*Aggrieved group appoints officers
Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja
One of the aggrieved members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Mr. Emma Nwosu Butches,, has said that the party owes former President Olusegun Obasanjo a debt of gratitude for his critical assessment of its leadership.
The former president had said in his letter of admonition to President Muhammadu Buhari that neither the ruling party APC nor PDP is a worthy horse to ride to lead Nigeria at this crucial and critical time.
Obasanjo said unless, these major parties rebrand and refocus on serving the interest of Nigerians, they would need to replace them with a new coalition.
However, Nwosu whose splinter group, Fresh PDP is still holding out against the party, described Obasanjo’s epistle as a “political expo” to the main opposition party which if well internalised will help it regain power in 2019.
“Obasanjo just released what I will like to call “a political expo” in which he raised heavy weather over the state of governance in our dear country.
“We have carefully studied the letter and are very convinced that we owe it a duty to our party members who look up to Fresh PDP as the last hope of survival for the party, to react to the particular area of the letter that directly affects our party,” he said.
He said the lesson for the party from what Obasanjo has said is that it should be doing everything possible to depart from impunity and imposition of candidates and to let go all old practices that made Nigerians to lose faith in it.
Nwosu who is leading the aggrieved PDP group, said they have appointed a 29- member caretaker National Working Committee under his leadership.
Speaking on what went wrong in the reconciliation that saw some members dumping him to pledge loyalty to the national chairman of the party, Prince Uche Secondus, the Anambra-born politician said those who surrendered did so because they were after pecuniary benefits.
He said the group would prefer a reconciliation spearheaded by the party’s Board of Trustees which is the recognised body saddled with rescuing the party from crisis.
He explained that the essence of the interface with the party leadership should be to extract a commitment to end impunity and to ensure that elections in the party are made to be free, fair, credible and free from manipulation from any quarter
