I had thought “eat alone, die alone” was a cast-iron, street-grown, fixed collocation but I knew better some years ago at a function of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW). It was there I heard: “Eat alone, go away!”
I am not sure I joined others to laugh at that bullet declaration. I saw a lot of take-home in it and I look out for victims at every gathering of hawks. Even among the Yoruba where age is revered, once an elder is adjudged greedy and selfish, he carries his load home, on his own, alone!
Last year, May 10, after the presidential election, I wrote about the fall of the PDP and I decreed, like a prophet (or a pastor) that the party was over for that party. I said it was dead, never to rise again. Some diehard loyalists of the party (in my backyard) did not like it. That was your opinion, they said. I wrote about money being the poison that ate the heart, liver, kidneys, intestines (big and small) of the PDP. But some thought it could still be rescued. They thought the dead could be brought back to life even without removing it from the morgue. A lot has started happening. Imagine power struggle in a cemetery. That is what I see in the power show between the Gulak group, the governors and the undertakers (the (NWC). They are all killing this dodo, this Raphus cucullatus, bird of a flightless present. They are simply fighting over carrion which can only be food for the abnormal. Although there was a faint stutter in Rivers State after the Supreme Court judgement of last Wednesday, it will not change anything. The dead is dead. Undertakers are just chalking up the expenses, cutting off some, adding some new items. Rivers is just added as one of the burial parties. I swear.
Back to my last position. I feel like repeating myself, once again, if you don’t mind, especially in the light of all the offensive “gates” we are daily assailed with. I feel the gates of Dasuki or whoever, shouldn’t be strong enough to shut us out of accepting that we need to keep our eyes open so that the carcass of the dead horse won’t be served as suya in satisfaction of our salivating palate.
This is the position I took May last year. You may agree; you may not:
If you were a government worker that has been denied salary for six months and you heard the Peoples Democratic Party’s Olisa Metuh last week reeling out how billions of naira were moved out, shared and spent for the party to continue managing your affairs, how would you have reacted? And then, the raging fight over the spent billions in the PDP showed seriously how the mighty has fallen.
In all previous elections, PDP fought with everything, spent billions, won elections and there was no noise about any money badly spent or criminally unspent. We saw nothing. We heard nothing. But all that has changed. All sorts of crooked knives normally prove their sharpness the day an elephant falls. The elephant is down. I have a very strong feeling that the PDP is dead. If you are in doubt, check out its lot in all the states it had lost from 2003 till date. It died quickly everywhere it was not in power.
And the PDP was not a party of all warts. It had sterling achievements to its credit. At the federal and state levels - anywhere across the country - its most ardent critics would be unfair to deny it its due accolades in its areas of accomplishments. They are there. But the party allowed itself to be demonised. It was generally perceived as the demon in our forest and so it must die. Today, it is down.
The party is not like the wise that falls and struggles to rise again.
No. It is too full of a salad of greed and conceit to appreciate the strength in rising after any fall. In all the states where that party had had the misfortune of falling from power, self-pity, backstabbing, treachery and blatant self-destructive shenanigans have combined to slaughter it. Has anyone found out why and how the party lost the 2003, 2007, 2011 (and 2015) governorship elections in all states where it failed?
And why is it still out in those places?
In all the six zones, the stories oozing out of the PDP are too offensive to be suffered by any person of reasonable sensibility. I have heard stories of embezzlement of not just campaign funds but also of bags of rice. “Eating” of campaign funds is a recurring nausea the party can’t be healed of. And the culprits are not ordinary party members, they are persons it would call leaders. When a party looks up to greedy, pilfering characters as leaders, it is good fortune for the society to be rid of it.
I told a friend the PDP was dead. He asked to be shown the grave and I said it had none; it was cremated. He looked at me with a wry smile. I told him a party that won’t play opposition cannot live a minute outside power. It is too enamoured with power and money to ever imagine itself out of it. But it is out of it. And it may remain so.
Those who created the party in 1998 as a multi-purpose national platform (for whatever) killed it. They have proceeded to regale the APC with national acceptability. Someone told me two years ago that by 2015, the PDP would be competing for regional space with APGA. That prophecy has come to pass. And this was a PDP that boasted it was going to rule Nigeria for 60 years. Even the mere fact that it set a life span for itself showed how enamoured with death it had always been. And the way it hated best practices at the height of its glory gave it up as a candidate for failure.
The misfortune of the PDP is the ill luck of the strongman whose strength intoxicates to the point of seeing himself as the ultimate champion in all contests. The party was so self-conscious that when its nemesis ( APC) was born and purpose-grown before its very eyes, it refused to see the end approaching.
That was last year. Now, with Dasukigate and all other gates you have seen and may still see, do you think anything has changed to make a shift in the above position necessary?
Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, is the PDP’s last man standing. The only one having his vocal chord still working. But he was in Osogbo last week to meet his arch enemy, Rauf Aregbesola. They said the war was over! Which (what) war? Ask them. We do not have the details of the high wire trip...only speculations which are the tonic keeping politics alive...But I can decree again that with that meeting, the burial of the PDP is completed.
Beyond Fayose and everything around his trip to Osogbo, what has been the reaction of other members of the PDP to, especially, the Olisa Metuh case? Haven’t you heard elements whose grouse with Olisa wasn’t the (likely) criminality of the money he received but the fact that he did not share it with them? Aren’t they feeling (and saying) he ate alone and so, must go down?
Eating very conspicuously shamelessly is a cardinal sin in politics. Eating alone in politics is the ultimate sin. The penalty is “going away.” And “going away” could really mean anything. Never mind the fact of Wike’s victory last Wednesday. It won’t change anything. It was victory for Wike, and Wike alone. It wasn’t for the PDP. That is the culture; the truth...
MONDAY LINES ...culled from Nigeria Tribune
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