A party that lost its fathers and found its chaos, by Stephanie Shaakaa

There was a time the PDP spoke and Nigeria listened. A time the party walked like a giant that owned every corridor of power and every inch of political imagination. There was a time getting a ticket meant you were waiting for your swearing in. But today, the PDP moves like a wounded animal limping, confused, snarling at its own reflection, unsure of which direction is forward. The crisis consuming the party did not start with the recent fights, court orders, and counter-orders. The decay began the moment Goodluck Ebele Jonathan lost his reelection bid in 2015 and quietly disappeared.

When a ruling party loses power, the immediate responsibility of the outgoing president is to become the father of the house. He holds the roof steady so that the rain of confusion does not destroy the structure. But Jonathan, instead of stepping into the role of custodian and rallying point, withdrew into the quiet of Otuoke as though he had never led the largest political party in Africa. As though he owed it no duty to reorganize, rebuild, or even console it. He abandoned the party like a newborn dropped at the gate of an orphanage.

A sitting president who just lost an election should be the one holding emergency meetings, calming factions, and re-anchoring the party. Instead, PDP leaders were left to roam like sheep without shepherd, each claiming authority, each building private empires. The PDP did not just lose power it lost its father. And when the head withdraws, the body begins to rot. That was the beginning of the party’s freefall.

And where was Olusegun Obasanjo in all this? The same Obasanjo who built the party brick by brick, who installed governors like a chess master placing pieces on a board, who wielded the PDP as both sword and shield? The elder statesman who should have stepped in as stabilizer, mediator, and guardian? He tore his membership card on live television and walked away. Since then he has drifted around the political landscape like a wandering spirit commenting on every problem except the one he birthed. If anyone should have summoned the elders and told them, This house must not collapse, it was Obasanjo. But he turned his back, claiming neutrality, while the house he built burned in slow motion.

There was a time when PDP did not just win elections, it swallowed them. The party was so powerful that its primary election felt more important than the national election itself. Today that same party cannot even conduct a meeting without police trucks waiting outside

And nothing exposed that collapse more brutally than the disgraceful chaos that erupted at Wadata Plaza. What happened there was not a conflict it was a spectacle, a national embarrassment, a carnival of political madness.

Before sunrise, rival factions began mobilizing. Not with ideas, not with strategy  but with thugs, muscle boys, touts armed with sticks, iron rods, and unrestrained anger. By mid-morning, Wadata Plaza had turned into a battlefield. Chants rose. Insults flew. Security men clashed. Men climbed over the fence like burglars. Doors were kicked open. Tear gas filled the air. Elderly party members choked and staggered out, holding their chests. A particular woman was hit so violently with a rod that the entire left side of her face collapsed into swelling and blood. Others were dragged on the floor. People ran. People screamed. Party officials hid inside offices as though inside bunkers.

And all this happened at the headquarters of a party that once boasted of being the biggest in Africa.

The PDP is like a mansion that once hosted kings but now leaks from every corner because nobody remembered to maintain the roof. When a house decays from inside, even strangers can smell it from the gate.

The shame was not just in the violence,it was in the symbolism. A party fighting itself with such brutality has no moral authority to fight anyone else. A party that cannot secure its own entrance cannot secure a nation. A party whose members need tear gas masks to attend meetings has no business asking Nigerians to trust it again.

And then the question Nigerians whispered but were too afraid to ask out loud, where did Nyesom Wike get the kind of security he came with? Who authorized that level of show of force? Who cleared the deployment? Who provided the vehicles, the men, the weapons? Wike did not wake up and command that kind of operation from his bedroom. Power backed him. The kind of power that does not come from a mere ministerial portfolio. The kind of power that gives you confidence to bring heavily armed security agents to a party secretariat as though invading hostile territory. The kind of power that tells you do what you want we will protect you.

Wike moves like a man who knows someone in Abuja will clean up behind him. Nobody brings that level of force into Wadata unless they are certain the consequences have already been cancelled.

And it wasn’t just security agents. He came with thugs. Hired muscles. Men paid to intimidate, beat, brutalize, and silence. PDP members were beaten in front of their own secretariat not by outsiders but by their own. This is not politics. This is the collapse of political culture. This is the rot that grows when a party has no father, no leader, no moral centre.

This is what happens when Jonathan retreats into silence. Jonathan did not just step aside. He left a vacuum so wide that ambition rushed in like floodwater.

This is what happens when Obasanjo abandons his house. This is what happens when elders sit on the fence. This is what happens when ambition becomes a disease.

Obasanjo built the house, locked the door, walked away with the key and then pretended he no longer recognized the building. The PDP is bleeding. And not lightly deeply, internally, from self-inflicted wounds. The party is now a house where every room is fighting another room. Governors against ex-governors. Chairmen against chairmen. Power blocs against themselves. Everyone wants to be king. No one wants to build the kingdom. Yet Nigeria desperately needs a credible opposition. Democracy collapses when government has no counterweight. A weak PDP is not good for APC. It is not good for Labour. It is not good for the country. When the main opposition party becomes a circus, governance becomes a one-man show. Power becomes reckless. Accountability sleeps.

If the PDP must survive, it must first admit its truth.This crisis is not about faction. It is about fatherlessness. Until the party confronts the vacuum created by its own abandoned leadership, it will continue to thrash in the dark. The collapse of PDP is not a mystery. It is a warning. A party without elders will always become a playground for thugs. A party without structure will always become a battlefield.

A party without truth will always die from the lies it tells itself. If PDP does not rebuild itself now honestly, boldly, and from the foundation history will remember it not as the party that once ruled Nigeria, but as the party that destroyed itself with its own hands.

In the end, the PDP is not dying because its enemies are strong, it is dying because those entrusted with its legacy chose cowardice when courage was required. Jonathan retreated when the party needed a spine. Obasanjo abandoned the very house he built. Wike has become a political wrecking ball backed by powers too timid to show their faces, and days at Wadata Plaza, the so-called largest party in Africa couldn’t even protect its own members from thugs, tear gas, and humiliation. What happened there was not just a crisis it was a confession. Because a party that cannot govern itself cannot govern a country. A nation cannot rise when its leaders refuse to stand. Where there is no discipline, democracy becomes theatre. And Nigeria deserves better than recycled chaos paraded as leadership.

Wadata Plaza used to be a symbol of power. It now looy like a crime scene with demarcated barb wires. Party members were running for safety in a building that once dictated the future of Nigeria.

When the biggest opposition party becomes a circus, the whole country becomes the audience. And every democracy where citizens become spectators instead of participants is already in trouble.

Criticism is patriotism. Truth is rescue. Silence is consent to decay. And if the PDP cannot confront its own rot, then history will write the verdict without sentiment,the party was not defeated by an election it was defeated by its own silence, its own ego, and its own refusal to choose country over clique. A party that cannot govern itself cannot govern Nigeria. Nigeria does not need perfect leaders. Nigeria needs present leaders. The PDP lost its way the moment its leaders chose to disappear when the house caught fire.

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