PDP/PeterObi> The First Kiss

By Sam Omatseye

Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s dilemma about embracing Pitobi is not PDP’s alone. It is also an Obidient quandary. The LP dilemma over PDP merger is not LP’s alone, it is also a PDP’s. It is the jigsaw puzzle of Nigerian politics. It was created by PDP itself.

But it is too simplistic to put it that way. We saw it last week when PDP said it was on the cusp of healing itself, and one of its formulas is to bring everyone home, including Kwankwaso and Pitobi. Like Medea in Euripides’s rendition of the Greek tragedy, they are looking at what might have been. Before she slaughtered her two sons, Medea avenged her traitor and power-crazed husband Jason by murdering his new wife and her conniving father, King Creon, who snatched Jason from Medea. Medea looked back at the time of her love with Jason with an unblended alchemy of fury and tenderness. Memory drove her to a witchcraft of envy and murder and regicide.

PDP spokesperson spoke with sumptuous nostalgia on how they might have trounced Tinubu and his APC if they had come together. Kola Ologbodiyan probably read in his mind the scripture when David eulogized how “good and pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity.” Only that the precious oil of the election poured on their head did not reach down to Aaron’s beard before it gave them a splitting headache. They were already three persons. This trinity had no unity.

They are like divorcees with the fantasy of their first kiss. The fantasy is sweet, but the reality is like quinine without the cure. Between the first kiss and divorce, they had blisters and sores, fought bedbugs of cash in the other room, flew dinner plates across the sitting room after equity failed in sharing it, lied to their children about what they shared, kissed lovers across the aisle in furtive hours. They want to cancel all that memory to reenact the hour of the first kiss?

That is the problem with PDP. The first kiss never comes back, like Chekov’s short story of a woman who had a kiss in the dark in a party and spent all her life wondering about it and who had kissed her. Neither Pitobi nor Kwankwaso’s NNPP are sure they can reenact the bliss of that romantic kiss.

They hope to return to the first kiss believing that they are like water into water and no one can know their differences anymore. Old things have passed away. Behold all things have become new.

First, they must stop lying to themselves. One, Pitobi has outgrown who he was when he was a candidate who rebelled against PDP and picked up LP ticket. Since then, he has amassed a big and rambunctious following, and that makes him a force in the political sweepstakes. How formidable that force is today is doubtful. It may have retreated into a rump. But it is still far bigger than Pitobi ever could have been under the umbrella. During the election, PDP lamented the collapse of its unity as stormy Nyesom Wike turned the party upside down. Now, the story is not different. Pitobi did not relent, after building a coalition of faith and tribe in southern and central Nigeria. He hoped he had enough to pull off a win.

It was an illusion that political Mathematician Babatunde Raji Fashola(SAN) laid bare as a prophecy. But Kola Ologbodiyan and Professor Pat Utomi goaded their candidates on. Fashola’s Math as prophecy came into reality because, like Oedipus in Sophocles’ play, they did not listen. They saw victory in a cloud. They were afflicted by what literary critic G.D. Killam called “insistent fatality,” in characterizing Okonkwo in Things fall Apart. They saw death and careened into it like a drug.

Since things fell apart, PDP has been trying to bring everyone home. But it is important for them to know who they are now. Pitobi does not know. He has diluted the religious part of his Obedient movement. The Tinubu administration has allayed fears and quieted ballyhoos about an apocalypse about the Muslim-Muslim ticket, with a cabinet and appointment profile that undermines any allegation of pious bigotry.

So, if Pitobi goes to PDP, will he become a deputy to the party’s point man? That will not suit the feminine-voiced Anambrarian. That will, to all intents and purposes, be the Nunc dimittis of the Obedient movement. PDP forgets that the reason the Obedient movement was born was because, one, they wanted a party to fix their dilemma of southern and central Nigerian Christians not voting for a Fulani man and a Yoruba man. They did not want Tinubu, a Yoruba, and did not want the moral cross of voting a Fulani man in a prostitute like Atiku for another possible eight years. For this big chunk of the Obidient cause, Pitobi was not a candidate, or even a person, he was an excuse as a cause. But the excuse has grown into a myth for its core followers, many of whom dumped Kanu as a cultic hero (almost as sacred as Ojukwu) for a more practical one in Pitobi.

PDP will have a lot of problem blending that crowd into its own party. Again, there were the Endsars component and ill-digested radicals and lawyers who clasped to their bosom the same Pitobi who they had associated with a perverse elite before his born-again LP sojourn. How will they blend? I can hear them echo Apostle Paul, “Come ye from among them and be ye separate.”

But that makes the Obidient crowd too small to fight alone. Wike is the immediate nemesis of Ologbodiyan’s party. Last week, the FCT minister warned the Bauchi governor and other interloper PDP governors that he has the capacity to undermine peace in their states. For sure, they cannot expel Wike form the party. Unlike Ganduje,who had ward miscues, Wike is still a stalwart of Rivers State PDP. He put the party echelon on notice last week for a reason. He is capable of determining the presidential candidate of the party next election cycle. Remember, but for Tambuwal, he was on the path to victory in the last PDP primary.

It shows how powerful he can still be. Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, the hypocrite who called for removal of fuel subsidies in the open during Buhari’s time, suddenly became a critic of its removal because he wants to run for president. The megalomaniac, who responded to this column the last time I ribbed him, has been quiet over Wike’s jibe.

What it means is that we are back to Fashola’s mathematical prophecy. Their followers are only going to line behind them. And as troubled as the APC may be today, it is more united than its foes, and a house divided against itself must beware of its wobbly legs.

Before any of them can unite, they must decide who is guilty. For without guilt, there is no reconciliation. The issue with Nigerian political class is that we allow guilt to fester without atonement. If these groups reconcile, there must be penance. Who will do penance if Wike reconciles with Bauchi Governor? Or if Pitobi goes back to PDP? Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia trilogy, the first was about guilt known as Agamemnon, the second about atonement known as The Libation Bearers and the third is about absolution and known as Eumenides. When have we had a major reconciliation in our politics that evokes absolution? I don’t know when. Our politicians don’t reconcile. They embrace like pigs. We keep a narrative of patchworks that turn back to haunt us. Hence, we have parties without philosophies. The people inherit their lies and illusions. Sir Ivor Jennings had Nigerians in mind when he asserted that, “the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people.” Pitobi must be wary to make a decision like a merger for the Obidients. He risks losing them. If he joins PDP, he would have decided who his new people are, and they may not be called Obidients.

Shakespeare advice, “to thyself be true.” In a satire of class and manners, the great Oscar Wilde penned the play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in which lovestruck men try to change their identities in order to marry two women who only want to marry men named Earnest. In the end, saying truth to themselves matters.

Nor is identity so easy in politics anywhere. In the age of absolutism in Europe, Catholic France was defending Protestant Netherlands against its Catholic enemies and Catholic Spain and Germany pitched tents with Protestants called the Huguenots in France against the Catholic French king. And Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant who slaughtered many Catholics at home, made alliance with the great Jules Mazarin, French Catholic leader. If you compromise faith, you can compromise anything. We saw Pitobi the other day in the shadows of a mosque.

The story of PDP and Pitobi’s LP will make a great study in crisis of love and marriage in politics.

If their first was luscious, the next will be Judas kiss.

NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation