Nyesom Wike is simultaneously the greatest asset and liability of the PDP. Let me explain.
By his uncouth and crude utterances and bullying tactics, Wike is a PR nightmare for the PDP.
For a party battling a reputational baggage that has only begun to recede in the context of Buhari/APC’s disastrous 7 years in power, Wike’s antics are a needless distraction, not to mention a repulsion for many Nigerians reconsidering the party as a potential alternative to the ongoing APC disaster.
Wike’s shenanigans disrupt and impede the PDP’s messaging, diminishing the party’s appeal in many quarters.
It is also quite possible that Wike has scarred away potential joiners of the party. No Nigerian political official, much less a governor, wants to join a party controlled by Wike, who expects everyone in the party to pledge fealty to him personally.
Why should an Oga in his own right become a subaltern to another Oga?
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The PDP is captive to Wike, and his whims are directing the party’s affairs, much to the frustration of those who want to see a viable opposition.
But Wike is also the PDP’s biggest asset, and is quite possibly the single most important reason the party still exists as a national political entity.
Wike is unquestionably the PDP’s most courageous Governor, taking on the APC/Buhari regime and defeating the FG’s might in several of political skirmishes.
He even humiliated the FG-backed effort to remove him from power in the 2019 election and in the subsequent judicial process.
At a time when the PDP has inexplicably abandoned the courage to effectively challenge the calamitous rule of Buhari, to articulate an oppositional critique embodying the mass disgruntlement with the regime, and to present an alternative program of reclamation and recovery, Wike’s bare knuckle political histrionics, repugnant as it may be to some, has come to represent the most potent oppositional response to the tyranny, utter failure, and overreach of the Buhari regime.
Wike, moreover, has been the single most important funder of the PDP since the party was voted out of power in 2015. Without his largesse, the PDP would probably be comatose today, unable to even play on the national political stage. One could argue then that whatever symbolic cachet the PDP retains as a national party, which is not much, Wike has financially sustained it.
Finally, Wike is an asset to the PDP in another way. Love him or hate him, he has done so much in terms of infrastructure for Rivers State.
In that way, his governorship, while not a model of cerebral and polished democratic leadership, has arguably been the most developmental gubernatorial administration among the 2015/2019 cohort. He has certainly surpassed the achievements of his immediate predecessor, Rotimi Amaechi, many folds, despite Rivers earning less from the federation account than it did during Amaechi’s administration.
PDP states are out of federal favor for discretionary developmental funds, and most of the party’s governors are underperforming, in part due to this reality but also due to their incompetence and greed, so Wike stands out, for good or bad, as a beacon of development and performance that mitigates this overarching PDP mediocrity.
He points to what an opposition governor, albeit one that enjoys a favorable allocative and internal revenue configuration, can accomplish in spite of being in disfavor with the FG. Wike’s infrastructural strides also point towards what the party could do with a focused approach if it came back to power in Abuja.
Wike has thus been a free developmental advertisement for the PDP, with other PDP Governors eager to ride on his coattails and identify with his strides as a representation of what the PDP can do.
Wike, to conclude, is a pain in the PDP’s behind, a fish bone stuck in its throat. It cannot ingest the bone and it cannot regurgitate it.
Even more crucially, this painful metaphorical fish bone situation is precisely what is keeping the PDP in national reckoning and gives it a fighting chance of unseating the APC in 2023.
The PDP establishment is disgusted with Wike, but its members realize that he is their lifeblood and so they have to tolerate him for the time being.
For this reason, all PDP roads still lead to Port Harcourt until Wike is out of power next year.
*Ochonu is Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, and a socio-political commentator on Nigerian affairs