A Nunc Dimittis for PDP

By Andrew Agbese

PDP has seen good days. The once self acclaimed largest party in Africa is currently not in good shape. Its halcyon days were when it was in power between 1999 to 2015.
It is trying hard to come back to life but the efforts have not been reassuring. All one can see is a circumambulation that merely skirts around the issues.
The efforts are what the Hausa call kwaskwarima, a mere superficial gesture meant to give a false impression but not to address the issues. Ngrrr as the Gen Zs would call it.
Party members aspiring for elective offices are speedily working on plan Bs.
Governors who won their elections using the party’s platform are now ashamed to identify with it during the day.
Those that benefited from the party are deliberately and unashamedly doing everything to bring it down for their selfish interests.
Members are leaving in droves trying to find alternative platforms before the entire building would collapse.
Rather than the umbriferous abode its symbol projected, it is now a kenopsia, or a deserted village as the poet Oliver Goldsmith would describe it.
Come to think of it, the PDP predicament is aptly captured in the following verses by Goldsmith in the poem The Deserted Village:

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green:
One only master grasps the whole domain