By Kemfon Neke
With the victory of PDP in the Essien Udim rerun elections, the politics of 2019 is wrapped up. I can’t begrudge PDP their joy, they probably worked harder in finding a way to assert their dominance. For the sake of overall public interest, I wish the elects well. Congratulations!
It is sad that the outing of APC was abysmal and our candidates had to withdraw from the rerun. We must try to understand why we had challenges at the polls. We must tell ourselves some home truth. We can start by setting aside the anti Igini agitation and look more at the other reasons that impeded our popularity across the state.
1) We can start by filling only very credible candidates. As an opposition party, we must know that our fate is with the people and the people won’t break their legs or ignore money in this age of vote buying for another routine guy. We must whet the appetite of our electorates with very intelligent, scandal free and credible options.
2) We may have to also align or balance this credible quality with the unwritten political behaviors of the people, like on the issues of zoning and no 3rd term policy. Nobody should also be good enough to be a candidate if he is not ready to sponsor himself in that election and also pick litigation bills. Somebody should not be thinking that Akpabio will pick all his bills.
3)We must also coalesce the energy of everybody, we cannot continue to cartel our party along lines of its eminent leaders. There’s no way we will go anywhere if we continue to cancel ourselves out with continuous animosity of previous politics.
4)Never again, should APC hand over too much of its election petition briefs to only one law firm. Even one petition is stressful, two is crazy but 31 is impossible.
5) We must drop the arrogance of thinking that the regular approach will take us anywhere. I dare say that the quality of ideas presented to our leaders by the downlines are appalling. If you’re threatened by talent and consumed by greed then repent otherwise we’ll lose again.
6) We must thinks less of elections and think more of governance. We can take our minds off 2023 and concentrate more in our role as an effective opposition in governance. That way, we demonstrate our preparedness to be trusted by the public by that 2023. That said, our press releases and official communications should be more of review of government acts and policy. There should be less press releases on political matters and rejoinder to opposition’s press releases. We must stop being on the defensive.
7) We must never forget that power lies with the people. One can only rig or buy the people with money when the people are not ready to use their power. It is the opposition’s job to make the people angry enough to take back their power but we must deserve it ourselves. We may have been rigged out but we can check it too since it is only a more popular party that can rig easily.
8) We must be tenacious because it is not going to be so easy. There is so much poverty at home and government is the biggest paying industry. We can expect to be fought by the people we’re trying to salvage. Some do so to earn a living. Poverty has been weaponized and it’s up to us to gently enlighten our people that they have a choice always.
9) We must realize that party offices is not for compensation but work. A company is as good as its employees. In our next congress, we must carefully shop for the best of us.
In conclusion, we must recognize the name value of PDP earned in about 20 years of unbroken control of the state and realize that it will take more than some big names and sheer routine politics to displace them. It will take a lot more. My interest in all these is to see a multi colored House of Assembly with an active minority wing engaged in a healthy adversarial debates like we all watched during the BREXIT debate in the UK parliament. We’re not there yet, not even close. We hope on!
Please take heart and be strong my party men and women.
