The dispute over the North West Zonal Vice Chairman position of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has not been resolved, seven months after violence broke out at the botched Kaduna zonal congress of the party, Daily Trust on Sunday reports.
It would be recalled that said the election of the North West zonal executives of the party was indefinitely suspended following the dispute between the camps of former governor of Kano State, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, and that of former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Aminu Wali, over the zonal vice chairman position.
The position, Daily Trust Saturday on Sunday reports, has been zoned to Kano State, hence the battle between the two camps to grab the position to brighten their chances ahead of the 2023 elections.
The 17 zonal positions, including seven ex-officio, are to be shared among the seven states in the zone – Jigawa, Kaduna, Katsina, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara.
During the ill-fated congress at the Kaduna Trade Fair Complex on April 10, supporters of Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State and Kwankwaso clashed, leading to an abrupt postponement of the exercise.
Kwankwaso had accused Tambuwal of hobnobbing with Wali to interfere in the affairs of the party in Kano State, an allegation the Sokoto State governor vehemently denied and called ‘baseless’.
The situation has forced the leadership of the party to constitute a caretaker committee for the zone.
But the between Kwankwaso and Wali dates as far back as 2018 when the former governor re-joined the PDP and it was reported that the party’s national leadership at that time had given him 51 percent control of the party, leaving the remaining 49 percent to be shared among another former governor, Ibrahim Shekarau (before he decamped to the APC), Wali and Senator Bello Hayatu Gwarzo.
The spokesman of the Kwankwasiyya Movement and a chieftain of the PDP in Kano State, Aminu Abdussalam Gwarzo, had told Daily Trust on Sunday after the Kaduna incident, however, that while Senator Kwankwaso welcomed the move to reconcile him and Tambuwal and Wali, the crisis could have been avoided if leaders of the party like Tambuwal and Wali had not allegedly reneged on agreement of the party to put forward Mohammed Jamo as the consensus candidate for National Vice Chairman, NorthWest.
He had accused Tambuwal of conniving with Wali to sponsor Senator Bello Hayatu Gwarzo to contest for the position despite “much publicised hobnobbing of Wali and Gwarzo with APC government in Kano State.”
“They (Wali and Gwarzo) were rewarded with positions in the government. A whole commissioner of Water Resources was given to the group and Aminu Wali gave it to his biological son who happened to be a gubernatorial aspirant in the 2019 (PDP) party primaries,” he said.
He said the Kwankwaso group would not fold its arm and watch the other group humiliate them.
But Muhammina Bako Lamido, a factional chairman of the party in the state loyal to Wali, insisted there was no agreement on any consensus candidate before the congress.
“We are the original members of the party since 1999. We have never departed from the party. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and his supporters sometimes in 2014 when he was a governor decided to leave the party for APC and we decided to remain in the party (PDP). That was the beginning of the problem.
“He (referring to Kwankwaso) felt that we betrayed him because we told him we did not want to go to the APC. When he decided to come back to PDP, that was in 2018, he said that we are his number one enemies and so he will not join us and run the party together because the last time he wanted us to join APC, we declined, that is the only problem,” Lamido said of the genesis of the crisis between Kwankwaso and Wali’s group.
He said they went to Kaduna on April 10 “as PDP supporters to vote for our candidate, Senator Bello Hayatu Gwarzo who is a founding member of the party and a former senator, who is contesting for the seat.”
He alleged that it was because the Kwankwasiyya group (which fielded Mohammed Jamo) realised that Senator Gwarzo had “an overwhelming majority support of the people and they felt that when the election is concluded, they will fail. That was why they started to disrupt and beat people, snatched boxes and chased people away from the place.”
“There was no consensus between our group and the Kwankwasiyya. There must be an election; that is the decision reached by the North-west caucus because the seat is being contested by more than one person,” he said.
The national secretariat of the party had then set up a committee headed by former Senate President Bukola Saraki for the reconciliation of party members across the country, a development Kwankwaso said he was not against. But it was gathered that the former Kano governor did not honour an invitation extended to him to reconcile him and Ambassador Wali.
Subsequently, the congress was fixed for September 4 but could not hold because it clashed with the day of local government elections in Kaduna State.
Explaining the current situation, Shehu Sagagi, the party’s chairman in Kano loyal to the Kwankwasiyya movement, said the congress was fixed for October 9 and it again coincided with the time President Muhammadu Buhari was going to Jaji in Kaduna State.
“So, the Commissioner of Police in Kaduna State advised that we should postpone the election. After that, it was decided that the election would hold after the national convention. That is the current situation,” Sagagi said.
Corroborating Sagagi’s position, Lamido said “the current (national) leadership will continue with their mantle till December 9th when their tenure will expire and the (new) executives will be sworn in but before then, I am quite sure the national body will fix the new date for the election of the zonal congress.”
But unless the root cause of the crisis is addressed, political pundits believe the last may not have been heard of the crisis and that it may negatively affect the fortunes of the party in the 2023 elections.
“Obviously, that was what affected us in 2019. That was what resulted in us losing the election in 2019 and I hope the stakeholders of PDP have an idea of what happened in 2019 and do not want a repeat. I am confident that the elders and the party leaders will come up with a solution in 2023 so we will win the election,” Lamido added.
Also, because of this unrest between the PDP family in the state, the party has not been able to take advantage of the internal crisis the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state has also been battling with.
The unrest in the APC, for instance, which has pitted former governor of the state Ibrahim Shekarau-led G-7 against the incumbent, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, as well as the recent exchange of kind words between Shekarau and Kwankwaso has made some pundits to suggest that both former governors may be planning to team up against the incumbent come 2023; but the big question is: under which political platform?
