‘No Zoning on Ground Now’

Written by This Day Friday, 09 July 2010

The National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo, speaks with newsmen on the controversial zoning arrangement in the party and other topical issues. Chuks Okocha presents the excerpts

How will you handle the ambition of many presidential aspirants jostling for PDP’s ticket and the emergence of campaign groups for President Goodluck Jonathan and General Ibrahim Babangida?

I think that is the easiest one to address because you know that our party is the largest party in our country and probably the largest in Africa. For us to have a presidential election, we will only have one candidate. There will be different presidential candidates and each candidate must have his own programmes for Nigerians. We will look forward to nominations that all these aspirants will buy. When I was the national secretary, I think about six candidates vied for the slot in Jos or more. There was no problem. We had a free, transparent primary election. At the end of the day, I think it was the first primary election anywhere in the third world that was so transparent. All the aspirants agreed with the results of the primaries, filed behind the winner and we won the general election.

We had an appeal panel. We didn’t have one single appeal in that election. So, I don’t see any problem with a lot of our members wanting to be the presidential candidate of PDP. What I promise them as the national chairman is that there will be a repeat of the Jos experience. It will be transparent and it will be a showcase. Those who will watch it live on television will see that it is possible again to have such a thing in Nigeria and we can keep repeating it in the interest of our country. That is the way things should be and that is the way they are going to be.

PDP is seen generally as a leaking umbrella in view of various crises rocking it.  How do you want to patch this leaking umbrella?
The root of 90 per cent of the crises in PDP is what I have been preaching against from the very day that I made my inaugural speech. It was the matter of handing the party to godfathers or godmothers and excluding the rest of the stakeholders. That is why I am saying that we have got to push this party back to the hands of the people.

The party belongs to the people. It is Peoples Democratic Party. I will keep saying this. I will keep repeating it. I will never be tired of repeating it because that is the truth. This party belongs to the people. It doesn’t belong to any one person and all these crises are generated by one person amortising the party to himself and then every other person is shut out. So, what we want to do is to try and reconcile all stakeholders and make sure that everybody has a stake.

If everybody has a stake, I don’t think there should be problems except from one person who may be greedy. If he doesn’t have the whole structure to himself, then there will be no way forward for such a person. We only have one way forward and that is for all of us who are stakeholders in every state of Nigeria to be comfortable about the structure of the PDP in our states. And with the national officers of the party, the structure can deliver free and transparent primaries in each of the states of the federation. This being the case, I don’t see where there will be problem again.

Didn’t you get to your current office through godfathers?
No godfather supported me o.

You mean President Jonathan and Governor Sullivan Chime didn’t support you?
They are stakeholders. The South-eastern stakeholders sat with the president and out of a number of candidates, they zeroed down to me.

They took it to the caucus which comprises the parliament, the party and the government. There again, it was debated forthwith. If your ear was on the ground, you would have heard this during the reception programme organized for me. At the end of the day, I came out as the choice of the caucus. Then, they took it to the Board of Trustees (BoT). Many people said I would never scale through the BoT scrutiny because of my wahala with former President Olusegun Obasanjo in the past, but he presided over the meeting.

In fact, it was at that point that I had a unanimous acceptance. Then, we left the BOT and we came to the National Executive Committee (NEC) and again the NEC was uninanimous. Where is the godfather with unanimous members? Before we went to the caucus, the South-east governors took me to the council of governors. Again, at the council of governors, I came out almost unanimously accepted. What they told me was that their decision was unanimous when they called me. Then people said Ah! these governors are imposing the chairman again and I had to battle to defend myself that I was not a candidate of the governors.
How do you intend to revisit zoning in the party? Was it a coincidence that the Co-ordinator of Jonathan Support Group represented the president at the reception organized for you?
That is for Mr. President. That was the man that came to represent him.

How he came, I have no idea. About the first part of your question on zoning, yes, I told the (British Broadcasting Corporation) BBC and I repeat to you again that zoning in PDP has been jettisoned. There is no zoning on ground right now. Absolutely, there is no zoning. In 1999, there was zoning and only one Northerner insisted on his inalienable right through the Nigerian Constitution to contest against the zoning arrangement of the PDP. I wrote a letter to him and returned his cheque. That was the late Abubakar Rimi of blessed memory.

In 2003, after four years of Obasanjo in government, candidates sprang up from across the country. They paid money. They canvassed and nobody returned their money. Nobody wrote them that there was zoning. In 2007, there were more candidates from Southern Nigeria than we had in  Northern Nigeria and I think if that primary election was allowed to hold without interference, maybe somebody among Peter Odili, Donald Duke or Sam Egwu would have won. They all paid. Nobody returned their money. Nobody stopped them. Nobody talked about zoning.
They all contested. Why zoning now? Why? 

We have jettisoned it but we can revisit it. I’m not afraid about revisiting it. If we think that we need to revisit zoning today, let us revisit zoning. But the one we did in 1999, no, no, no, no, it has been jettisoned by PDP itself. So, those who are talking about that agreement are not following the history of the party?

The party has never stopped anybody from contesting after 1999 on the altar of zoning. But if they want us to zone the Presidency now, we will go through the process. We will start from the Central Working Committee. We will prepare a memo on the advantages and disadvantages of zoning. We will take the memo to the caucus. The parliament and the government will make their inputs on which way to go. We will take it to the BOT - the conscience of the party and draw from their wealth of experience.

Then, we will modify the scale with their inputs. And then we will have the final debate at NEC which takes final decision for PDP. Right now, nobody can get up and tell me there was zoning or there was no zoning. If we want to zone, we have to go through this process because the earlier arrangement on zoning is not working any more.