Monday, November 17, 2014

Jonathan may lose Cross River over lingering crisis – Ambassador

A Former Nigerian Ambassador to Mali, Mr. Sony Abang, on Monday expressed the fears that  the adopted candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party for the 2015 Presidential elections, President Goodluck Jonathan, may lose in Cross River State if the intra-party crisis in the state continues.
Abang,  who is also a two term chairman of the party in the state,  stated this in an interview with journalists in Abuja.
He alleged that the leadership of the PDP in the state was allegedly sacrificing the collective interest of its members on the alter of personal interests of certain individuals who joined the party barely a year ago.
He also lamented that the current leadership of the party was in the hands of non politicians who were until recently,  in the civil service before they retired and drafted into politics by the leader of the party in the state.
He said, “If we go to the 2015 election with the way things are,  I am not too sure that the PDP will have a good outing in the state. The present leadership did not emerge through the same process that brought us in.
“When I was a local government chairman,  it was a consensus among all the party leaders that I should come and head the party.  It was not the decision of one individual but today, the choice of the state chairmanship, was the decision of one or two persons.
“They wanted somebody, who will just be there to do their bidding. The state chairman,  everybody knows,  is a civil servant who just retired.  He was the Clerk of the state House of Assembly. He doesn’t know anything about party administration. He doesn’t even know the people he was supposed to administer.”
The politician, who regretted that the actions of the political actors in the state had drafted him away from active politics at the moment,  said the PDP membership strength which was about one million as at 2008, had dropped to 200, 000 now in the state.
He said, “We have an election in 2015 and we know the implications.  When I left as party chairman in 2008, the membership of the PDP in Cross River State was nearly one million because we had a policy that every  eligible voter in the state must be induced to be a member of the PDP.

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