Opposition not a death sentence – Bode George

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A former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Chief Bode George, says being in the opposition is not a death sentence.

The PDP leader said this while delivering a paper titled, “Leadership, Change and National Continuity,” at a public lecture organised by the Minerva Philosophical Association in Lagos on Wednesday.

George, who returned to Nigeria recently, after spending five consecutive months in the United Kingdom, said he had enough time to reflect on Nigerian politics and understand things from a fresh perspective.

He said there was a general misconception in Nigeria that the job of the opposition is to bring down the government in power and it was this sense of distrust that caused immature politics.

George said politics could only engender development when the two opposing forces were able to fuse and birth positive realities.

He said, “Once an election has been won and lost, once a new leadership enters the fray, the greater good of the nation must then be the driving force of all contending ideologies. Debates will never stop. The contest of ideas, the storm and tempest of ideological differences must now be articulated in a new patriotic frame and national balance.

“I do not say the opposition should roll over and die. I do not say the opposition should withdraw into lethargic indifference and accommodate the new order without contemplative engagement. No.

“What I am suggesting is that every nation is about renewal and change. Every nation is always a perpetual work in progress. It is never about a permanent arrival. It is always in constant fluidity as political actors perpetually contest for public space and dominance.”

George, who is a member of the PDP Board of Trustees, said that in the UK, the Labour Party did not taste power at the centre for 18 years.

He added that the Conservative Party spent over 11 years out of power before the current Prime Minister, David Cameron, took over.

“Take the seemingly endless travails of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. When Baroness Margaret Thatcher defeated Lord James Callaghan in 1979, the Labour party was flung into an unbroken 18 years in political wilderness. No doubt, the several years in the political limbo would have been full of severities and dramatic challenges for the Labour Party.

“But through the ebb and flow of the downward turn in the party’s fortunes, there was no insistence that without Labour that the country must be forfeited. There was no clamour that the nation must tumble into ruin and destruction unless Labour is restored!

“Labour was in perpetual vigilance and unceasing positioning of its ideals. Yes, the party never remains the same. It keeps evolving to attune to the confronting realities. Principled men and women remain forever at the political barricades, engaging the presiding Conservatives with the purest of motives and the noblest of patriotic vision,” he said.

Source: Punch