PDP Crisis: Sen Anyanwu Explains His Travails
The embattled National Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Senator Samuel Anyanwu says insistence on due process, respect for the rule of law, and long-standing personal relationship with the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Chief Nyesom Wike are responsible for his current travails within the country’s main opposition party.
Senator Anyanwu, who was giving insights into reasons certain persons were hell-bent on forcing him out of office, claimed he was being targeted by some party’s leaders from the South East geo-political zone consider him a stumbling block to their political ambitions, including taking over the party structure.
According to him; “I was validly nominated and elected as National Secretary of this great party at a national convention, and our constitution clearly spells out how a person occupying positions in the National Working Committee can be replaced if the need arises.
“I took time off to contest for the governorship of my state, and the Deputy National Secretary acted while I was away. Our constitution gives me the power to delegate functions to my deputy.
“It was strange that while I was campaigning, some people went as far as forging documents by illegally altering our party guidelines and inserted a clause that is not in the original document to say I must resign. The police is investigating I won’t say much on that.
“Everybody knows my relationship with (Chief Nyesom) Wike. We were local government chairmen and members of the PDP; I cannot deny him.”
Further accusing some of PDP governors of working in cohorts with a section of the Board of Trustees (BoT) in pursuit of their selfish agenda of weakening the party for pecuniary gains, Senator Anyanwu claimed that the advice of both bodies that Sunday Udeh-Okoye be immediately sworn in as the substantive National Secretary, following a Court of Appeal judgment was simply “a proxy war.”
The Appeal Court ruling notwithstanding, embattled PDP National Secretary urged those seeking his exit from office to wait until the expiration of his tenure in December, 2025, to contest for the position during the party’s national convention.
Forefront News notes that the PDP leadership has been split in two by those seen as loyalists of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and the FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike with the party’s 2023 presidential primary, in which Atiku defeated Wike considered the trigger of the current crisis.
Aside from the Wike’s group working to undermine the Party’s electoral chances in the February 2023 presidential poll, the crisis further degenerated into a fallout between Wike and his successor, Governor Siminalaye Fubara of Rivers State.
Amid the crisis, Anyanwu and the party’s acting national chairman, Umar Damagum, considered sympathetic to Wike’s cause, have come under relentless attacks by those opposed to them, even as the PDP Governors Forum, during their monthly meeting in Asaba, Delta State, endorsed Udeh-Okoye as National Secretary.
Citing an Enugu Court of Appeal judgment recognising Udeh-Okoye as the bonafide occupant of the position of National Secretary, the PDP Governors’ Forum decision thereafter got the backing of the Party’s BoT members who adopted the report of a Committee set up to examine the claims made by both Anyanwu and Ude-Okoye.
However, the Committee, chaired by. Kabiru Tanimu Turaki (SAN), recommended that Udeh-Okoye be sworn in immediately based on the court judgment. – With the Vanguard report
