PDP govs meet in Zam­fara to strategise ahead of Monday NEC

Gov­ernors elec­ted on the plat­form of the oppos­i­tion Peoples Demo­cratic Party (PDP), yes­ter­day con­verged on Gusau, the Zam­fara State cap­ital for a two-day meet­ing to strategise ahead of Monday’s National Exec­ut­ive Com­mit­tee (NEC) ses­sion of the party.

Their meet­ing, com­ing barely a day after PDP lead­ers in the South, led by Oyo State Gov­ernor Seyi Makinde, met in Lagos, is believed to have been called to fine-tune their pos­i­tion ahead of Monday’s NEC gath­er­ing, par­tic­u­larly in the light of the fresh crisis threat­en­ing the party’s planned Novem­ber 15-16 elect­ive national con­ven­tion.

Week­end Trust learnt that the crux of the Gusau meet­ing is how the gov­ernors will resolve new chal­lenges raised by the Min­is­ter of the Fed­eral Cap­ital Ter­rit­ory (FCT), Nye­som Wike ahead of the con­ven­tion.

Wike’s insist­ence on dis­solv­ing the Elder Emmanuel Ogidi-led South-South zonal care­taker com­mit­tee and repla­cing it with the Dan Orbih-led fac­tion has unsettled pre­par­a­tions for the Ibadan con­ven­tion. His loy­al­ists on Thursday dis­missed the Lagos meet­ing led by Makinde as “an illeg­al­ity.”

At the 101st NEC meet­ing in July, mem­bers unan­im­ously approved Ibadan, Oyo State as host of the national con­ven­tion, which is expec­ted to pro­duce new mem­bers of the National Work­ing Com­mit­tee (NWC) to replace the Ambas­sador Umar Dam­agum-led lead­er­ship.

The party has also been embroiled in a tussle over its national sec­ret­ary, with Samuel Any­anwu and Sunday Ude-Okoye backed by Wike and Enugu Gov­ernor Peter Mbah respect­ively.

The former Rivers State gov­ernor, a cent­ral fig­ure in the crisis that has rocked the PDP since its 2022 pres­id­en­tial primary, which he lost to former Vice Pres­id­ent Atiku Abubakar, had at one point declared the rift “over” fol­low­ing Atiku’s exit. But he recently warned that the con­ven­tion could not hold unless the South-South zonal con­gress held in Calabar, where his loy­al­ists emerged as lead­ers, was recog­nised.