Factional National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff has disclosed that the quest for the party’s presidential ticket for the 2019 election is the main cause of the current crisis tearing the party apart.
The former Borno governor is presently locked in a battle for the soul of the party with Senator Ahmed Makarfi, whose tenure as chairman of the national caretaker committee of the party was extended by 12 months in Port Harcourt last Wednesday.
But speaking in an interview with Africa Independent Television, AIT, Sheriff accused Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State and a former Deputy National Chairman of PDP, Prince Uche Secondus, of plotting to hand the party’s ticket to a prominent leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, who by his inference is former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar.
He said: “Wike and Secondus are working to give the party ticket in 2019 to a man in APC, a man that is not even bold enough to leave the APC and join us. He was in the PDP before. He was a founding father of the PDP.
“I don’t have to mention him. Secondus himself told me that he and Wike always meet this man to strategise plans on 2019. I told him that it is wrong. If the man is bold enough, let him come and join us now.
“They accused me of working for the APC. How? I have never played games like that. I had formed a party and was the BoT Chairman. I was a presidential candidate, three time senator, Minority Leader. Makarfi worked for the APC in 2015, Ben Obi was Atiku’s Vice Presidential Candidate, and Secondus and Wike are meeting an APC man regularly on how the party will be sold to him.
“Wike is full of arrogance and impunity. He is too small to pocket PDP. I will not allow him. There are people who can carry the flag within the party. PDP will not be sold.”
