PDP crisis: Melaye’s criticisms on leadership are addressed by stakeholders
PDP Frontliners, a group of party supporters, have chastised Dino Melaye, the party’s previous nominee for governor of Kogi State, for allegedly defaming the party by making baseless verbal attacks against its leaders.
Melaye’s claims that the party has been “commercialized and privatized” under Amb. Umar Damagum’s leadership were deemed impolite by them.
This was said in a statement yesterday in Abuja that was signed by the president, Alhaji Hussein Mohammed, the secretary, and the publicity secretary, Mr. Dan Okafor.
Following Melaye’s outburst, the leaders of the PDP claimed that “vultures of different hues” both inside and outside the party are now circling, expecting to witness the party’s demise and seize swift advantage.
As devoted party members, they pledged to resist. They promised to battle alongside other progressive members to prevent the success of such terrible expectations and the individuals who support them.
“These are strange times for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), its Kogi state governorship candidate in the last elections who got huge resources but woefully failed to do any serious political mobilization,” the statement said in part. “Now has the guts to come out and say that the party is being destroyed by the exact officials who facilitated his governorship ticket and persuaded others to step down.”
“You can all see the baseless and groundless insult he is using to pay back,” the statement reads. “Many who benefited generously from PDP are now among the party’s biggest headaches. Dino Melaye got PDP ticket to the House of Representatives, and even after returning from the APC, the PDP gave him a senatorial ticket after forcing other qualified aspirants to step down.”
The group said that Senator Melaye’s decision to ignore his own well-known flaws and unfairly blame the party’s acting national chairman, Umar Iliya Damagum, national secretary, Senator Samuel Anyanwu, and national organizing secretary, Umar Bature, for the party’s poor performance was a gratuitous insult to the people of Kogi State and the PDP.
The group continued, “Dino Melaye received large contributions for the Kogi state governorship last year, including cars from PDP stakeholders, but he never gave campaign money to party structures or even PDP polling agents throughout Kogi state; it has never been this bad since 1999, but Dino Melaye’s failure earned PDP a meager 46,000 votes in the entire state, and the governorship candidate himself did not even bother to vote!
This Melaye boldly posted, “End of the road for PDP as Damagun, Bature, and Anyanwu irredeemably destroyed the party,” on the social media site X, which was formerly known as Twitter. We’ll discuss PDP’s commercialization and privatization. PDP was formerly known as.
Members suspect an ongoing agenda to even scam Kogi state PDP once again. “Ironically, this fellow now talking about how our party is dying was implicated in efforts to scuttle the PDP ward congress in Kogi state, in an abortive effort to commercialize and ‘deliver’ to a paymaster for a desperate outing in 2027.”
The unjustified rage directed towards Damagum and the PDP leadership started when they acquiesced to our group’s and 18 of the 21 PDP chairmen’s August 9 call in different
local government areas of Kogi state to prevent the state’s Caretaker Committee from substituting an arbitrary process that was hastily scheduled for Saturday, August 10 but canceled by the national leadership for the outcomes of a free, fair, and orderly ad hoc delegates’ conference on July 27, 2024.
“Clearly, someone is trying to con us and profit from the PDP base of support in Kogi state; or is it not an odd irony that the same minority clique that was responsible for the botched attempt to sell and privatize Kogi state PDP prior to the 2027 primaries now boldly accuses those who put an end to the manipulation so forcefully?”
The PDP’s supporters expressed hope that, with the right actions done, the party will overcome its current problem and reemerge as the preferred choice in Kogi State and throughout Nigeria.
