LAGOS AUGUST 13TH (URHOBOTODAY)-The crisis rocking the National leadership of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) may have been resolved as the Senator Ahmed Makarfi led faction has conceded to the leadership of Senator Ali Modu Sheriff and has agreed that Sheriif should continue in office for three months to conduct a fresh national convention of the party and at a neutral venue.
At a reconciliatory meeting in Abuja on Tuesday attended by some members of PDP Board of Trustees (BoT), led by Professor Jerry Gana, it was also agreed that the party’s National Convention be postponed from the August 17, 2016 earlier proposed by the factional committee and that; no fresh congress be conducted in any part of the country by the party but to rely on the earlier one conducted by Modu Sheriff.
Modu Sheriff as the National Chairman also insisted that the date and the venue of the fresh convention must be set by all the party’s stakeholders and approved by its National Executive Committee.
At the end of the meeting which ended on a convivial note, members of the reconciliatory committee agreed that the committee would reach out to all the Governors on the platform of the PDP to engage them to accept the resolutions.
Earlier, the National Chairman of the PDP, Senator Ali Modu-Sheriff, said the rule of law must prevail for the party’s crisis to be resolved.
According to him, the crisis lingered because leaders in the party were not alive to their responsibilities and keep perpetuating it.
“I am ready to listen at anytime to the committee but for the crisis to be fully resolved, the rule of law must be followed.
“The moment we want to use impunity to address another, it will not work.
“If our leaders had taken up their responsibilities, we would never have had most of the problems we are facing today,” he said.
Sheriff had accused the trouble shooting team, made up of members of the BoT, of complacency over what he called the high-handedness and impunity of the PDP Governors.
According to him: “people want to use one impunity to correct another, it will never work. I want to put it on record that I never asked or wanted to be national chairman of the PDP. People came to beg me to fix the party after the loss of the election in 2015”
“Governor of Bayelsa State came and I objected initially. A lot of misinformation is going round. I took the responsibility to put the party together; and I did my best within the period. I respect a lot of my leaders; however, most of the problems we experience today would not have happened if our leaders had taken their responsibilities seriously. We all want our party to be great again, but we must do away with impunity”.