PDP leaders reject calls to resign as crisis grows

 

                     There seems to be no end to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) blame game —the result of the ruling party’s massive electoral loss.

                  Party Chairman Adamu Mu’azu hit back at the Presidency and the governors at the weekend, cautioning them against “the developing culture of using and dumping”.

                   He rejected any blame on him and the National Working Committee (NWC) for the party’s thrashing by the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Also at the weekend, a group of Southwest leaders of the party met in Ado-Ekiti and canvassed the resignation of the National Secretary, Prof. Wale Oladipo, and the National Auditor, Alhaji Adewale Adeyanju, for leading the party to failure.

Oladipupo faulted the call. He attacked party’s former Deputy National Chairman Chief Olabode George, one of the conveners of the meeting.

Oladipo, in a statement yesterday, said: “However, a very careful examination of the inherent breaches in the procedures adopted in the convening of the meeting as well as the content and tone of its resolution shows an orchestration by a few individuals bent on sowing a seed of discord within the PDP fold in the zone.

“This is evident in the fact that the said communiqué in no way reflected the views of majority of those who attended the meeting, neither did it tally with the opinion of the generality of our party members in the region.

“It is indeed undermining and a clear breach of protocol the fact that a meeting of some leaders of the zone would be convened to discuss issues of the party’s presidential campaigns and the highest-ranking national officers of the party from the zone were excluded.

“This is in continuation of the apparent marginalisation of the National Working Committee and the party structure at all levels in the handling of the presidential campaigns.

“More so, even some of those who attended the meeting were not privy to the agenda and the eventual content of the communiqué issued at the end”.

Oladipo said the call was absolutely unpatriotic and against the wishes and aspirations of majority of party members from the Southwest through whose mandate he occupied the office of the National Secretary.

He also spoke for Adeyanju, saying: “If we concede to the demands in the communiqué, especially given the fact that as elected members of the National Working Committee, our positions have a tenure which lasts until March 2016”.

According to him, members of the PDP in Osun State, his primary constituency, have already passed a vote of confidence on him as the party’s National Secretary.

Continuing, Oladipo said: “Furthermore, while some of those asking us to resign performed very poorly even in their polling units, it is on record that the National Auditor and my humble self performed creditably and delivered our areas in the general elections.

“It is therefore disheartening that rather than joining other well-meaning members of our great party in supporting the National Working Committee in the on-going re-engineering process to rebuild the PDP, some elders from our zone, particularly, a former Deputy National Chairman, Chief Olabode George, who should know, have instead resorted to divisive politics by attempting to instigate our members against one another.

“What our party needs now in the Southwest and indeed across the country is for all hands to be on the deck as we work harmoniously in our determination to reposition the PDP to regain power in 2019.

“Our party members are by this therefore charged to watch out for individuals whose agenda is to sow seeds of discord and pave the way for crisis within our fold for their selfish interests.

“The National Working Committee is now more than ever before determined to rebuild the PDP and restore its glory as the preeminent political party in Nigeria. This resolve is irrevocable and we shall not allow ourselves to be distracted in anyway by any person under any guise whatsoever.”

Senate Leader Victor Ndoma-Egba also accused the governors of being behind the failure of the party at the elections.

In a paper entitled “Majority and minority parties in the Legislature: party defection (cross carpeting in the legislature)”, which he delivered at the induction course for legislators-elect of the 8th National Assembly in Abuja, Ndoma-Egba said: “In the PDP, government is no longer of the people and for the people.  It is now government of governors, by governors and for governors.”

Speaking on the defection of members to opposition parties, Ndoma-Egba explained that politicians “defect because their former party squeezed them out, or in the case of the PDP recently, that they did not fit within the governors’ calculations. In my view, since every politics is local, each case should be treated on its merit.

“Unbridled defection has the capacity of not only overheating the polity and upsetting the entire political configuration but destabilising the polity.

“While the law has clearly settled the circumstances under which a person elected on the platform of a political party can switch parties, nothing restricts those who are not in the legislature from switching parties.  “The phenomenon will endure for as long as ownership of political parties is not with its members but, as in the case of the PDP, with governors.  Governors (especially of the PDP) have become so over bearing that it is only their wishes that rule.  The party (at the national level) suborns its Constitution, guidelines and even court orders to please the whims and fancies of governors who appropriate the will of members and impose theirs in its stead.

“This has bred sycophancy, impunity and arrogance, and eroded internal party democracy.

“Consequently, after the last so-called primaries, there was a lot of traffic out of the PDP and no corresponding traffic into it.  The party simply imploded under the weight of governor’s impunity and arrogance.

“The PDP carefully  choreographed its downfall.  It worked very hard at it and got the result it deserved.”

 Ndoma-Egba advised that the best antidote against the PDP defeat in 2015 is to stem further defections by ensuring “internal party democracy” as “a party can only give the nation what she has.

“A party that does not have internal party democracy can only falsely promise the nation democracy.”