The PDP’s Week of Reckoning: Expulsions, Factions, and the Struggle for a Coherent Opposition

The Peoples Democratic Party entered the week determined to project renewal. Its convention in Ibadan was intended to symbolise a turning point — an attempt to restructure a party long weighed down by factionalism, internal incoherence, and an increasingly visible erosion of credibility. Governor Seyi Makinde, host of the gathering, articulated this aspiration plainly. He invoked the party’s founding ideals of democratic courage and national rescue, insisting that despite years of decline, the PDP’s “soul” remained intact through those who still believed in its mission. Yet even in this carefully calibrated address, the cracks were glaring. Makinde himself acknowledged what the past decade has made apparent: the dysfunction that has afflicted Nigeria’s political landscape has been mirrored, and in some respects magnified, within the PDP.

Rather than marking a moment of cohesion, the events surrounding the convention exposed the extent to which the party can no longer coordinate its basic processes. What should have been routine — assembling delegates to elect leaders — descended into a contest of competing authorities. Factions loyal to Nyesom Wike sought to halt the gathering through an Abuja High Court order obtained by former Jigawa governor Sule Lamido, whose exclusion from the contest for National Chairman the court found to violate the PDP’s own constitution. Makinde’s camp countered immediately with an Oyo court order authorising the convention to proceed. However, this legal scuffle was not a clash of principle, nor a debate over constitutionalism; it was simply a demonstration of a party operating without coherence. The inability to agree on whether a convention could even hold underscores the depth of disorganisation within the party’s structure.

Nonetheless, over 3,000 delegates converged on Ibadan amid simultaneous claims of legitimacy and illegitimacy. The absences were hard to ignore: governors Ademola Adeleke, Siminalayi Fubara and Agbu Kefas declined to attend, while four state chapters — Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Adamawa and Plateau — rejected the convention outright. Their objections were not ideological, or centered on national strategy, but on conditions specific to the party’s internal rivalries and suspicions of Makinde’s growing influence. In place of unity, the PDP demonstrated fragmentation: factions operating in open contradiction, each invoking legality to justify its own course of action.

The convention’s decision to expel several high-profile figures — Wike, Ayo Fayose, Dan Orbih and others — was, on the surface, intended to signal the reassertion of discipline. Yet it immediately triggered counter-claims and counter-expulsions. Abdulrahman Mohammed, himself among the expelled, dismissed the action as irrelevant and insisted he remained Acting National Chairman, having been installed by the Wike-aligned faction after suspending Umar Damagum and the entire National Working Committee. What one faction presented as discipline, another framed as nullity. In a matter of hours, the crisis had migrated from Ibadan to Abuja, where rival groups announced their own National Executive Council (NEC) and Board of Trustees (BoT) meetings, each insisting on institutional legitimacy.

The ensuing confrontation at the national secretariat — security personnel loyal to Makinde clashing with those aligned with Wike, teargas deployed around Wadata Plaza — represented a symbolic rock-bottom for a party historically central to Nigeria’s democratic architecture. It was evidence of a party in which institutional authority has dissolved to the point where physical control of the headquarters is treated as a determinant of legitimacy. In response to the initial expulsions, the Wike faction escalated matters further, purporting to expel Makinde, Bala Mohammed, Dauda Lawal, Bode George and even Kabiru Turaki, who had been elected National Chairman only days earlier.

It is important to recognise that the expulsions announced in Ibadan, especially of Wike and Fayose, arrived years after their political behaviour rendered them incompatible with party cohesion. Wike’s trajectory is well documented. Having led the G-5 rebellion against Atiku Abubakar’s 2023 presidential bid and accepting a ministerial position in an APC government while retaining PDP membership, he has publicly campaigned for Bola Tinubu’s second presidential term. He has also repeatedly challenged the party to discipline him, confident that his political weight and past financial contributions will shield him from any repercussions. His public glee at the news of the defection of Delta’s entire PDP structure to the APC further illustrated a posture of impunity. Fayose, for his part, openly supported APC governor Biodun Oyebanji in Ekiti, praised him publicly, and allegedly filed multiple suits aimed at undermining the PDP’s caretaker committee. Both men operated for years with little consequence, reinforcing a culture in which anti-party activity became routine rather than exceptional.

There is a stark contrast between the PDP’s repeated leniency toward internal insubordination and the decisiveness with which the APC has addressed similar disturbances. In 2020, the ruling party suspended Ekiti governor Kayode Fayemi within days of allegations that he aided the PDP in Oyo and fraternised with Femi Fani-Kayode ahead of the Edo election. The suspension was immediate, firm, and politically strategic. The PDP, by contrast, allowed internal sabotage to thrive unchecked, thereby emboldening a wave of defections, culminating in the loss of the Delta State structure — a development that would have been unthinkable during the party’s dominant years.

This crisis is not simply the product of recent developments but the outcome of a slow disintegration that began around the PDP’s loss in the 2015 presidential election and intensified with Atiku Abubakar’s successive presidential pursuits, which the party proved unable to manage effectively. The breach of its own zoning principle in 2023, which prompted the G-5 revolt, was merely one of several moments when the PDP abandoned the internal mechanisms that had once stabilised it. The defection of Peter Obi, Atiku’s own subsequent departure to the ADC, and the general drift of prominent members to the APC all weakened the party’s institutional fabric. Over time, the PDP has ceased to operate as a coherent opposition and has instead become a vehicle for individual calculations, temporary alliances and competing personal empires.

This week’s expulsions, just like the party’s recent zoning of the 2027 presidential ticket to the South represents an attempt to reclaim order and restore credibility. Yet these attempts carry the unmistakable quality of actions taken under duress — reactive rather than strategic, designed to demonstrate vitality in the face of visible decline. The result is a party that appears to be fighting itself at the precise moment when political logic demands clarity, discipline, and a unified posture ahead of 2027.

Nigeria’s opposition landscape has hardly been any weaker than it currently is. A party founded by the 34 First Republic and Second Republic politicians to counter authoritarian rule has now become entangled in its own inability to enforce rules, maintain structure or articulate an alternative national vision. The urgency of its self-repair is evident, but the methods deployed — parallel conventions, reciprocal expulsions, physical confrontations — only underscore the profound institutional decay at its core. What unfolded this week was intended as a reclaiming of purpose. Instead, it has revealed a party fractured to its foundations, struggling not merely to oppose the ruling party but to remain recognisably whole.