What PDP’s Meltdown Says About Nigeria’s Ruling Class
By Iduh Onah
THE APPARENT* meltdown of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is profoundly instructive not merely as a political epic but more as a tragic drama of the contradictions, vanities and historical amnesia of Nigeria’s ruling class. Here was a party conceived in the crucible of the struggle against military dictatorship by eminent personalities and statesmen, nurtured into a national political institution and governed Nigeria for 16 uninterrupted years. Today, the PDP finds itself battling internal divisions, leadership disputes, institutional paralysis and the sad reality of being captured by the ruling APC and weaponised for its victory in the 2027 general elections.
The argument here is simply not about how and why the PDP lost power in 2015. Political parties lose elections, and governments are legitimately replaced. The more troubling question is how a party established by men who understood the dangers of authoritarianism and the importance of national cohesion could become so weakened that it struggles to perform even the elementary functions of a political party, including maintaining internal discipline, resolving leadership disputes and presenting a credible presidential candidate.
What does this tell us about the people who have dominated Nigeria’s political landscape since the return to civilian rule in 1999? More importantly, what does it reveal about the character of the elite entrusted with organising and managing a country endowed with extraordinary human and natural resources?
To appreciate the irony, it is necessary to revisit the circumstances that gave birth to the PDP.
In 1997 and 1998, Nigeria stood at a dangerous crossroads. General Sani Abacha’s military regime had tightened its grip on the country, political freedoms were severely constrained, and the prospect of democratic restoration appeared increasingly uncertain. The regime’s determination to transform itself into a civilian administration culminated in the bizarre spectacle of five registered political parties adopting Abacha as their presidential candidate. The late Chief Bola Ige’s memorable description of those parties as the “five fingers of a leprous hand” captured the absurdity of a political arrangement designed to manufacture legitimacy for military authoritarianism.
It was against this background that a group of politicians and statesmen decided that the country could not be allowed to drift into a political cul-de-sac. The initiative associated with the All Politicians Summit, the subsequent meetings of political leaders and the emergence of the G-18 and G-34 represented an attempt to build a broad national coalition against the perpetuation of military rule.
Among the personalities involved were former Vice-President Alex Ekwueme, former President Shehu Shagari, Adamu Ciroma, Abubakar Rimi, Sule Lamido, Atiku Abubakar, Jerry Gana, Solomon Lar, Audu Ogbeh and several other political figures whose experiences spanned different administrations and political traditions.
These were not political novices but men who had occupied positions of responsibility, witnessed the failures of previous governments and understood the fragility of Nigeria’s national project. Their coming together reflected a recognition that the country needed more than a collection of sectional political interests but a broad-based platform capable of restoring democracy, reconciling competing interests and providing a measure of national stability.
The emergence of the PDP in August 1998 was the culmination of that effort with a founding vision that was ambitious – to bring together patriotic Nigerians across ethnic, religious and ideological divides in a political platform capable of advancing national reconciliation, economic reconstruction, human rights and the rule of law.
The party’s early electoral performance suggested that the project had struck a chord with Nigerians. It won 21 states in the 1999 governorship elections, secured the presidency through retired General Olusegun Obasanjo and emerged as the dominant party in the National Assembly. By 2003, it had consolidated its position, expanding its control of the states and retaining the presidency.
In 2007, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua succeeded Obasanjo, and in 2011, Goodluck Jonathan won the presidential election despite a contentious North-South powershift dynamics following the death of Yar’Adua. Whatever the shortcomings of individual administrations, the PDP had established itself as the central political institution of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. It had a national structure, an extensive membership base, considerable electoral machinery and the political experience necessary to shape the direction of the country. It also possessed a formidable collection of experienced politicians who, at least in principle, should have understood the importance of institutional continuity.
Yet, beneath PDP’s impressive electoral victories, the seeds of decline were already being sown. Its fundamental weakness was that it increasingly confused the possession of political power with the possession of political wisdom. Its leaders came to treat electoral dominance as an entitlement rather than a responsibility, while the party itself gradually became an arena for negotiating access to public office, distributing patronage and managing the ambitions of powerful individuals.
Its founding ideological commitments became progressively less distinguishable from the personal interests of its leading figures. Internal democracy was frequently subordinated to elite bargaining, while party structures were often treated as instruments to be controlled rather than institutions to be respected. As a result, the party’s celebrated breadth, once a source of strength, gradually became a liability. Its capacity to accommodate different interests did not always translate into the ability to reconcile them through credible rules. Instead, the party increasingly relied on arrangements among influential individuals, many of which became unstable whenever the distribution of power was contested.
The crisis over presidential succession, particularly the controversy surrounding Jonathan’s decision to seek election in 2011 despite the party’s informal understanding about the rotation of power between the North and the South, exposed the fragility of its internal consensus. The party’s inability to manage the consequences of such disagreements without alienating influential members contributed to the erosion of its cohesion.
By 2013, the departure of prominent politicians, including five sitting governors and other influential figures, had become a significant factor in the opposition’s consolidation. The formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC), which brought together previously fragmented opposition forces, changed the political equation. The PDP lost the presidency in 2015. Jonathan conceded defeat to Muhammadu Buhari, and Nigeria witnessed its first transfer of federal power from one political party to another through an electoral process.
That moment should have provided the PDP with an opportunity for institutional renewal. Defeat could have forced it to examine its failures, rebuild its structures, clarify its political commitments and establish a more credible relationship between its leadership and its members. Instead, the years that followed revealed how difficult it was for the party’s political establishment to distinguish between losing an election and losing the privileges associated with power. Its subsequent defeats in 2019 and 2023 reinforced the impression of an organisation struggling to reinvent itself. The party remained a significant national political force, but its electoral standing increasingly contrasted with the depth of its internal crises.
This is where the story becomes more than a chronicle of the PDP’s misfortunes to being an indictment of a political class that had repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to mobilise against an external adversary but a much weaker capacity to govern itself through rules, institutions and a shared sense of purpose.
It is therefore a historical irony that the PDP, formed by a group of political leaders who recognised that a military regime was attempting to capture the state and subordinate the political institutions and structures of the entire to the ambitions of one man, men who understood that a country could not be organised around the unchecked will of an individual, had in less than two decades after emerging from that resistance became vulnerable to the influence of individual power brokers and factional interests. Its founding generation, and the generations of politicians who followed them, have not succeeded in building sufficiently resilient institutions to prevent personal ambition from overwhelming collective purpose.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore: a party established to resist the personalisation of political power has struggled to prevent the personalisation of its own structures.
It would be simplistic, however, to attribute PDP’s predicament entirely to the conduct of its founders. Political parties evolve, and responsibility for their decline belongs to successive generations of leaders, including those who inherited the organisation, exploited its weaknesses or failed to reform it. Neither should the party’s internal problems obscure the broader challenges of Nigeria’s political system, in which party defections, elite realignments and the pursuit of office frequently transcend ideological boundaries.
Nevertheless, the founding generation’s historical significance makes the party’s present condition particularly instructive. The men who helped establish it understood the necessity of political organisation. What their successors failed to demonstrate consistently is that organisation must be sustained by institutions capable of outliving the individuals who created them. This failure is now particularly evident in the PDP’s struggle to define its interests ahead of the 2027 general elections.
A political party that once mobilised a national constituency, won the presidency four consecutive times and controlled a substantial majority of the states, now faces persistent uncertainty over its leadership, internal legitimacy and electoral strategy. The prospect of Nyesom Wike’s rainbow coalition has further complicated its position.
Coalition-building is not inherently a sign of weakness. In a democracy, parties may legitimately cooperate to challenge an incumbent government, aggregate votes and develop a common programme. Indeed, the APC’s emergence demonstrated the electoral possibilities of opposition consolidation. But there is an important distinction between a coalition built by confident political parties and one that becomes a refuge for parties unable to resolve their own internal contradictions.
If the PDP enters a coalition as a functioning institution, with a coherent programme, legitimate leadership and a clearly defined role, it could contribute meaningfully to a broader opposition movement. If, however, it becomes a convenient vehicle through which some of its leaders negotiate their personal political survival, the arrangement may amount to little more than the redistribution of existing ambitions under a new banner. The danger is that the party could disappear politically without ever confronting the reasons for its decline. Its name, structures and historical legacy might be absorbed into a new arrangement, while the same elite practices that weakened it are reproduced under a different political identity.
Such an outcome would represent not merely the decline of a party but the failure of a political generation to learn from its own history.
There is also a question of institutional dignity. The PDP was not created as a temporary electoral association to be discarded whenever its leaders encountered difficulty. It emerged from a national struggle and acquired, through its years in government, a significance that extended beyond its membership. It became one of the principal institutions through which Nigeria’s democratic competition was organised.
That history imposes a responsibility on its current leadership. They may decide, through legitimate internal processes, to participate in a coalition, negotiate an alliance or even support a fundamental restructuring of the party. But they owe their founders, members and the wider electorate a serious explanation of what they seek to preserve, what they intend to change and what lessons they have drawn from their prolonged decline. A party that cannot confidently confront these issues is unlikely to offer convincing answers to the larger problems of governance, and these problems are considerable. Nigeria, of course, remains a country of enormous agricultural potential, mineral resources, energy reserves, entrepreneurial ingenuity and a youthful population. Its citizens have demonstrated resilience in circumstances that would overwhelm many societies. However, the country continues to struggle with insecurity, poverty, inadequate public services, unemployment, weak institutions and a persistent deficit of public confidence in political leadership.
These difficulties cannot be attributed to the PDP alone. The party governed for 16 years, but it did not govern in a vacuum, and the administrations that succeeded it have also had their own record of achievements and failures. Nigeria’s structural problems predate the Fourth Republic and cannot be resolved by changing the ruling party alone. The more fundamental issue is that the political elite has repeatedly failed to transform access to power into the construction of durable public institutions. Political competition is often intense when the prize is control of government, but the commitment to institutional development appears considerably weaker when it requires leaders to submit themselves to rules that constrain their personal discretion.
The PDP’s decline therefore invites a broader reflection on the nature and character of political leadership in Nigeria. Are the country’s political leaders primarily interested in building institutions that can serve future generations, or in maintaining political platforms that preserve their relevance in the immediate struggle for office?
An honest response to this is critical because a nation cannot be organised sustainably around the changing calculations of a handful of influential individuals. It requires political parties that develop programmes, cultivate leadership, manage internal disagreements fairly and maintain a clear relationship between electoral promises and public accountability. It requires an elite that understands power as a temporary mandate rather than a personal possession.
The PDP’s predicament also challenges the assumption that experience automatically produces wisdom. Nigeria has never lacked individuals who have occupied high offices, participated in historic negotiations or accumulated decades of political experience. What remains less certain is whether that experience has translated into the capacity to build institutions that are stronger than their custodians.
The tragedy of the PDP is that its history contains both a lesson in political possibility and a warning about political decay. In 1998, a group of leaders confronted a military regime that appeared determined to monopolise political power. They built alliances across old divisions, organised a broad-based movement and helped create a party that became central to the restoration and consolidation of civilian rule. Nearly three decades later, the same political tradition faces the prospect of being overwhelmed by the very weaknesses that its founders should have understood the importance of preventing: personal ambition, factionalism, institutional indiscipline and the subordination of collective purpose to individual calculations. The contrast is crystal clear. The G-34 and its allies helped create a political organisation that was bigger than any one of its members, but that organisation, the PDP of today, symbolises an organisation that is not strong enough to be bigger than its competing members.
That is the paradox at the heart of the party’s meltdown. Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor is that of a body whose organs have ceased to work in coordination. Its name remains recognisable, its historical achievements are still recalled and its political constituency has not entirely disappeared. But its capacity for purposeful movement is compromised because its constituent parts no longer respond to a common direction.
In such circumstances, joining another body may prolong the life of individual organs without restoring the health of the original organism. A coalition can provide a new electoral vehicle, but it cannot automatically cure the political habits that produced the crisis. This is why the PDP’s future should concern Nigerians beyond the ranks of its members. Its difficulties expose a weakness that runs through the country’s political establishment, including the ruling APC: the tendency to mistake the ability to win power for the ability to organise society.
A political class that cannot consistently organise its own parties, establish legitimate succession procedures or resolve internal disputes through trusted institutions will struggle to inspire confidence that it can manage the more complex demands of a diverse nation. The lesson is not that the PDP must survive at all costs. No political party possesses an eternal entitlement to existence, and democracy should allow political organisations to decline when they lose public confidence. The lesson is that the circumstances of its decline reveal the limitations of a political culture that places too much faith in personalities and too little in institutions.
If the party is eventually swallowed in a rainbow coalition created to facilitate victory for an incumbent president, its demise may be remembered as another episode in Nigeria’s familiar cycle of political realignment. But the deeper question will remain unanswered: why does a country with so much talent, history and material wealth continue to produce a political elite that struggles to build institutions capable of matching its ambitions?
The PDP’s meltdown may yet offer a final public service if it compels the Nigerian political class to confront that question honestly. Otherwise, the country risks repeating the same political drama under different party names, with familiar actors, recycled alliances and grand promises of national renewal. The banners will change, the coalitions will multiply, and the speeches will remain eloquent. But beneath the spectacle, the underlying disease will persist: a political elite adept at organising itself around the acquisition of power, yet insufficiently committed to organising power around the enduring needs of the nation.
That, ultimately, is what the PDP’s crisis teaches us about Nigeria’s ruling elite. The problem is not simply that a once-dominant party is falling apart. It is that the political class that built it has yet to demonstrate, with sufficient consistency, that it knows how to build institutions that can endure beyond its own ambitions.
Onah is the Editor-in-Chief of NATIONAL RECORD and writes this column every Wednesday. Send reactions via email to: nationalrecordng@gmail.com, onahiduh@yahoo.co.uk. WhatsApp: +234 8033209749
