Andy Ezeani
Tuesday, December 9,2025
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) may be down and battered, but it apparently has not lost its sense of drama. That must be reckoned to the party as a mark of resilience.
The buffeting the party has received in the last ten years is enough to knock out even a champion. Of course, the PDP was once a champion.
In the wake of its 16 years of dominance as Nigeria’s pre-eminent political party, the PDP has largely lived in the region of shadow of death. It has been submerged more frequently in chaos than it has shown cohesion and purpose as an opposition party.
The body blows on the party have been manifestly devastating, raining from virtually all corners. Not the least of the sources of the party’s travails is the inordinate ambition of its prominent members, a malaise accentuated by the inability of the party leadership to rein in such excesses.
To worsen the lot of the party, its leadership over time has shown crass unfaithfulness to the laws and foundational principles on which the party was established.
Indeed, in the period since PDP lost its place as the ruling party, the big men within its fold have tended to believe that the only way to assert their strength was by trampling on the Party’s guiding regulations rather than promoting the supremacy of the party.
It was only a matter of time before the fight among the elephants in the house tore what remained of the already stretched umbrella that symbolically held up the roof over the party faithful.
On November 15/16 2025, at a contentious national convention in Ibadan, which the opposing faction insisted was not any convention, the party, or better still, the dominant section of it, decided to wield the big stick. After electing a new national chairman, the party proceeded to expel some of its chieftains spearheading a separate agenda that appeared to align more with the interest of the ruling All Progressives Congress than PDP’s role as an opposition party.
Not surprisingly, the expelled members included Samuel Anyanwu, erstwhile national secretary of the party and Nyesome Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, who is the leader of a malignant stub of the party, as well as Ayodele Fayose, former governor of Ekiti State and others.
Last week, PDP’s national leadership, in a further bid to instill order and assert its uncompromising stance on party discipline, cemented the sanction on its erring members with a creative act. It introduced a novel seal of finality on the expulsion of the identified errant members by formally issuing them a “Certificate of Expulsion”.
The concept of Certificate of Expulsion for dismissed party members is not only unprecedented in this clime, it appears to be designed to carry a stamp of odium, to serve as a deterrence to extreme misbehaviour by politicians.
While the weight and significance of the new certificate are indeterminate for now, there is no doubt about its intent. For whatever it is worth, the certificate is a creative idea that may yet lend itself to further exploration in the political realm.
The idea of a certificate of expulsion, a step below a certificate of dishonour, sounds appealing, not particularly with reference to the first batch of the recipients of the document at the PDP, but for the fundamental significance of the document on the crucial matter of party discipline.
For any recipient of the ignominious certificate, the unmistakable message seems to be; ‘take your talent for mischief elsewhere’.
Not since Moses, in the Old Testament account in the bible, reluctantly acceded to the Israelites the right for a man to issue his wife a certificate of divorce where necessary, has a certificate of severance of relationship appeared as definitive without intricate technicalities as the PDP certificate of expulsion to its erring members.
The Mosaic certificate of divorce, as was explained in the New Testament, reflected the hardness of heart of those who asked for it. That may not be the case with the PDP certificate of expulsion. From all indications, the basis for the latter is anchored on frustration.
If only the PDP could devise a way to extend its certificate of dishonour to the individuals who exploited its platform to win governorship election in the states, only to expropriate the mandate and bolt to a different political party. Such a reprehensible act of political rustling!
In its Certificate of Expulsion, the PDP may have introduced a concept that can, if properly developed, leave a salutary effect on Nigeria’s political system in the long run.
Think about it. Against the backdrop of the pervasive devastation that politicians without principle and conscience have brought upon Nigeria, a certificate of dishonour does not sound like a bad stamp on persons whose conduct undermine integrity and decency in public offices.
Brazenly taking the mandate won on one political party to another party without qualms deserves a certificate of dishonour. So does occupying a prime public office and surreptitiously sponsoring bandits and criminals to be wreaking havoc on the society. Or being publicly counted as a member of a political party while actually working for another.
Even if all that a certificate of dishonour carries is moral weight, the society will surely be better off with formally knowing the individuals whose conducts in the public realm were so repugnant and bereft of decency that their colleagues stamped them with a mark of disapproval.
Such a certificate may not prevent an opprobrious individual from being nominated, say, for an ambassador, but the burden of condoning indecency will then be that of the appointing authority.
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Benue bishops and the Reverend governor
The Catholic Church in Benue State is grappling with the pernicious influence of partisan politics on the affairs of the church. It is hardly heard that a Catholic priest counters the stance of a Catholic bishop, not publicly. However, what politics can not disrupt hardly exists. After USA President Donald Trump raised the issue of Christian genocide in Nigeria recently, the Catholic Bishop of Makurdi Diocese, Wilfred Anegbe, testified in the United States Congress confirming the genocidal attacks on Benue’s Christian communities. He even took a survivor along. One of his priests, Hyacinth Alia, now on sabbatical as APC governor of the state, however, took his political party’s line and declared that there was no such thing.
Over the weekend, a USA fact-finding team visited Benue and invited Bishop Anegbe, alongside his brother bishops, William Avenya of Gboko Catholic Diocese and Bishop Isaac Dugu of Katsina-Ala Diocese to meet with the delegation at Government House Makurdi. The bishops flatly declined to go there. The delegation reportedly shifted the meeting to the Diocesan Bishop’s House. The bishops may have asked the delegation to ask Alia of a place called Yelwata and what transpired there in mid-2025.
