PDP Crisis: Party Leaders snub Sheriff, set for convention

Governors, leaders and other members of the Peoples Democratic Party have resolved to snub the factional National Chairman of the party, Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff, as they resolved to go ahead with the party’s national convention.

The convention holds in Port Harcourt on Wednesday, August 17.

The decision of the governors followed their inability and that of the Board of Trustees to pacify Sheriff to support the holding of the convention as scheduled.

The BoT and the governors had tried in vain to reconcile the Sheriff group with the party’s mainstream.

Indications that the peace moves had failed emerged at the meeting of the PDP Northern Leaders Forum where both Prof. Jerry Gana  and Senator Ibrahim Mantu, told the delegates that the convention would hold as planned.

Both men said that the party had concluded all plans to host the event, and that nothing will stop it.

Gana is the chairman of the BoT Reconciliation Committee that had met with the Sheriff faction on a number of occasions.

The former minister of information is also the co-convener of the Northern Leaders Forum.

Mantu, a former Deputy President of the Senate, is also a member of the BoT Reconciliation Committee.

The  meeting of the PDP Northern Leaders Forum, where both men spoke, was called to discuss issues relating to the planned convention and how the general interest of the northern region will be protected at the event.

Apart from amending some aspects of its constitution, the convention will also be used to elect new national officers for the former ruling party.

In order not to be caught unaware, the northern leaders meeting set up a special screening committee to look at the qualifications of all aspirants to various offices convention, and recommend to the region, aspirants to be adopted for the various offices.

Sheriff and members of his group had given many demands before they said the convention could hold.

Apart from insisting that the convention be postponed, the faction also asked that the venue be changed from Port-Harcourt to Abuja and that the chairman of the Convention Planning Committee, Governor Nyesom Wike, be removed.

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