ALARMED by the possibility of disintegration, the Peoples Democratic Party leaders have decided to come down from their high horse and beg the aggrieved governors of the party, learnt on Monday.
The governors’ mass boycott of the party’s peace meeting and celebration of the first anniversary of its National Working Committee, chaired by Alhaji Bamagar Tukur, on Sunday, had apparently sent jitters through the leadership hence the decision to appease the state chief executives.
Both the party’s new Chairman of Board of Trustees, Chief Tony Anenih, and Tukur as well as other party members were said to have been shocked by the governors’ absence at the meeting already planned to showcase the success of the PDP’s peace tour across the country.
The mass boycott, curiously, came on the heels of speculations that many PDP governors were already making moves to defect to the yet-to-be-registered opposition coalition party, the All Progressives Congress.
The APC is an arrangement spearheaded by four opposition parties – Action Congress of Nigeria, Congress for Progressive Change, the All Nigeria Peoples Party, and a faction of the All Progressive Grand Alliance – with a manifesto to wrest power from the PDP, come 2015.
Out of the 23 PDP governors, only two – Cross River’s Godswill Akpabio and Kogi’s Idris Wada – attended the peace meeting while a handful sent their deputies to the event presided over by Vice-President Namadi Sambo in Abuja.
Both Tukur and Chairman of the PDP Governors’ Forum, Godswill Akpabio, on Monday offered an explanation for the absence of the governors at the peace meeting.
While Akpabio said his colleagues stayed away due to poor publicity, Tukur said the governors were absent “because they were part of the reconciliation meetings in their respective zones, and had made useful contributions during the visit by the National Working Committee members, a reason it was never compelling for them to be in Abuja.”
The Akpabiop-led governors’ forum was formed recently in Abuja at the height of animosity between the Nigerian Governors’ Forum under the leadership of Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State.
President Goodluck Jonathan’s aide on political matters, Ahmed Gulak, in justifying the setting up of the PDP Governors’ Forum said the NGF under Amaechi was being run like a “trade union.”
Already, Anenih, our correspondents learnt, had commenced a panic tour of the states governed by the party with a view to appeasing the governors that had been threatened earlier by both Jonathan and Tukur.
The Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the party, Sen. Walid Jibrin, said, “Our chairman of BoT is already visiting the states to discuss with the governors and I know that his discussion is yielding fruitful results. He will visit all the governors and have one-on-one discussion with them. The governors are with us.”
A source at the national headquarters of the party told one of our correspondents in Abuja on Monday that the governors were becoming more emboldened and that their actions could lead to the disintegration of the PDP.
He said the outcome of the nationwide Reconciliation and Consolidation Tour by the leadership of the party had further shown that the party needed to move fast to prevent the opposition from capitalising on the “huge wedge that is now openly shown to all as a result of what happened during the tour.”
The source, who is a member of the party’s NWC, said that it was amazing that most of the governors refused to be part of the reconciliatory meeting in their zones.
He said, “Imagine, in the whole of North-Central Zone, no single governor was on ground to receive us, even when they knew that the tour was being led by our national chairman.
“While some of them were benevolent to send their deputies to represent them, there were those who even sent deputy speakers of their Houses of Assembly.
“That is very bad. Even in North-East, only two governors attended the meeting. Yet, the governors know that this is the zone of the chairman.
“While we were holding the meeting, we have it on good authority that one of the governors from the zone was busy inaugurating some projects in his state.
“In South-South Zone, some governors even left us in the hall and walked away. The party is in crisis; we don’t need to pretend any longer.”
It was learnt that the Presidency and the party had thought that the plan to dislodge the governors of their powers by threatening to start e-registration of members would make the governors shift their opposition to the leadership of the party.
Apart from this, the setting up of the rival PDP Governors’ Forum, with the aim of polarising the NGF, has also not been able to break the ranks of the governors as expected by the Presidency and the party.
Explaining the PDP governors’ absence at the Abuja meeting, Tukur told journalists at his residence on Monday that some of the governors were not in Nigeria on Sunday. He said others contacted the party that they would not be able to be in Abuja for the rally, adducing different reasons.
He said, “We were in the South-East zone and the governors turned out. When we visited the South-South, Governors Uduaghan, Akpabio and Amaechi came to welcome us and made useful suggestions.
“Indeed, the Rivers State governor spoke to us on behalf of all the PDP governors. Bayelsa State governor, I reckoned, was busy with a special task, while the same story of success trailed our visit to the North.”
He stressed that the reconciliation meetings across the zones and Abuja were meant for members, most especially those who were estranged, and not necessarily for state governors, who he said, had played their parts meaningfully in the party’s reconciliation agenda at the zonal level.
“I think the media should not join the pseudo-democrats, the demagogues and the treachery fellows who always love to reap from chaos and crises. This is why we require the media support in our desire to re-invent politics and recreate Nigeria,” he said.
Tukur said the PDP would not succumb to blackmail coming from those he described as virulent opponents of the party, most especially on their desire to paint a picture of a PDP being at war with itself.
He stressed that the PDP had always been in agreement with its members and all its governors, as evident by the encouraging outcome of the reconciliation tours across the federation.
Asked what the party gained from the tours, he said the PDP had realised that imposition of candidates during elections had been the cause of misunderstanding within its ranks and that this would be corrected during subsequent elections.
Akpabio, after a closed-door meeting with Jonathan in Abuja on Monday, told State House correspondents that it would be unfair to blame any governor who did not attend because they were not aware.
He said, “There is really no crisis in the PDP. The one year anniversary that was celebrated by the NWC at the International Conference Centre yesterday (Sunday) was not well publicised. Many governors were not aware of that ceremony.
“I got to know about the ceremony just a night before the event. I had a visit of the National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, and he asked me if I will be at the conference centre on Sunday and I asked him for what and he said grand finale of the zonal meeting of the national chairman and I said I wasn’t aware of it.
“I hosted the Super Eagles in my state on Saturday and I felt let me struggle to represent the governors of the PDP who definitely were not aware. I know that if there was no single governor there, the next thing Nigerians will say is that the governors boycotted.
“I think it was a slightly rushed affair, it was not well publicised. I don’t blame any state governor that was not there. I was even surprised that the governor of Kogi State managed to be there. Clearly speaking, we cannot blame any state governors, it wasn’t a boycott.”
Akpabio also disclosed that contrary to the belief that some PDP governors would abandon the party, they were the ones currently wooing their colleagues in opposition parties to join them.
He said the PDP governors had already set up what he called a tactical committee saddled with the responsibility of luring opposition parties’ governors into their fold.
He said, “The thing is that even now, the opposition is rattled. You can see the barrage of attacks against the chairman of the PDP Governors Forum. That is a sign that the opposition is rattled.
“For instance, we made a paltry donation of a million naira to a state to help delegates and you made it an issue. They set up panels on television and radio stations to discuss the issue.
“If you translate the money, it will come to less than N2,000 per person. If a delegate appears at a function that the party leader does not buy lunch, or give money for transport. So it is something that we are leaving the main issue and going into trivial issues.”
