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Barring any last minute change in plans, by Tuesday October 14, 2025, Peter Mbah, the governor of Enugu state and the last Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governor in the South East geopolitical zone, would have been received into the All Progressives Congress (APC) by the leadership of the ruling party. In moving into the APC, Governor Mbah is expected to move with the entire party and elective structure of the PDP, including state, local government and ward executives, elected local government chairmen along with their councillors, members of the state executive council, friends, associates and whoever of note left in the PDP in the state. To put it simply, the Enugu house of PDP has collapsed with its constituents emptied into the APC.
But the ripple effect of this collapse is going to go beyond the boundaries of Enugu across the entire South East region. Interestingly, the South East region was the birthplace of the PDP in 1998 and, for 24 years since the transition from military to civil rule in 1999, remained the party’s most consistently loyal support base. Founded by Alex Ekwueme, a former Vice President and prominent son of the South East, the region has been the home of the PDP as a ruling party and especially when the party fell into opposition in 2015 after 16 years in power. As a matter of truth, the South East zone, which is home to the Igbo people, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, provided the oxygen that kept the PDP alive since 2015, when it fell from power.
However, by 2023, everything changed, when the PDP betrayed its most loyal and consistent support base. Against wise counsel, common sense and appeal to the moral conscience of the managers of the party on the need to uphold the principles of equity, fairness and inclusion in deciding its presidential candidate, the PDP decided to jettison the age-long zoning and rotation arrangement that has oscillated presidential power between the North and South since independence in 1960. The zoning and rotation arrangement of political power is actually in furtherance of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, in section 14[3] of the 1999 Constitution, which states: “The COMPOSITION of the Government of the Federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs SHALL be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few States or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that Government or in any of its agencies.”
So, after eight years of power in the North since 2015, it was expected that major political parties such as the PDP should be working for the emergence of a Nigerian President of southern extraction. But this was not to be, as the inconsiderate northern wing of the PDP, led by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State and some of their sheepish southern sidekicks worked surreptitiously to undermine the South to produce a northern presidential candidate, going into the 2023 presidential election. I had warned on this page about the grave mistake it would be for the PDP to jettison zoning in a piece titled “That PDP May Not Sail Against the Wind in 2023.” In that piece that has proved quite prophetic I cautioned the PDP thus: “That the PDP may not sail against the strong wind of presidency that is blowing South will be for the party to field a southern candidate as its presidential candidate in the 2023 presidential election. For the PDP, 2023 presidential election is not just about ‘winnability’ but actual survival. While the APC is dominant in the North and the PDP’s strongest support base is in the South, the move by the APC to field a southern candidate in the 2023 presidential election will torpedo the PDP from the region, if the party fields a northern candidate. And if the PDP goes ahead to sail against the wind in 2023 by fielding a northern candidate, the ship of the party will capsize, sink into oblivion, as the party will lose in the North and in the South to the APC and go into extinction in post-Buhari Nigeria.”
As it turned out, the PDP sailed against the wind by fielding Atiku, a decision that proved fatal, as the ship of the party ran into troubled waters and is gradually sinking into oblivion. Unfortunately, when Atiku’s inordinate ambition happened to the PDP, it developed two problems; one was benign [Peter Obi] and the other malignant [Nyesom Wike]. As the 2023 presidential election approached, the PDP was blessed by the emergence of a very popular political figure from the South East whose popularity spread across the country like wild summer fire. This political figure was Peter Obi. He was the southern equivalent of northern Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari. And because, of the three geo-political zones in the southern part of Nigeria, only the South East was yet to produce the President of Nigeria, Obi ticked all the boxes.
On why the PDP should have zeroed down on Peter Obi, in an article titled “Peter Obi: Putting PDP’s Best Foot Forward,” I had this to say: “The consequences of not presenting Peter Obi, a candidate that many Nigerians consider PDP’s best option, will be unpalatable in many ways. If the PDP picks a candidate from the North, it will lose its southern support base and also lose in the North against a stronger APC in the region and go into oblivion. If it picks any other heavy-spending southern candidate from the South other than Peter Obi, the PDP will come across as joke of a party that is irredeemably corrupt and not different from APC.
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But if the party picks Peter Obi as its flag-bearer, he will in the least lead the PDP to victory in its traditional stronghold of the South East, South-South, parts of the South West and the Middle Belt areas in the North, enough to remain relevant in post-Buhari Nigeria. And it is better to lose gracefully with a decent and upright Peter Obi than to lose disgracefully with a bullish clown and a corrupt money spender.”
As predicted, when Peter Obi left the PDP to LP, he appropriated the party’s traditional stronghold in the South East, South-South, Lagos and the Middle Belt.
While the PDP’s benign problem that was Peter Obi decimated its electoral fortunes, its malignant Wike problem appears to have sent the party on the final throes of death. If Atiku’s ambition killed the PDP, Wike’s fury is conducting its final rites of passage by giving the party a most indecent burial. And I have always maintained that Wike is within his right to exert revenge on a party that betrayed him and his region. Wike, former governor of Rivers State, in the South-South, is a foundation member of the PDP, who rose through the ranks to emerge as the strongman of Nigerian opposition when the party fell from power in 2015. It was Wike who rallied whatever was left of the PDP between 2015 and 2019 and helped nurse the party back to national reckoning. In 2019, the PDP’s southern dominated leadership of the party ceded the presidential candidacy to the North and Wike worked extra hard for the emergence of Aminu Waziri Tambuwal as the PDP flag-bearer. But when Atiku defeated him to emerge as PDP’s presidential candidate, Wike made the single most significant contribution to Atiku’s electioneering war chest, including delivering more votes to him from Rivers state than he got from his home state of Adamawa.
Sadly, in a locus classicus case of political betrayal of a kind never before seen in Nigeria’s history, Tambuwal teamed up with Atiku to deny Wike victory at the PDP primary, ahead of the 2023 presidential election. As hell hath no fury like a Wike betrayed, the PDP has lost sleep ever since. Wike and his group of five other PDP governors would go on to work against Atiku, who was eventually defeated by Ahmed Bola Tinubu of the APC.
Although appointed FCT minister as a reward for his revolt against PDP, Wike remains a member of the party and is doing everything possible to destabilize it from within ahead of the 2027 presidential election. Therefore, with the intractable problems in the PDP, a second term-seeking governor like Peter Mbah has taken a pragmatic step to ditch a sinking ship before it is too late. In the coming days, more PDP governors will follow Mbah’s pragmatic example.
