A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Raymond Dokpesi, has said both the national chairman and Board of Trustees’ chairman of the party cannot step down to appease certain stakeholders of the party, as doing so will create a constitutional crisis in the party.
Daily Trust reports that since the emergence of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as the presidential candidate of the party, a group loyal to Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike, who lost to Atiku, has been alleging that having the presidential candidate, national chairman (Senator Iyorchia Ayu) and BOT chairman (Senator Walid Jibrin) of the party from the North has disenfranchised their southern counterparts.
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They are therefore insisting that Ayu or Jibrin should step down to balance the equation.
But speaking with journalists in Kano yesterday, Dokpesi, a media mogul and ally of Atiku, said apart from the fact that a constitutional crisis would be visited on the party, it would be the most unwise decision to change one’s leadership team with campaign period starting in less than a month.
As regards Ayu’s position, Dokpesi, who had also sought to be national chairman of the party in the past, said, “In 2017 up to 2025, we are supposed to have a chairman of southern extraction. It wasn’t the North that complained in 2021 that they wanted to have the chairmanship.
“It was the southerners – the governors who are today the problem of the party, were the ones who demanded for rotation because they don’t want (Uche) Secondus (former chairman) to go to court and defeat them.The North protested based on the constitution, but that was ignored.”
On the BOT chairman, Dokpesi said, with just about four months left in the tenure-ship in the five-year span, “during the trying days of his term, you want to throw him out? He will go to court and that will put the party in an undue position.”
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