As the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) appears to be sliding into a crisis over who should be recognized as its substantive national secretary, Abuja Bureau Chief, LEON USIGBE, writes that the 25 defecting members of the Rivers State House of Assembly have already used the tussle for the post to justify their action.
When 25 members of the Rivers State House defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) recently, they rationalized their action by citing the lack of clarity as to who was the national secretary of the main opposition party.
Sam Anyanwu, the substantive occupant of the post had stepped aside last year to become the governorship candidate of the party in the November 11, 2023 Imo State election without resigning. But the PDP South East Zonal Executives decided to nominate Sunday Ude-Okoye, a former National Youth Leader of the party, to replace him as the national secretary, believing that it would be a distraction for Anyanwu to retain his position as party secretary at a time when he was the party’s Imo State governorship candidate.
Because Anyanwu did not resign and Ude-Okoye had been put forward to be ratified as the substantive national secretary from the south east, the defecting Rivers State assemblymen concluded that two individuals claiming the post amounted to a division in the PDP and provided enough ground for decampment.
The PDP Board of Trustees (BoT) had called on Anyanwu to resign from the national secretary post but this was countered by the minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike. Ude-Okoye subsequently dragged the PDP before a federal high court in Enugu, which in October last year ordered the party to recognize him as the party national secretary. The PDP countered this in a motion filed on October 24, 2023 asking the court to set aside the order, noting that “it was obtained by fraud and suppression of material facts” while also faulting the order for not being specific as to what position Udeh-Okoye should fill.
Earlier this month, a federal high court in Abuja declared Anyanwu as the valid national secretary of the PDP with the presiding judge, Inyang Ekwo, also restraining the national leadership of the PDP from appointing any person as acting national secretary until the completion of Anyanwu’s four-year tenure on December 9, 2025.
With two different judgments coming from courts of coordinate jurisdiction, observers believe that the party has been thrown into a legal quagmire and a new crisis that threatens its already fragile unity.
Ostensibly, what comes to their minds is the excuse of the defecting Rivers State legislators, which one of them, Enemi Alabo, advanced in an interview: “We have a division in the PDP. We have cases in court concerning the secretaryship of our party. We desperately tried to reach the secretariat of our party, and we could not. As I speak to you, I can’t tell you who the secretary of my party is. If I can’t even have correspondence with my party, then what am I talking about? We’ve been in the eye of the storm for a few weeks now and since then; there has been no communication from my party at the national level. What kind of party is that?”
Section 68 (1g) of the 1999 Constitution provides the only basis for defection: “A member of the Senate or the House of Representatives shall vacate his seat in the House of which he is a member…if being a person whose election to the House was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected: provided that his membership of the latter political party is not as a result of a division in the political party of which he was previously a member or of a merger of two or more political parties or faction by one of which he was previously a member.” Division in a political party is necessary to make defection to another platform legal or the elected individual involved risks the chance of losing their seats.
Despite the PDP’s pushback on the claim that there was a division in the party at the time the Rivers lawmakers defected, the declaration of their seats as vacant and the call on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct a bye-election to fill the vacancies created by the defection, the members have carried on their legislative business buoyed by President Bola Tinubu’s extra-legal intervention, which the PDP has denounced.
However, there is no indication yet that INEC will heed the PDP’s demand to conduct a bye-election while the main opposition party seems completely powerless to press ahead with its case.
In the midst of this is a development that is more threatening to the corporate existence of the PDP. It is the divergence between its National Working Committee (NWC) and the BoT led by its acting chairman and former Senate president, Adolphus Wabara, on the issue of who, between Anyanwu and Ude-Okoye, should be recognised as the substantive national secretary. The BoT has written to the acting National Chairman, Umar Iliya Damagun, warning about the consequences of not recognising Ude-Okoye as earlier ordered by the court.
In the letter also copied to all 13 state governors elected under the PDP, the BoT chairman pointed out that Ude-Okoye was already in court before Anyanwu filed his case in another court of coordinate jurisdiction in a way the board described as a classic case of abuse of court process. It pointed out that the judgment given by the Abuja court did not nullify the one given by the Enugu State High Court as only a higher court could override it. “Having not been set aside, it remains valid and subsisting and there is an urgent need for the party to obey it even if it is not convenient for some persons,” the board maintained.
The BoT warned that given the Plateau State experience where the PDP elected members of the state and national Assemblies were removed because they were not validly nominated, the party may face a similar challenge if the wrong person is allowed to sign the nomination documents in the coming bye-elections.
Understandably, the worry for party stakeholders now is that there appears to be a crisis of confidence between the Damagun-led NWC and the Wabara-led BoT, a situation that they say, is potentially more fatal as it can lead to the split that enemies are craving. It is also this crisis of confidence that caused the South-East Zonal Executives not to bother to formally communicate their resolution on the national secretary issue to the NWC who they believed would not act on it having allegedly preferred to pander to certain other interests. The zonal executives chose rather to implement their resolution through the court.
“As leaders, we should not carve a dubious reputation for PDP as a party that has a penchant for disobeying court orders,” the BoT had warned over what it saw as the NWC’s recalcitrance in doing the right thing.
However, the NWC does not see any cause for worry as the PDP national spokesman, Debo Ologunagba, maintained that the party has continued to be administered in the best way possible. “The party is united. The party is governed by the constitution. Individual members can say their position about what they feel but that doesn’t represent the party. The NWC has a party to manage and we are managing it and we follow our due process, we follow our laws, and our constitution. That’s what we are doing.”
“We have a duty as NWC to manage the party and that’s exactly what we are doing and we are doing a good job at that. Are there challenges? Yes. Life is about challenges,” the party spokesman declared.
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