Dr. Adetokunbo Pearse is a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In this interview, he speaks on the crisis rocking the party and the move by the PDP Governors’ Forum to resolve it, among other issues. ANAYO EZUGWU writes
What would you say the governor’s extraordinary meeting in Ibadan was set up for, and the resolutions that came out of the meeting?
The meeting came about, I think, basically because there had been a lot of talk about determining the position of national chairman and the issue of the national secretary. Let me say this very clearly.
It is a terrible misconception that the PDP is having problems fielding a candidate. What kind of nonsense is that? Is it now that you begin to field a candidate? That issue doesn’t come up.
You see, we have a lot of people at the party who are disgruntled. So, they come up with all sorts of things, and they have access to the media. So, they gathered and talked all sorts of rubbish and confuse people. There’s no problem about coming up with a candidate until you go to your national convention for a candidate, somebody will come up.
Whoever emerges as a candidate of the party in that convention will become the candidate. So, this issue about candidate or no candidate now is not needed, and it’s out of place. But what happened in Ibadan was that a lot of people have been putting pressure on the party that Umar Damagun, the acting national chairman, must go.
Another issue was that of the national secretary, which everybody thought had been settled because the court said the party is in charge of that issue, whatever the party says is what goes. The party has decided that Udeh-Okoye is our national secretary. But, of course, Samuel Anyanwu is not happy with the decision of the court.
I mean, the court said the party decides and the party decided that we don’t want Anyanwu. All the organs of the party – board of trustees, national working committee, governors’ forum agreed with that. Then the next National Executive Council, (NEC) which is comprised of all the former presidents, former governors, will come together but individually, they have all spoken.
So, what happened in Ibadan was that the governors now spoke and said a couple of things. One, that the issue of forming a merger; we don’t need to form a merger. Acting national chairman put it, I think very appropriately, He said PDP is a brand name.
We don’t need to change our name, and we don’t need to merge with anybody. And I’ve said it; in fact, I said it more than a year ago, and the reasons are clear. I wasn’t surprised when the governors said the same thing I’ve been saying for months now.
The PDP has a national spread. The only reason why APC came to be as a merger was because ACN, coming from the South-West basically, had about three million votes. It didn’t have a national spread. Muhammadu Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) had been carrying 10 to 12 million votes for a long time, but couldn’t get anything n the South.
So, the two of them had to come together to merge, so that they could speak nationally. That’s why they came to be. PDP already has a national spread. We are in every nook and cranny of Nigeria, every ward, every street, for years. So, we don’t need that.
Since you are against the merger, are you working for President Bola Tinubu?
I am working for the PDP. I know the president very well but I can never work for him. He doesn’t deserve it. Nigeria doesn’t deserve a president like this. Now, the reason why they’re asking me, and I find out, is that they are members of the Labour Party.
They want me to come to Labour Party as they want PDP to come into the Labour Party but I said, look, if you want to work for Peter Obi and the Labour Party, please go ahead. Let me do what I can for the PDP. When we go to the election, we shall see who Nigerians want.
But Atiku doesn’t think that PDP can face APC as it is right now. Do you think he is wrong?
That’s what Atiku thinks. Atiku has been wrong many times before, and he’s wrong again. Let me tell you something; at the appropriate time, I will reveal as much as I should. For now, let me just say that Atiku was in the PDP in 2015. He left PDP in 2015, came back in 2017.
He was welcome. I was one of the people who worked with him to get the ticket for 2019. But he ran that election. He lost. His attitude to the party is part of the reason why he’s having problems now. I supported him mainly because he promised to restructure Nigeria.
And I believe, even now, Governor Seyi Makinde wants to run for president, the first thing I told him is, if you are interested in restructuring Nigeria, let me understand that you know what we’re talking about.
Nigeria will never settle unless we reorganise the way the system works. It’s too centralised. It’s a military system we’re running. We have to run a truly democratic system whereby each region, just like in the U.S., each state has control over so many things. You don’t overload the centre.
This whole question of zoning must be very clear. If you are zoning, you are zoning. You cannot say you are zoning and still sell forms to everybody
The president is just too powerful. Everything is from Abuja. So, that’s the reason I supported Atiku. Now, Atiku ran in 2023. He lost in 2023. If he wants to run again in 2027, he should come and say so.
Within the party, I suspect that his feeling is that he cannot get the ticket in 2027. There’s a lot of opposition to him now in the party. People are saying enough is enough.
Therefore, he is going to form a merger and he is looking for another platform. I cannot be part of that. I said to him; stay in the party.
Don’t run from here. You ran from PDP. You ran to ACN. You ran from ACN. You came back to PDP. You want to run away from PDP again; don’t do that.
The Ibadan declaration looks like a ploy not to give the ticket to Atiku; don’t you think that the PDP governors might unwittingly be playing into the hands of the president?
The Ibadan declaration had nothing to do with trying to exclude Atiku. I’m giving you my interpretation and what I think is going on. It has nothing to do with Atiku. Atiku is not an issue in the party now. Politics is very dynamic. One day is like a lifetime.
Let me tell you; if you read the political climate within the PDP, that’s why you see these people shouting everywhere, complaining everywhere. When you see people panicking like that, you know they have a problem. You know, they just don’t have any grounds. That is what’s going on. That time is over. It’s not about Atiku.
It’s about the soul of the party. In other words, people who want us to have a substantive national chairman and to clarify the issue of the national secretary. That’s why the governors said we are going to move our convention to August instead of October, the reason being that as soon as we can, let’s resolve this issue of the national chairman.
You know, we’ve had an acting national chairman for almost two years now. So, we want to resolve that so that everybody will settle down and get ready for 2027. The issue of the national secretary is also very important. Anyanwu was at the conference in Ibadan to meet the governors.
They just ignored him. But at the national convention is when, by our constitution, you can formally remove or replace the national secretary. That is why that meeting is important.
Informally, morally, he’s already been removed because nobody wants to see him. But when we have this convention, everybody will settle down. People have said that Damagun must go for over a year now. And I keep telling them that Damagun is not there because he wants to be there.
We needed somebody to immediately take that position once Iyorchia Ayu left, so that there’d be no vacuum. Now, because of all sorts of things coming up, we couldn’t go to a convention and choose a substantive national chairman. Now, in August, we’re going to do that. So, that’s why Ibadan was important. That’s what it was all about.
Would you say PDP is learning from some of the mistakes of 2015, 2019 and 2023 to make sure they are not repeated, especially with its structure?
Just as I said that the national chairman will be consolidated into a substantive national chairman. Also, the national secretary issue will also be resolved. Nyesom Wike’s issue will also be resolved. I guarantee you.
I can assure you he will be expelled at that particular congress because his actions, just like Anyanwu, disqualifies him as a member of the party. He may claim to be a member of the party but look at the man saying Makinde is his friend.
How can Makinde be your friend when you are working for the President, and Makinde wants to be president. So, how can he be your friend? In the court of public opinion of the PPD, Wike is no longer a member of our party. At the forthcoming convention, the issue of Wike would also be resolved.
What happened in 2023 was this: Makinde is my friend but I’ve known Atiku long before I met him, and Atiku’s commitment to restructuring gave me confidence that this is the man we should support. I didn’t have a vote, but I predicted that he would win the nomination, and he got it. You see, he got the nomination because he had opportunity to contest what the party did. The mistake they made was that hey talked about zoning.
They formed a 30-member committee to look at zoning. They said there was no zoning. It was not conclusive, but it appeared there was no zoning. Now, if you want to zone, you zone. And you say that anybody from this zone cannot purchase the form, therefore, they cannot contest. What if you sell the form to everybody?
That way, everybody can contest. So, we now know. We can make that mistake again. Secondly, the case of the national chairman, it is in the Constitution that if a national chairman is elected, we’re going to have the election of the national chairman before we have the presidential election. So, a national chairman would have emerged. If the national chairman is from the North, the presidential candidate can also not be from the North.
If a presidential candidate from the North wins the nomination, as Atiku did, Ayu, according to the constitution of the party, is supposed to step down. Ayu said on video that he would step down, but he didn’t. What I advise is that we should have this on record, signed and make it a legal document that once the presidential candidate is from the same zone as the national chairman, you must step down.
Also, this whole question of zoning must be very clear. If you are zoning, you are zoning. You cannot say you are zoning and then sell forms to everybody. So, once we get that right, we will not have a repeat of the confusion and the conflict we had in 2023.
