Ndigbo and PDP: Blast of Truth from 1999 and 2023

Ernie Onwumere

It is commonly asserted in elite public discourse that opinion is free, but facts are sacred. This piece is the expression of an opinion anchored on the sanctity of truth. There is the truth about Jos ‘99, the lie told against Jim Nwobodo, and the road Ndigbo refused to walk in 2023.

I was in the room where the truth began to unravel. In 1998, I served as Media Strategy Manager for Dr. Alex Ekwueme’s presidential campaign, working under the Director of Media and Publicity of ALEPCO, Prince Tony Momoh. I was at the PDP National Convention in Jos on the 14th and 15th of February, 1999. I speak, read and write Hausa. I say this at the outset because what follows here is not hearsay, and because a half-truth has been allowed to grow legs and walk among Ndigbo for far too long.

Let us begin with the context that the storytellers always leave out. By the time the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) gathered in Jos, the military had already made up its mind.

Chief Olusegun Obasanjo had just been released from prison, granted a state pardon, and had held private meetings with President Abdulsalami Abubakar and General Ibrahim Babangida. He was the man the soldiers had chosen to succeed them. Jos was not really an election; it was a formality dressed in the robes of democracy.

The statistics told its own story at the primary. Chief Obasanjo polled 1,658 votes. Dr. Ekwueme took 521. Alhaji Abubakar Rimi managed 195. Chief Jim Nwobodo scored 47. Mr. Francis Ellah had 16, Chief Don Etiebet 11, and Dr. Olabode Olajumoke 5. Read those numbers again. Even if Ekwueme and Nwobodo had stood aside and pooled every vote they commanded behind a single challenger, the outcome would not have shifted by a single delegate. The race was decided before the ballots were counted, and it was decided somewhere far from the campaign podium.

But how did the military’s preference prove itself? Openly, in the general election that followed. President Obasanjo lost his polling booth. He lost his ward. He lost his local government. He lost his state, both at the governorship and at the presidential level, to the Alliance for Democracy. And yet he was elected President of Nigeria. Why? It is because the military men who had ruled us for fifteen years saw in him the leader they could trust with the keys.

What played out in 1999 was captured perfectly by Barr. J.S.P. Nwokolo in his now famous ‘Ekechago nku Ukwa’, meaning the breadfruit has already been shared behind closed doors before the villagers arrive. By the time the crowd filed in, the portions had been apportioned and the plates cleared.

Which brings me to the lie.

It is being said, quietly in some places and loudly in others, that Chief Jim Nwobodo spoke in Hausa at the Jos convention against Dr. Ekwueme, or against the Igbo interest. That is not true, and I can say so with authority because I understood every word he uttered. The video of the convention speeches still exists; anyone who wishes to test this claim may go and watch it.

What Jim Nwobodo did was speak in Hausa, but not for any candidate and not against any candidate. He spoke in Hausa to canvas for his own votes. He did not attack Dr. Ekwueme. He did not de-market anybody. He promoted himself, which is precisely what every politician who mounts a podium at a convention is there to do. To convert that into a charge of betrayal is not history; it is sheer mischief, and it is the kind of mischief that costs a people their clarity at the very moment they need it most.

So, if Jim Nwobodo is not the culprit, who is?

Of course, it is not the man who spoke Hausa to ask for votes in 1999. The men to blame are our own brothers in the PDP who, 25 years later, sold the future of the South East for a plate of porridge. They are the ones who should carry this burden, and they know it.

Let’s ponder what was placed in their hands. After eight years of Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner, the expectation across the length and breadth of Nigeria was that the presidency would return to the South. Within the South, the South East had waited the longest and had given the most to the PDP without ever being rewarded with the ticket. The party’s constitution and its unwritten conventions recognised zoning between North and South as the glue that held it together.

In 2022, the party set up a thirty-seven-man zoning committee under Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, ostensibly to formalise what everybody already knew. Instead, the committee recommended that the ticket be thrown open, pleading the exigency of time and the virtue of merit. In plain language, the PDP told the South East that its turn did not matter. NEC ratified it. Zoning died at the source, and with zoning dead, the field was flooded with northern aspirants who had the structure and the money to dominate a primary. Atiku Abubakar, a man of means who had run several times before, walked through the open gate.

But here is the part our people dislike hearing. An injustice is not the same thing as a defeat, and the South East was not only wronged; it was careless. Going into that contest, the PDP’s strongest hold in the entire country was the South East: three governors, thirteen senators, more than thirty members of the House of Representatives, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and a mass of party members.

That is not a begging bowl. That is a bloc capable of dictating terms to any candidate who wanted the nomination. It was never deployed as one.

Peter Obi was the strongest South East contender and the only one with genuine national appeal, and he lost the prize in three ways. First, he waited too long to act decisively inside the party. He remained in the PDP until late May 2022, mere weeks before the primaries, by which time the zoning battle had already been lost and the northern bloc had consolidated behind Atiku. Had Obi campaigned earlier and louder for zoning, he could have forced the party’s hand or split the southern bloc before it was too late. Instead, he was seen as passive while the decision was being made around him.

Second, Obi never coordinated the South East into an unbreakable front. The region’s governors, legislators and delegates were divided; some leaned towards Atiku, others hedged, and nobody welded them together. A united South East, with five governors and a solid delegate base, would have been far harder to ignore even in an open contest.

Third, when the fight grew hard, Obi walked out. He resigned from the PDP and moved to the Labour Party, gaining a national platform and a movement, but surrendering the party structure in the process. Inside the PDP, he retained no ability to influence delegates, negotiate, or fight to the last round. The party read his exit as surrender, and parties always do.

Others simply jumped ship. Dave Umahi saw the gang-up and left the PDP. Professor Chukwuma Soludo, for his part, was never part of the PDP at all. Meanwhile, our governors in the South East, men like Okezie Ikpeazu and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, endorsed the current Minister of FCT Nyesom Wike. In that circumstance, the role Wike played in trying to stop Atiku was politically correct, and it is a lesson our people would do well to emulate rather than condemn.

The tragedy is that the South East could not hold a line even when holding it served its own interest. Millions of voters followed Peter Obi out of the party, the PDP lost the South East to the Labour Party, and it lost the presidency to the APC. A party that had the numbers, the history, and the moral argument to produce a president of South East extraction chose short-term calculation over long-term trust. It deserved what it got.

And what of the man who actually won? Love or loathe him, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu offers something uncomfortable to learn. In the build-up to the APC primary, the ticket was thrown open, like the same open field that swallowed the PDP. But Tinubu did not sit and wait for consensus, and he did not petition anybody for fairness. As a master strategist, he bulldozed his way through, declared his ‘Emilokan’ (it’s my turn) mantra, and went further than anyone thought prudent by running a Muslim-Muslim ticket. He fought his political battle and he emerged, despite every effort to push him down. Whatever one thinks of him today, his method is instructive.

That is the lesson of Jos ‘99 and of 2023 alike. Power is not given. It is taken. The breadfruit is shared before the villagers arrive, and the only defence against that ancient arrangement is to be seated at the table early, in one voice, with the appetite to eat.

Thus, the half-truth told against the Igbo about Jos ‘99 cannot hold. But neither can we hide behind it. Chief Jim Nwobodo was not our saboteur. Our saboteurs sat in our own caucus, and they wore our own Igbo names. That is the plain truth, period.

Ernie Onwumere, a brand communication consultant writes from Ikeja