions. While the cooperation among all political parties is unarguably important to the sustenance of democracy, it is unquestionably impolitic for the opposition to lose its soul to the ruling party in quest of dividends of cooperation.

Nwachukwu Ngige writes from Abuja

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