To cite only the most polite, this being a newspaper for the family, he has been called arrogant, myopic, vainglorious, obtuse, and deluded. To these, add obsequious and grovelling, for his vowing to give Malam Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who rules Nigeria in the party’s name "101 per cent loyalty."
Ogbulafor may in fact be none of these things. I suspect that he is merely the latest in a long line of public figures to be portrayed in caricature by media commentators who, given a choice between understanding an issue and condemning it, will reflexively condemn. No great mystery here; it is far easier to condemn than to understand.
If all those commentators who have been excoriating Ogbulafor had cared to analyze what he actually said and understood it in the proper context, the only failing for which they could have quite properly rebuked him is his low ambition. I would even go farther to say that I see him as a person of abysmally low ambition – low to the point of being visionless.
If he had just a smidgen of anything that can be called ambition, or for that matter a spark of imagination, how could he contemplate a reign of only 60 years for the PDP?
Adolf Hitler did not enjoy and could never even hope for the tidal wave of support that swept the PDP to power and sustained it for almost a decade, despite all those mesmerising Nuremberg rallies captured so unforgettably on film by Leni Riefenstahl. Yet, Hitler could proclaim boldly and confidently that the Third Reich, and by extension, Nazism, would last a thousand years.
Even when it was clear that Britain had long parted company with its imperial greatness, its leading politicians still insisted that the sun would never set on the empire. The British, as everyone knows, are masters of understatement. But, however you interpret their time frame for the days of empire, it is certainly much longer than 60 years.
But here is Ogbulafor, former general secretary responsible for the day-to-day functioning of a political party that has been vanquishing not just the opposition but the entire electorate at every outing, be it at the local, state, regional or national setting, declaring that the PDP would remain in control for a mere 60 years.
In light of this tragic failure of imagination, it is surprising that the PDP rank and file has not risen in indignation against Ogbulafor. Not even the mildest rebuke has issued from that body when there should have been a resounding vote of no confidence, produced by the same kind of consensus that had made him an unopposed candidate for the position he now holds. What is going on at Legacy House?
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo and current chairman of the PDP’s Board of Trustees may be too busy fending off charges of gross malfeasance during his time in office and searching for his fugitive Senator-daughter to reprimand Ogbulafor for his lack of imagination.
But what of the Fixer himself, Tony Anenih? Can it be that he is busy putting his papers together to explain away why there is so little to show for all those billions of Naira invested
in Nigeria’s road transportation network under his watch?
Even Yar’Adua, to whom Ogbulafor pledged "101 per cent" loyalty, stands accused of being complicit in this conspiracy of silence. How can a man who rules over every fifth African and far and away the biggest aggregation of black people on earth settle for just 101 per cent loyalty from an underling?
Can’t they all see – Obasanjo, Anenih, and Yar’Adua — that Ogbulafor’s heart is not really in this business? Otherwise, how would he pledge only 101 percent of his loyalty and not 1,000 percent? For whom is he saving the remaining 899 per cent? Atiku Abubakar, Ahmadu Ali, Alex Ekwueme or Audu Ogbeh?
The PDP leadership need look no farther than Gabon and Togo to realise that Ogbulafor is not the man for the job. The stalwarts of the Gabonese Democratic Party never hinted, and certainly never proclaimed, that anything could set a limit to how long it could cling to office. But the party has held power for 46 years, and seems set to continue ruling Gabon for at least another 46. Even if it were to hold power for just 15 more years, it would still have overshot the 60-year benchmark that Ogbulafor has prognosticated for the PDP.
The PDP’s paid membership alone is larger than Gabon’s entire population. You can fit its entire territory into Abuja Federal Capital Territory and still have enough land left to satisfy the cravings of the most desperate land grabbers in the executive and legislative branches, not forgetting their wives and children and concubines.
Nigerians everywhere must feel deeply insulted that the PDP’s power calculation, per Ogbulafor, is not nearly as inspiring as that of the Gabonese Democratic Party.
In Togo, which is no bigger than a sliver of Ogun State, the ruling party held power for 25 years until the death, in 2005, of President Gnassingbe Eyadema. Since then, his son has been ruling under the auspices of that same party. Their combines tenure would have been longer by at least 12 years if Eyadema had had the presence of mind to launch the party when he seized power in 1967.
No matter. Having studied the dynamics of statecraft at the feet of his father, the younger Eyadema can be expected to ensure that the party maintains its monopoly on governance for
the next four decades at least, by which time it would have held power for 69 unbroken years.
The Togolese must all be sneering at the Big Brother to the east where the ruling party is so bereft of imagination that it cannot look beyond the next 60 years.
Even if the PDP can be pardoned for being innocent of the inspiring examples of Gabon and Togo, there can be no excuse for its ignorance of its own antecedents. Shortly after its landslide victory in the 1983 general elections, its precursor, the NPN declared that all other political parties in Nigeria had become "irrelevant."
This was a clear indication that it had set its sight on ruling till the end of time. And its national chairman, the thoroughly unsentimental Chief Adisa Akinloye, was making that very point more or less when he declared that there were only two parties contending for power in Nigeria — the NPN, and the armed forces.
It must therefore be accounted a tragic measure of the regression in political thought and organization in Nigeria that, 25 years later, the offshoot of the NPN cannot bring itself to declare that it will hold power for the rest of this century and well into the next, not even after it has abolished the electorate.
Nor can this reticence be put down to mere modesty. The PDP did not attain its pre-eminence by being modest. For in politics, the modest finish last if at all, and the path to power is strewn with their bodies. Its founding fathers may not have set out this principle with such brutal clarity, but it is the iron law on which they run the family otherwise known as the PDP.
From the foregoing, it is clear that Ogbulafor has strayed dangerously out of line. The surprise, I repeat, is that they have not charged him with anti-party activities and expelled him. Perhaps they are deferring, like their principal at Aso Rock, to the rule of law. Perhaps they have not yet mustered their accustomed consensus.
