National Publicity Secretary of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Ini Ememobong, has sharply criticised what he describes as an increasingly “nepotistic” governance culture in Nigeria, arguing that the rush by state governors to “connect to the centre” undermines the nation’s democracy and development.
During a political discourse with ARISE NEWS on Friday, Ememobong said, “When you look at the reason for which most of the governors have said, they said, ‘let’s connect to the center.’ It presupposes that there are benefits that the system, the central system, is not running an egalitarian system. It’s running a nepotistic system where governance favors are dispensed on the basis of political partisanship. And that calls to question whether that is how we should run it.”
According to him, the narrative implies that states outside the ruling party are deliberately deprived of development opportunities.
“A political party primarily being a vehicle for the assessment of power becomes the ideology through which people who aspire to those offices should execute the mandates of the office. But you now see the situation where people just come to the public space and say, look, we are connecting to the center so that we can take benefits back home. The unsaid thing is that it means if you do not connect to the center, you don’t take things home. That is clearly undemocratic. That is clearly anti-development,” he said.
Ememobong argued that a proper federation should not function in a way that punishes political diversity or opposition. He said the current system incentivises partisanship over principle, and political survival over governance responsibility.
While speaking, he also suggested that the current wave of defections and political repositioning reveals a deeper moral crisis.
“In 1998 when we started politics, we didn’t have governors, we didn’t have senators, but we built all of this. And that is why we are going back now to say that where did we get it wrong? Remember also that even in 1999 to 2007, there were all pressures like this, but you found people who were able to stand their ground and to exert that, look, we belong to a political party. We can’t shift grounds like that. But maybe it speaks to the morality of the people we handed power to. It speaks to their inability to stand for what they believe in,” he said.
Ememobong further acknowledged the PDP’s own internal issues but insisted they cannot be viewed in isolation from external pressures exerted by the political centre.
Melissa Enoch
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