Segun James
The Lagos State Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) seems to be in crisis as five of the six governorship aspirants in the party have called for the outright cancellation of an alleged delegates list of the party.
The party state Chairman, Mr. Philip Aiboji, at a press conference yesterday in Lagos said the state executive “reject in its entirety the Ad-Hoc delegate list brought by the electoral committee to Lagos State for the purpose of conducting the state House of Assembly and House of Representatives elections in Lagos State.”
The chairman, who was flanked by four governorship aspirants, including Mr. Olarewaju Jimi-Kamal, Mr. Rhodes Vivor, Mr. Deji Doherty, and Dr. Ade Dosunmu, said: “We are all shocked to see that the list does not reflect the authentic elected ad-hoc delegates as conducted by the organs of the party at ward level and supervised by officials of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the DSS.”
While lamenting that the delegate list used by the ad-hoc did not emanate from his executive committee, Aiboji said: “We realised that contrary to the provision of our great party and the electoral guidelines of the party, the election committee came to the state with the list venues and already chosen electoral officers. This is the responsibility of the state executive committee of our party and therefore totally unacceptable.”
Aiboji said the chairman and secretary of the election committee meant to conduct the House of Assembly primary have not reported to the state chairman or state organ of the party “and up till this moment, we cannot reach out to the committee chairman and secretary. Their telephones have either been switched off or unreachable.”
They said as law-abiding members of the party, “we collectively reject this list and we cannot guarantee free, fair and credible party primaries that we have sworn to conduct. The process have been compromised ab initio and skewed to favour a particular aspirant.
“We, therefore, call for the outright cancellation of the election exercise. Doing otherwise would not only jeopardise the chances of the party at the polls, it will also lead to a plethora of endless litigations afterwards.”
