Some truths don’t need to fight. They only need ears willing to listen. Yet in a time when comfort has become more sacred than clarity, the People’s Democratic Party would rather shield its illusions than confront reality.
We see it everywhere. The PDP’s recidivist pattern of defying its own constitutive rules. The recidivist disregard for court orders it refuses to honour. The recidivist resistance to accountability because accountability means admitting systemic failure. The PDP cycles through the same violations, returns to the same lawlessness, and expects a nation to simply accept its contempt.
Truth and justice demand courage. Courage to question what the party was meant to stand for. Courage to challenge what the party has become. Courage to let evidence reshape the nation’s convictions about an institution grown corrupt. The PDP lacks this courage. Instead, it chooses the familiar prison of its own making, dragging Nigeria down with it.
Here are a few reminders for a nation watching a party disintegrate through recidivism:
The hardest battle isn’t against ignorance. It’s against the PDP’s recidivist unwillingness to learn, unlearn, and reform. Ignorance can be cured with information. Willful lawlessness cannot.
The PDP’s recidivism is the choice to return to what failed and what the courts have already condemned.
Justice must interrogate facts. Truth must influence institutions. One without the other is merely corruption dressed in the language of democracy. The PDP mistakes repetition of violations for political power.
Too many defend institutions not because they serve justice, but because they are comfortable with the power they hold. Comfort is the enemy of reform. Accountability is the grave of entrenched corruption.
The PDP chooses the comfort of defiance over the discomfort of obedience to its own laws and the courts that guard them.
Progress begins the moment we ask ourselves a difficult question: What do we stand to gain if the PDP continues to refuse its own rules and mock court orders? And more importantly: What are we willing to sacrifice to prevent becoming a nation where law means nothing?
The law must punish PDP recidivism as a safeguard for democracy. An institution that repeatedly defies its own constitution, that ignores court orders it is bound to obey, that cycles through violations with impunity, threatens the foundation of the state itself.
Justice demands accountability. Democracy requires protection. When the PDP returns again and again to contempt of court and breach of its own rules, the law must intervene not out of political vendetta, but out of institutional necessity.
To allow this recidivist pattern to continue unchecked is to betray every Nigerian who looks to the courts and constitutional order for protection. Penalties, sanctions, and enforcement are not persecution. They are the law defending itself against an institution that refuses to be bound by it.
You can awaken the reformist, but never the recidivist pretending to care. There is a difference between a party that errs and corrects itself, and a party that errs, is ordered to correct itself by courts, and then refuses.
The PDP doesn’t simply refuse to reform. It actively returns to violations it has already been condemned for, cycling through the same patterns of defiance and constitutional breach.
Some people fear being wrong. But the PDP doesn’t fear being wrong. It fears being held accountable. The shame of a court judgment cuts deeper than the quiet sting of private error. So the PDP retreats into recidivism, returning to familiar violations because at least those territories are known.
There is no greater betrayal of democracy than the refusal to obey the law. Weakness is circumstance. Refusal is choice. The PDP’s recidivist defiance of court orders is a deliberate choice to place itself above the law it once claimed to represent.
Sometimes wisdom means isolating institutions in their lawlessness. Not out of malice or political conquest, but out of necessity. Not every political party that has lost its way can be reformed. Not every recidivist institution deserves a second chance when it has already rejected the first. Some must exhaust themselves against the consequences of their own defiance until they have no choice but to comply or collapse.
Truth does not shout. The courts have already spoken. The orders have already been issued. The constitution has already been written. But the PDP will never hear it, because it has stopped listening to anything but the echo of its own recidivism.
And when an institution refuses to listen to law itself, the law must speak in the only language recidivists understand: consequence.
Otunba Segun Showunmi
Convener The Alternative Movement
PDP Stakeholder.
