THINKING ALOUD With MUKA POPOOLA The Amode Runaway Gang And 20 True Members Remaining In Lagos PDP

About a week ago, Hakeem Amode, incumbent State Publicity Secretary of our party, followed the cowardly path of otherwise visible members of PDP who have been poached by the ruling APC across the country in the recent times.

Two other noticeable figures in the Amode gang of defectors from the Lagos PDP are Alhaja Safu Layode, a two-time deputy governorship candidate of our party, and Mr. Ola Apena, who's an old-time APC adventurer as he's returning to the ruling party for the second time.

Please mark the description "noticeable" as different from *notable*. All other persons paraded in the viral video of their decamping ceremony, where APC returnee 2023 Governorship candidate of the Lagos PDP, Abdul-Azeez Olajide-Adediran a k.a Jandor received them are a bunch of unknown articles.

Amode's exit instantly provoked a rash of critical reactions. Perhaps, not necessarily because he potted to the rival APC but because of a somehow weird and obviously fallacious statement he made at the ceremony.

Jandor's comments are of no consequence here now as he only repeated, like someone stuck in a loop, same things he had said over and over again to justify his actions while he was briefly in the PDP and his eventual decision to return to his natural roots.

In his speech, Amode claimed that he and his runaway gang had collapsed the entire structures of the Lagos PDP as they were dumping the party. 

Amode had made the misleading statement deliberately to achieve two purposes. One was to further dent the image of our party and unsettle the rest of the members, the other was obviously intended to hoodwink their new leaders in APC, suggesting that the new decampees were influential leaders with huge following in the Lagos PDP that they had just dumped. What Amode missed, however, is that more astute and intelligent political players have a way of validating such a cheeky lie. 

Will the APC leaders not see eventually that the rest of the PDP structures that they claimed to have collapsed has remained intact since their defection? Will the APC leaders across their various LGA and Ward structures not realise later that your so-called followers from the PDP are mere ghosts that they couldn't see? So, for me such an empty grandstanding is nothing to bother about. 

However, that statement expectedly enraged a lot of our members who found it as not just a lie told only to bolster their littleness in the eyes of their new leaders but the nocuous effect it could have on the public perception of the Lagos PDP. And truth be told, our party's perception and public rating had been shrinking in the eyes of the Lagos people over the years, basically for different pernicious and baleful reasons that are largely our own doing.

With the exit of the Amode gang I have taken time to reflect on the reactions that poured out from all angles. From the official statements made by the State Chairman, Hon. Phillips Aivoji, State Secretary Hon. Soji Orioye, his other colleagues in the state leadership and several concerned members, all I could see was everyone debunking Amode's statement and throwing his lie back at his face. 

Amode's statement was clearly illusory and distasteful but our responses so far has not addressed the core issues that could make another Amode who may be decamping tomorrow to mock us again. 

Our responses to Amode's statement has not been about the truly distressful situation that is chasing the fickle minded ones into the APC. Not about broken relationships among our leaders and members alike. Not about what we're doing to arrest the discouraging trajectory of our political misfortunes and break the decades-long jinx of electoral failures. Not about what we should be doing to collectively build the Lagos PDP platform that we can be proud of.

But I could see something broader than just the Amode gang leaving us, which is the effect on the battered sensibility of our members and their emotional connection to the party. 

To our members who detest Amode gang's defection I got your back too. For me I believe that any privileged members, especially in the status of someone like Amode and the like, who run away from the troubles of the Lagos PDP with their eyes to go lick from the rich pot of soup prepared in the APC, is not only cowardly, they are cheap creatures driven only by lustful desires.

What best illustrates our collective hypocrisy about Amode's statement and the reality of our lives as Lagos PDP members is how so much the party has been decimated. How many members do we have in the party today? 

It's a salient question that deserves being frankly considered if we would sincerely chart a good path forward and progressive for our party in the state.

If a census of the membership of Lagos PDP were to be conducted today I bet it would be effortlessly done. In a fleeting second as batting of the eyelid or thumping one's nose, we can count who the true members are.

With the unarrested manner in which our party has been depleted over the past years and the wave of defections that we've been seeing of recent, we do not seem to have more than 20 true members currently in Lagos PDP, figuratively representing that we don't have more than one patriotic and committed member in any local government.

That singular lover and patriotic member of Lagos PDP is you. Yes, you!

It sounds fallacious, isn't it? I'll explain.

In any local government, you could rarely find a situation where members are working with unity of purpose. Each person is suspicious of the other's loyalty and commitment to the party. You could only find at least one person who genuinely believes he loves the PDP, and that he loves our party more than everyone else.

Today, the friendship among leaders and members of Lagos PDP is like the war between Russia and Ukraine. 

To the extent that relationships have been damaged among our members, it is hard to beat our chest that we truly have a party.

What we need to do is to quickly fix our broken relationships. Without that, leaders will continue to play vindictive politics against one another and their followers in the different factions will remain individualistic; without a spirit of unity, without consensus building mentality and without synergy to work together for the progress of the party.

We all associate with one leader or the other, please it's time you told your leader to drop their guns and come together to work for a reinvigorated Lagos PDP. The leaders and everyone of us should know that where there's no peace there can be no progress.

That's all the challenge that Amode's mockery of the Lagos PDP has thrown at us as people who still believe in the party. Let's work on it now.

©MUKA POPOOLA

Senior member, Agege PDP