A SURPRISE it was as former president and PPP supremo, Asif Ali Zardari, announced on his wife’s death anniversary that he and his son, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, will seek to enter parliament via by-elections. To the extent that parliament is the apex democratic forum and this National Assembly in particular has suffered from a lack of interest by PML-N principals, particularly Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the PTI too, the entrance of high-profile politicians could re-energise the house and attract fresh public interest. But Mr Zardari’s unexpected decision is in many ways a perplexing one — and perhaps undesirable too. The reasons are several. To begin with, the real challenge for the PPP is to reorganise the party and make it electorally relevant outside rural Sindh again. The party has no unifying or coherent message nationally and it is increasingly hamstrung by the perception that the government in Sindh is riddled with corruption and gross misgovernance. A turnaround is desperately needed, but it’s not clear how Mr Zardari’s entrance into parliament will help engineer that. If anything, the by-election contests will further detract from focusing on matters of party reorganisation and regeneration.

There is also the matter of Mr Zardari overshadowing the parliamentary education of his son and PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. What in substantive terms can Mr Zardari hope to achieve by joining parliament approximately a year before its term expires? In recent years, there is no legislative issue or corner of executive oversight that the former president has expressed an interest in. By choosing to contest a parliamentary seat alongside Mr Bhutto-Zardari, and for the first time since 1990, Mr Zardari has all but guaranteed that the parliamentary focus, especially within the PPP, will be on him. While Mr Bhutto-Zardari certainly has a long political education ahead of him, the simultaneous parliamentary entry may send a hard-to-rebut signal that all decision-making in the party remains tightly controlled by the father. For a young politician who has already seen his political career launched with fanfare several times, the latest development cannot bode well.

It remains, of course, the prerogative of the PPP to choose its own destiny and for its leadership to select its own path. To be confounded by internal decisions the party takes is not to deny the party’s inherent right to make those choices. Yet, there are at least two realities that make the PPP’s internal decisions a matter of immediate public interest. The party nominates the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly and has a majority in the Sindh Assembly — positions of power that come with real responsibilities. A quiet parliamentary education of Mr Bhutto-Zardari would have made sense. Adding Mr Zardari to the parliamentary equation seems largely a matter of ego and self-indulgence. The PPP deserves better and the country deserves more — Mr Zardari still has time to get his priorities right.

Published in Dawn December 29th, 2016