PDP Lacks Leadership At National Level –Suswam

Senator Gabriel Suswam, a former governor of Benue State and a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In this interview, he speaks on the crisis rocking the party and why the acting National Chairman of the party, Umar Damagum, must step aside, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU brings the excerpts

What is going on in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over the latest crisis rocking the party?

I believe that it is not just members of the PDP but all Nigerians who know that the leadership of the PDP has a lot of problems. Over time, it was expected that we would sit down as a party and address the issue of leadership problem.

Since we lost the election in 2023, things have not been well with the party and because we have a leadership that has no capacity and competence to sort out the problems of the party, it has continued to degenerate.

Issues that ordinarily would have been settled amicably, because of lack of capacity on the part of the leadership of our party, those issues have been left to fester and degenerate to the level where we are today.

It is an act of irresponsibility for the chairman of the party to sit down on his own and begin to suspend people in the manner that he did. And if the head of an organisation is not responsible enough to know that if we have a problem at that level, the problem would be escalated to the governors.

The governors as of now are the leaders of the party. So, if without consulting people who are financing the party, the chairman could sit down and purportedly suspended some members of the National Working Committee (NWC) even when he doesn’t have the power to do so, of course, the other members are also entitled to suspend him as well.

Unfortunately, we are washing our dirty linens in public. We know that our party has gone through a lot of problems since we lost the election but we didn’t expect that it will degenerate to this level.

If we have a leadership that has integrity, of course, it won’t be as bad as it is now. What I suggest is what the governors are doing. As I said, in the absence of a president, the governors are leaders of our party because to some extent, they are the ones financing the party.

Naturally, he who pays the piper dictates the tune. So, we will wait for the outcome of the governors’ meeting and the decision they would take but we have come to a level where the leadership of our party must go. If they don’t go, of course, the party stakeholders have alluded to the fact that the party is dead but I don’t share in that pessimism.

What I believe is that with proper leadership we can put the party together but what we have now are people who have no history of the party; people who are just there for themselves and don’t care what happens to the party. So, we must put people in place who have the history of the party and interest of the party and the commitment of the party at heart.

The group of people we have now as leaders of the party have none of these, so we are at a stage where the governors must take a decision. That decision has to be in the direction of sorting out the issue of leadership. If we have good leadership most of the problems that have escalated to this level would not even get to this level.

So, my opinion is that the governors must look critically at the leadership of the party which is common knowledge to all party members that we don’t have leadership at the PDP headquarters.

Why has the PDP allowed Damagum to stay for so long, and is it fair to say that he is part of the problem in the party?

First and foremost, the acting PDP national chairman is not supposed to be there in the first place. The North Central has made efforts based on the letters and wordings of our constitution, which clearly in unambiguous terms, states in section 47 (subsection 6) that when the chairman of the party either resigns or whatever circumstance, the deputy chairman from his part of the country should act. It is an interim measure and then the appropriate zone, which is the North Central, should produce a replacement.

We have been on this for a long but because of some substituting interest that wants to make sure that someone they can use to destroy the party completely or for their interest.

And that is what has sustained him there. Unfortunately, we have not been able to move forward from there but I think that with what happened in the past few days, the governors have woken up to their responsibility, which is to make sure that PDP comes together.

Without PDP they won’t have a platform because most of them are first-term governors. You need a platform to run elections. Not every person will be in one party, so there is a need for them to know that this is a party that provides the platform for them to run likewise

There is a total lack of capacity and competence on the part of the acting chairman and he has other interests other than the interest of the party

members of the National Assembly and every other person, who has been elected on the platform of the PDP. So, if we don’t put interest in sorting out the leadership crisis, of course, there won’t be any PDP.

I believe that what the governors have decided to do is to sort out this once and for all, but as we all know, that subterranean interest has come in to destroy the party and make sure that this leadership crisis continues to fester, so that we are all disorganized. In the congress that PDP purported to have held, there were a lot of crises in different states.

For instance, in most states what happened was a sham. In Benue State for instance, what happened was a sham; there was no congress. As a former governor, former House of Representatives member and a former senator, I don’t know the chairman of the party in my ward because there was no congress, not that I did not participate.

So, when you have a situation like that it means that it is a deliberate attempt to mess up the party. If we don’t take immediate action now, of course, we won’t have PDP again. You don’t need to tell that to anybody because every person who is not even a member of PDP knows that. If we don’t address the leadership crisis of the PDP, of course, we will not have a party.

There is a total lack of capacity and competence on the part of the acting chairman and he has other interests order than the interest of the party. If we allow him to stay there, of course, that is the end of the party.

What do you make of the Federal High Court ruling restaining the party from replacing Damagum until December 2025, when tenure of the current NWC is expected to end?

Damagum as the acting national chairman took the party to court and sections 58 and 59 of the PDP constitution alone is enough for him to be sent out of the party. He is the national chairman of the party for now and then he took the party to court and said he should not be removed from a position he wasn’t elected to.

Damagum was elected as the deputy national chairman (North), but he wasn’t elected as the national chairman. He became national chairman by default due to the crisis in the party because the person who was duly elected, Dr. Iyorchia Ayu, left as the national chairman.

According to section 47 (subsection 6) of our party’s constitution, he became the acting national chairman of our party but that section provides that he will act, pending when the appropriate zone that Ayu came from will nominate a replacement. Damagum is not from the North-Central, so what is the issue for him to vacate the position and go back to his position he went to court.

With that, you will not that there is more to it when he begins to go to court as the acting national chairman that he should not be removed from a position he wasn’t elected into. Be that as it may, the court has given its judgement and as a lawyer, I won’t go into the merit and demerit of the judgement.

What I will say is that the suspension of Damagum is different from the judgement of the court. The judgement said he should not be removed. He is not removed. The NWC suspended him and the suspension came from the judgement. So, they are two different things and people should not confuse it.

If the NWC decides to suspend Damagum, it is outside what the judgement says because the judgement says he should not be removed as the acting national chairman. So, I don’t see how that has impacted the suspension of Damagum. He has shown absolute incompetence and we cannot continue with that level of incompetence in our party at this point.

Some analysts believe that the crisis the party is facing is a result of the fallout between Nyesom Wike and Atiku Abubakar as far back as the party’s presidential election in 2022. What do you make of such assumption?

I don’t think the issue of personality in PDP should be what I would like to discuss here.

What I would want to say is that if you had good leadership at the PDP headquarters, this seeming conflict between the personalities you mentioned would have been settled but because of the incompetence of the party’s acting national chairman, he has not been able to sit down together with these two major stakeholders.

We have waited and we have not seen any effort on the part of the acting national chairman to address this issue you mentioned, so all goes down to the incompetence of the acting national chairman not to sit down together with the actors.

If you are the head of the house and you have probably your first son and wife fighting and you are unable to settle them, it means you are incompetent to be the head of that house and that is what has happened.

If you had competent leadership at the party, of course, between the two personalities there would have been a way forward. There has been no way forward because the acting national chairman has no competence to address the issue.

It is not about this personality against the other one but it is about the incompetence of the head of the house being unable to settle the problem within the house.

So, what do you do in such circumstances? We must find a new leadership and that is what I believe the governors should be doing now. Once you have that leadership, I can bet you that some of these problems will be addressed.