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GALE OF DEFECTION: WHAT REALLY IS WRONG WITH THE PDP?
A gale is sweeping through Nigeria’s opposition — not the gale of power, but of desertion. And no party is bleeding faster than the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Every day, a governor jumps ship. Every week, a senator waves goodbye. And every month, a former stakeholder becomes a latter-day critic.
Yet the PDP’s first instinct is to blame the weather.
“They are being bought,” they say. “They are being threatened.” But when your roof keeps leaking, the question is not about the rain. It’s about your roofing sheet.
Let us speak plainly: what is wrong with PDP is PDP.
It is not Bola Tinubu. It is not the APC. It is not gale, wind, thunder, or political harmattan. It is the simple fact that a party once described as the largest in Africa
[b] now behaves like a ship without a compass — and worse, without a captain.[/b]
Leadership is the first casualty. The PDP has not had a moral centre since Goodluck Jonathan conceded defeat. The party has drifted from one court case to another, with chairmen fighting like village kinsmen over a chieftaincy title — each faction more concerned with ownership than direction.
When history offered the PDP a golden moment — a chance to learn from its loss in 2015 and rebuild — it chose instead to pretend nothing happened. Like a man who wakes up in a burnt house and still searches for the TV remote.
By 2022, as the APC wrestled with fuel queues and Naira redesigns, the PDP had a golden opportunity to present a credible, united front. Instead, it stumbled into an ethnic war zone of its own making, mishandled zoning, insulted its Southern base, and handed the Labour Party an emotional advantage it never paid for.
And at the centre of this chaos is one man: Alhaji Atiku Abubakar — the perennial contestant, the familiar face on the wrong side of history. Atiku’s insistence on being the “last man standing” has become a bulldozer that crushes internal consensus. Rather than groom successors, he declares himself the only saviour left — like a prophet who refuses to leave the pulpit even as the congregation dwindles.
This is not ambition. It is addiction.
And now, the party groans. Governors leave, not because APC is perfect, but because PDP has lost its flavour. People do not eat saltless stew twice — no matter how nostalgic they are about the recipe.
What PDP needs now is not a press statement. It needs a mirror. It needs to look at its old mistakes: alienating the South, ignoring youth, mishandling internal democracy, running campaigns like inheritance.
Opposition is not a title. It is a discipline. It requires strategy, humility, and reformation. None of which PDP has shown since 2015.
So let the gale of defection blow. Let the rats flee. But when the house collapses completely, let no one blame the storm.
The termites were already inside.
