With the race to control the National Assembly principal positions in full swing, LEON USIGBE highlights the factors that may determine minority parties’ fate.
The 2023 National Assembly election tally so far indicates that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has become a severely weakened opposition compared to its performance in previous exercises. This suggests that it has a more minimal leverage in the race to produce the presiding officers of the legislature as it contemplates it can, working with other minority parties.
The main opposition party has 29 Senators and 102 members of House of Representatives-elect in the current election. This is a far cry from the 48 senators and 140 members that it mustered in the 2015 exercise, which enabled Senator Bukola Saraki and Rt. Hon. Yakubu Dogara to seize control of the levers of powers in both the Senate and the House of Representatives after the 2015 elections though the PDP did not secure most seats in both chambers.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) lost ground to the opposition in the latest elections and left open the possibility of a scenario where the minority parties can retake control of, at least, the House of Representatives if their combined strength operates on the same page. That is why the PDP, as the main opposition party, senses that it might just be able to pull off the 2015 Saraki/Dogara coup by galvanizing the other minority parties to challenge the ruling party, which itself, has been unable to determine the directions it wants to go.
The APC is dilly-dallying on its zoning formula, and thus providing the impetus for elected members from all geo-political zones to throw their hats into the race for the senate president, speaker of the House and other principal officers’ position in the National Assembly.
The PDP is actively working to capitalize on the lacuna. “We are meeting. The caucus has met. The minority caucuses have met, and we, PDP, is part of it because we have suddenly become a minority if you go by the developments that have cropped up in the last general elections. And so, we are meeting. The outcome of the meetings has produced at least 162 (elected members) over APC,” a member of the PDP National Working Committee (NWC) confirmed to the Nigerian Tribune. This position was confirmed by the PDP Deputy National Publicity Secretary, Ibrahim Abdulahi.
On his part, he said: “We are envisaging a leadership and we are already guiding them (PDP members) around a few names that we believe are credible people who have outstanding pedigree; people who have carved out niches for themselves; people who have made names and understand the dynamics of a functional democracy so that the legislature is not pocketed by the executive. We are looking at people who would not accept to be caged or to be pocketed by the executive. This is the kind of leadership we anticipate in the two chambers, and we have a few people who have carved niches for themselves in that regard whose pedigree we are going to preach, and we are preaching already and then, we would attract support for them going forward.”
But this PDP’s goal is hampered from the onset by the internal wrangling that has continued to trail it. It looks certain that the national leadership will not have the buy-in of outgoing Governor NyesomWike of Rivers State who seems determined to go to the opposite direction of every move made by the PDP NWC. “I have been hearing and reading where people are saying that the opposition parties are meeting to take over the leadership of the National Assembly. They won’t take it. It’s not possible. Even me, I will not support that. I will not support that kind of move where you want to take over the leadership of the National Assembly as an opposition. I won’t do that. There are so many selfish politicians. I’m not one of them,” he blurted in a recent interview.
Wike’s position is an expected fall out of the long running crisis between his G5 governors that he leads and the national leadership of the PDP, which saw him denigrating the party’s presidential candidate, AtikuAbubakar, in the February 25 election and as well openly working for his defeat at the poll. Since the conclusion of the presidential election, the National Chairman of the party, Dr IyorchiaAyu, whose ouster Wike demanded, has stepped aside. But that has hardly convinced the Rivers State governor to return to the path of peace and reconciliation with the party.
Other factors that may play against the minority parties in the push to control the National Assembly are that a critical member, the Labour Party (LP), is presently too distracted by its own internal leadership struggle to be able concentrate on the plots, while the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP), yet another party that will have a significant presence in the legislature, has demonstrated that it is not attracted to striking any deals with the PDP.
Therefore, with an already weakened tally, the LP in-fighting and the PDP not securing the support of its Rivers State members, the minority political parties seem to have enough to disorient their dream to have a foothold in the leadership posts of the 10th National Assembly.
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