By Kolade Larewaju, Abeokuta

FORMER President Olusegun Obasanjo yesterday declared that the priority of the Peoples Democratic Party  (PDP) in the South-west was the redressing of the speakership of the House of Representatives which was zoned to the region but now occupied by Hon. Aminu Tambuwal from another geo-political zone, specifically the North-west.

Obasanjo, who is the chairman of the Board of Trustees  (BOT) of the party, also vowed never to be in the same party again with members of the PDP  who worked against it in the last elections, saying that such people would never repent.

Addressing delegates at the PDP South-west Zonal Strategic Meeting in Abeokuta, attended by virtually all prominent members of the party from the zone, the former president said that the issue of redressing the issue of speakership should be paramount and not the struggle for national secretary of the party which took centre stage among aspirants jostling for the seat among the delegates.

He said: “The thing in the PDP is that everything should be equitably distributed. The issue of speakership should be addressed because, if not, we will lose greater things. The issue of zoning of secretary; it is ours, not that they zoned it to us. Our priority is to redress the speakership issue first”.

Obasanjo

In an intriguing power play, the South-west, to which the PDP leadership had zoned the House speakership, had, in June, lost the office to North-west which already had the vice presidency, thus upstaging the ruling party’s zoning plan for the nation’s six geo-political zones. On the South-west PDP’s poor performance in the April polls, Obasanjo told the delegates: “You must go home and re-organize.

Those who want to come back know the procedure of joining the party and they must be scrutinized very well. We must not forget what some of them did in the last elections; they will not repent. You must not take them back unless they have genuinely repented and they must be properly examined.

“Some of them behaved very badly. Their behavior was terrible. I will never be in the same party with them. I will serve Nigeria till death and I have made a covenant with God to use PDP to serve Nigeria. We must be disciplined”.

The former president said that the South-west  PDP has not collapsed but just suffered a setback, adding that it has happened before.

Obasanjo assured the delegates that the party would recover.
He said: “It has happened to us before, but we recovered. It is only for some time. But we must be disciplined. The setback will soon be a thing of the past.”

In his address at the meeting, the PDP National Vice Chairman in the zone, Alhaji Tajudeen Oladipo, lamented the “dismal performance of the party in the South-west.”

Oladipo went on: “The reasons for our failure in the last general elections are not because our party had no good followership in the zone or lacked good government programmes. Our loss was a result of the culmination of many factors and also our inability to manage the success that we had achieved in the previous elections.

“Towards the last elections, our party was characterized by strong internal strife, politics of exclusion by leaders  to the extent that some of our leaders were even playing god, personalization of the party structure at all levels by some party leaders and indiscipline within the rank and file of the party”.

The zonal chair said that in some cases in Ekiti, leaders collaborated with the opposition to ensure the loss of  the state  to the opposition both during the re-run and even during the court processes.

“One of such leaders is Ayo Fayose, a one-time governor of the State on the platform of our party. Today, some of them are calling for his return to the party. While I am not against his return, the truth has to be said that this young man was one of the strong party members who contributed to the party’s destruction in Ekiti State”.

In Ogun, he said: “You will recall how in the march towards the elections, the then governor of the state on the platform of our party, PDP, worked so hard against the interests of the party all because the leaders did not support the usurpation of the party and the party apparatus by the governor.

“The governor in fact formed a new party to challenge the party on whose platform he ascended the governorship seat! It was that bad in Ogun State. When it was impossible for him to impose his will on the party, he resorted to high level anti-party activities”.