Aformer Deputy National Chairman (South) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and a member of the party’s Board of Trustees (BOT), Chief Bode George has said that he disagreed with the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Chief Nyesom Wike, when he decided to support President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for the presidential poll on 2023. This is coming just as he also dismissed the claim of the party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 general elections, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), is inducing members of the party and disorganising the opposition in the process. Speaking in an inteview on monitored by Saturday Telegraph on Arise News on Friday as well as a media briefing he organised in his Lagos home also on Friday, Chief George emphasized that national interest must take precedence over personal ambitions in resolving the ongoing crisis within the PDP. “After the National Convention of the party, Nye- som Wike and his people came and said that they were trying to resolve the issues then and I joined them.
“We sat down and they said that now that we have two presidential candidates from the South, that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the better of the two and I said ‘if you go out of this meeting and you talk about it outside there, I would counter you in the open. I told them that ‘you guys have no idea of who this gentleman is. He had ruled my state before, we know his modus operandi. You don’t have any idea. “That was where we parted, it’s not a matter of jumping ship and looking for laurels, no. We parted ways since that day be- fore the election.
This is the truth, what else am I looking for that I will not be able to look you in the face and tell you the truth?” he asked. The PDP leader stressed that he supported Wike against Alhaji Atiku be- cause he believed that a Southerner should be the next president of the country after a Northerner had ruled for eight years. He also recalled his efforts in making a former National Chairman of the party, Senator Iyorchia Ayu, step down as he promised after the emergence of Atiku, a Northerner like him, as the presidential candi- date of the party, on the principle of zoning, which he said was agreed on by the founding fathers of the party.
“I spent six hours with Ayu in his house in Abuja, he said he didn’t do any- thing wrong and he was still insisting. I told him he made a statement in public that if the presidential candidate comes from the North that he would resign, but when the presidential candidate came from the North he refused to resign. “I said ‘what are you talking about,’ he said he had four years. I also called Atiku to talk to him that he should talk to Ayu. I said if we did that to you South- erners, would you accept it, never and what is not good is not good, you must have the fear of God in whatev- er you are doing. That was where I disagreed with them and I warned them,” he said.
He said that the Board of Trustees of the party must be able to set up a commit- tee to go into in depth analysis of what happened, say- ing that one cannot solve a problem by starting mid- point and thinking he can cover the other ones. “All sides of the divides are making us so angry; I want us to avoid creating a terrible public image for our party. People have started saying that ‘your party is dead’, but we say no, the party is not dead. We can disagree without being disagreeable. We should be able to rise above this pettiness. “What happened at that National Convention was the beginning of the crisis. To date, all sides are still very deep in their trenches firing salvos. It’s not going to help this country and the national interest of the must be much higher than the personal interest of any individual and no individ- ual can ever be bigger than the party.
“Let these managers rise above this and let’s call a spade a spade. We are drifting very badly like a rudderless ship. I will re- main consistent in my argu- ment. We must go to the be- ginning of this madness so that this will never repeat itself, and I am happy that the members of the BOT, the elders of the party, the custodians, were present, while this went on and the good thing is that they were able to manage the crisis,” he said.
