Over 3,000 delegates from across the country are expected in today’s non-elective convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) holding at the Eagles Square, Abuja.
Addressing a world press conference yesterday, National Publicity Secretary of the party, Prince Dayo Adeyeye, said that the delegates from the six geo-political zones were already in town for the big event.
Describing the convention as a unity gathering of the PDP family, Adeyeye said that the international community was in Abuja to monitor the exercise.
“It will be a carnival-like convention, the like of which we have never seen before. We have delegates from the Africa Union, the United Nations and the rest of the international community,” he added.
Obviously elated by the positive twist of events since the August 12, 2017 Supreme Court judgment affirming the leadership of the Ahmed Makarfi-led National Caretaker Committee, Adeyeye said that there would have been nothing left of the party if the ruling had gone the other way, an apparent reference to the then Senator Ali Modu Sheriff-led faction of the party.
“This unity convention is going to be a celebration for the PDP. I can tell you that if the decision of the Supreme Court had gone the other way, there would have been no PDP today,” he noted, even as he called on Nigerians to be vigilant, lest they fall to the propaganda of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
While enumerating some of the giant strides of the PDP in the course of its 16 years in power, Adeyeye said that the onus was now on Nigerians to decide which of the political parties mean well for them and the country. “Nigerians remember with nostalgia life under the PDP and they are yearning for it to come back.
“I challenge anybody to deny that the achievements of this great party are comparable to any other in Nigeria.
“We bequeathed the largest economy in Africa to the APC but they squandered it within six months to one year,” he stated, describing the two years administration of President Muhammadu Buhari “as the worst era in the history of Nigeria.”
Adeyeye also chided the current administration in the fight against corruption, describing same as “a witch-hunt of the opposition.”
“The only thing you need to do today is to cross over to the APC and all your sins would be forgiven. All APC members are saints and others are sinners,” he noted, adding that the entire anti-corruption crusade is a ruse considering the weight of allegations against the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Ibrahim Magu.
He also advanced reason for the apparent silence of the PDP on the alleged recovery of huge sums of money from the the ex-Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison Madueke, saying the EFCC has turned itself into prosecutor and the jury, “trying suspects on the pages of newspapers.”
On the purported decimation of the Boko Haram insurgency by the current administration, Adeyeye urged Nigerians not to forget that prior to the 2015 elections, the PDP government under President Goodluck Jonathan “held elections in every Local Government Area in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states,” the base of the terrorist sect; a feat he said is not possible today considering the menace of the sect in the last couple of months.