Two men slugging it out naked in the market place. Amusing? No. It is tragic. And it is truly the failure of leadership.

President Goodluck Jonathan and former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar are aspirants to the much-coveted Aso Rock throne. They are both members of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP. Each man’s victory in the 2011 polls would be the party’s victory – and a re-affirmation of its divine imprimatur to rule us for sixty years; after which, tired and exhausted from doing nothing memorable and burdened by the naked appropriation of our common weal, it will let the country be. So, a personal loss for either man as the presidential candidate of the party would be painful to each man, yes, but not tragic for the party.

Yet, see what is going on. A political war, the likes of which this country has never seen in its history. We are witnessing the dirtiest political campaign in the history of our country. Jonathan and Abubakar’s foot soldiers, armed with inexhaustible supply of mud and dirty underpants, are enthusiastically and feverishly and determinedly fighting a war of a mutually assured destruction in and outside the media, print and electronic.

 Politics is a dirty game and it is a war of sorts in our country but never have two aspirants from the same political party fought so dirty, so mindlessly and so mutually destructive. This is not a mark of our political maturity or progress. It is the mark of desperation that ignores the fact this country is on the precipice and these two men can, given their desperation for the throne, tip it over. It is silly to intone that this is not our portion in Jesus name.

All wars have direct and collateral damage. One man will lose in this war but we all, despite our pretence to the contrary, will suffer the collateral damage, if not now, then tomorrow. And yet, there is no one with enough clout and respected enough and objective enough in the party to appreciate the urgency of imposing order on the two men and their highly-paid foot soldiers. The more dirt the foot soldiers dig up in the back yard of the opposing camp, the more their bank managers appreciate their new social status and the less the country gains from a campaign that offers it nothing and promises it nothing but absolutely nothing.

The PDP has never offered us much in terms of national leadership. It is a shamelessly lawless party without respect for its own constitution, let alone the constitution of the country. In more than eleven and half years in power, the PDP has turned itself into an atomistic party in perpetual conflict with itself. It is polarised into enemy camps at the centre, the states and the local governments. Even its national chairman, Okwesilieze Nwodo, once its national secretary, needed the intervention of the local chiefs in his state, Enugu, to be accepted by the party there. The helpless man speaks helplessly from both sides of his mouth on any and all issues. He is tossed between the factions in his party. Don’t laugh. If you think this is funny, you are wrong. Our fate and the fate of our country are in the hands of a party that cannot find a common voice in anything. It stands only for power without responsibility. With the party enmeshed in its internal crises at all levels, it is little wonder that this lumbering giant of a country is but a joke.

We should not gloss over the true tragedy that we face here. We are less than four months to the 2011 general elections, our fourth consecutive elections since independence. These elections, in countries where the aberration is not the norm, should be our best because in the first three, we made mistakes and hopefully learned from them. Yet, here are the unsettling facts. We do not have the enabling law for the elections. The amendments to the amendments in the electoral act are dancing in the wind in the national assembly, an assembly controlled entirely by the PDP.

Much of the time spent on the amendments by the law-makers was really spent dancing to the manipulation by the various factions of the PDP, each seeking to use them to gain the upper hand in the only struggle that matters – the struggle to keep Nigerians divided, fooled and deprived. Did the party not smuggle the strange clause that would automatically make federal legislators members of the executive committees of their parties into the electoral act amendment and thus tried to impose on the nation what is essentially the business of each political party? That it pitted the governors against the legislators is proof positive that this was not a clause for our good and the good governance of our country but the ugly face of the endemic struggle for supremacy within the party.

With less than four months to go, there are no candidates for the various elective offices. We only have a parade of aspirants. Surprised? You should not be. We, the people, have been progressively marginalised since the 2003 elections. Our right to elect our leaders has been steadily and surely eroded, thanks to the manipulation of the system by the PDP. Tony Anenih, the high priest of political manipulations, said then there were no vacancies in Aso Rock and the government houses in the states. It was so. Now, he has said there are no vacancies. Those who still think that we are spending N87 billion to clear the path towards free, fair and credible elections next year should not be denied their right to their naïvety. Anenih has spoken.

Perhaps, we should look on the bright side of this mud-slinging between Jonathan and Atiku. The news media gain from it. The foot soldiers gain from it. The PDP factions gain from it. And it is the only evidence the world has that the government of the few bereft of mutually beneficial ideas for national progress by the confused few for the venal few shall not perish from the face of our country.

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