The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), once Nigeria’s largest and most formidable political force, has entered what now looks like a terminal decline. The controversial national convention meant to “reset” the party has instead fractured it beyond recognition, deepening internal wars and exposing a leadership willing to burn the house down to seize control of its ashes.
From the outset, the convention was tainted by legal uncertainties and political hostilities. What should have been a moment of renewal became a theatre of exclusion, suspicion and vengeance — the perfect storm that finally shattered the last illusions of unity within the PDP.
At the peak of the confusion, the party hierarchy moved to expel some of its most powerful figures, including the Minister of the FCT and former Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike; the party’s National Secretary, Senator Samuel “Sam” Anyanwu; former Ekiti State governor, Ayodele Fayose; and former Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom. The leadership then dissolved party structures in Enugu, Abia, Imo, Rivers, and Akwa Ibom — a political earthquake that wiped out the very grassroots machinery that once made the PDP unbeatable in those states.
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Amid this political bloodletting, the courts issued conflicting judgments that further destabilised the convention. In Abuja, the Federal High Court halted the convention entirely, ruling that the party had violated its own procedures and must first accommodate an aggrieved aspirant excluded from the process. But in Oyo State, a separate court ruling appeared to favour the convention’s continuation, creating a legal minefield that the party leadership ignored at its peril. The contradictory judgments — one restraining, one permitting — became symbolic of the PDP’s larger crisis: a party so divided that even the judiciary reflected its internal fractures. Instead of pausing to clarify the legal confusion, the leadership barreled ahead, deepening the chaos now engulfing it.
Back at the convention venue, the expulsions were celebrated by some delegates as triumphs of discipline — but in reality, they were strategic amputations. The PDP did not merely remove troublesome members; it removed the political muscle, funding networks and electoral machinery that had sustained it for two decades. Wike, Anyanwu, Fayose and Ortom were not fringe actors — they were pillars. Breaking them was like removing the central beams of a building already under structural stress.
The consequences are dire. By dismantling state structures and alienating power blocs across the South-East and South-South — regions once considered unshakable PDP territories — the party has effectively gifted its opponents the political space they long coveted. In politics, organisational death rarely comes suddenly; it happens when a party loses its grassroots, loses its cohesion, and loses its credibility. The PDP is now dangerously close to that point.
In the end, this convention did not consolidate power — it annihilated it. What remains is a party drifting without authority, wounded by its own leaders and trapped in a web of legal, political and moral contradictions.
Unless a dramatic intervention occurs, historians may look back on this convention as the day the PDP finally destroyed itself.
Written by:
Chekwube Aniugo
