By Stephanie Shaakaa

The tragedy of the PDP did not begin with internal wrangling, it began the moment Goodluck Ebele Jonathan lost his reelection bid and quietly folded himself back into private life as though he had never been president, never been the de facto leader of the largest political party in Africa, never been entrusted with holding the party’s centre together. When a sitting president loses an election, the party is supposed to rally, reorganize, re-strategize, and rebuild around him. He becomes the father of the house, the anchor, the rallying point, the moral authority that steadies the ship. Instead, Jonathan slipped back into his cocoon, retreating into silence, leaving the PDP to float like an orphaned child whose parents abandoned it at midnight.

It is one of the most consequential acts of political withdrawal Nigeria has ever seen. Because when the head steps back, the body begins to rot. And the PDP began to rot from that moment. Governors began to act like mini-presidents. Factions emerged like mushrooms after rain. Power blocs suddenly became kingdoms. The party lost not only the Presidency but its centre of gravity. A house without a roof will eventually become a ruin. Jonathan’s absence created a vacuum that swallowed the party whole.

Jonathan did not just step aside. He left a vacuum so wide that ambition rushed in like floodwater.

But perhaps even more shocking is the role of Olusegun Obasanjo. A man who built the PDP with the authority of a field marshal and the swagger of a political lion. A man who once summoned governors with a raised eyebrow, who controlled the party machinery with the precision of a general and the ruthlessness of a master tactician. A man who, because he had reached the highest political peak and would never contest again, should have been the stabilising elder statesman, the patriarch who calls the children to order whenever their fighting becomes disgraceful.

But what did he do? He tore his party card in public, washed his hands like Pontius Pilate, pretended neutrality, and has since floated around Nigerian politics like a wandering prophet who enters every house but belongs to none. His silence on the PDP’s decay has been as loud as thunder. His refusal to intervene has been interpreted as an endorsement of chaos. One wonders what political affiliation Obasanjo even claims today, because the PDP he helped build is on fire, and Baba is somewhere analysing Africa’s problems while his own political home crumbles like old bread.

Obasanjo built the house, locked the door, walked away with the key and then pretended he no longer recognized the building.

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 then came the Wadata Plaza disgrace. A scene that should never happen in a serious political party but unfolded before the country like a Nollywood film directed by confusion. Two rival factions storming the national secretariat, each claiming legitimacy, each backed by different governors, elders, moneybags, and ambitions. Security men shoving party members. Loyalists hurling insults. Some climbing over barricades. Chairs flying. Placards raised. Threats exchanged. A building meant to symbolize unity turned into a battleground of broken pride and collapsing dignity.

It was a shameful, shameful display of the highest political decadence. A public strip-tease of dysfunction. A family fight taken to the marketplace. The kind of spectacle that tells the world that this party, once mighty, can no longer even control its own front gate. When a party cannot hold a meeting without summoning police intervention, how can it dream of holding a nation together? When factions drag legitimacy like two people dragging a goat in opposite directions, what future is left?

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 Wadata incident was the loudest confirmation that the PDP is not just divided. It is fractured in its soul. It is bleeding from wounds inflicted by ego, betrayal, selfishness, and absence of leadership. It is a party where godfathers fight godsons, where governors undermine chairmen, where chairmen undermine candidates, where candidates undermine structures, and where the structures themselves are termites eating the foundation from inside.

Wadata Plaza used to be a symbol of power. Yesterday it looked like a crime scene. Party members were running for safety in a building that once dictated the future of Nigeria.

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.

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.

And all of this traces back to leadership abandonment. Jonathan abandoned the centre. Obasanjo abandoned the legacy. The elders abandoned their duty. And the party is now a wandering ship tossed on the waves of ambition without a captain.

A party that cannot govern itself has no business dreaming of governing a country.

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.

Shaakaa writes from shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com