Hon Teejay Yusuf, a three-term member of the House of Representatives has declared that the Federal Capital Territory FCT minister Nyesom Wike has heaved the blame of the crisis in the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP on the former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
Yusuf noted that the FCT Minister Nyensom Wike was not the major issue.
The former lawmaker who spoke on Channels TV programme where chronicled the problems of PDP from Genesis to Revelation stating that:
“Go into the archives, each time Atiku Abubakar fails to obtain the ticket of our party he junkets into another since 2007 till date.
“In 2007, 2014 immediately he lost out he dumped us and even in 2019 he ran to Dubai after the election abandoning PDP to swim alone.
“I led a group of lawmakers from Nigeria to see him in Dubai to convince him on the need to make our party a virile opposition, nothing happened.
“In 2023 we lost the presidential election and he was still hopeful of getting in 2027 but it’s so glaring that he can’t get it, he has dumped the PDP.
“His type of approach is ticket-in and ticket-out, once no ticket the man don waka.
Haba! How did we get there? I shared this on a different platform. PDP normally zone to North or South. The party positions came first and the chairman was zoned to the North. And the moment you have a chairman in one side, the presidency goes to the other side, it is natural to believe that the presidency will come to the South.
“However, the committee was set up to do the zoning chaired by Governor Ortom then, the then Governor of Benue State. But the Atiku structure was formidable a lot from the North. I was involved and they insisted that it should not be zoned.
“So when I hear people say I know, I even listened to him say if they had zoned to South East he wouldn’t have contested. I feel like crying that leaders will misinform the populace to manipulate them this way. We don’t zone to the geopolitical zone, we zone North and South.
“Two, the zoning thing was done with before forms came. So he was given an impression that if they had zoned to South East seeing Peter Obi’s vote in the election so as to appeal to those group that if they have been zoned to South East I wouldn’t have ran for the election.
He disrupted NEC because of zoning because he said it should not be zoned.
“So that is where you find this crisis. So don’t forget that Wike is a symptom. The real cause of the crisis we refuse to zone.
And they will come up with an argument that Buhari was not in PDP, that the last person that was president under PDP was Jonathan from the South, that it should come to the North.
“They brought the same argument in 2019 that was why all those who ran the presidential primary in Port Harcourt under PDP were from the North.
“So Wike now belongs to that group who said oh because you did not zone, you have fluffed the rules, the constitution of the party that there’s no basis for me to be loyal to you.
Then the people went into negotiation. I played a lot of roles trying to see how we could breach this but you could see arrogance, this conviction that it’s done, we have, just like they’re doing now, the election is done, PDP is dead, the same way, the same approach, no lessons learnt.
On the role of acting chairman of PDP, Teejay asserted that: “The constitution of our party said when the substantive chairman is not there, the next person in hierarchy from that zone, Ayu was the chairman and Ayu was taken and the next person was Damagum so that is the national chairman.
On the national Secretary he said “It was, there are plethora of I mean judgments and what have you, it was ego trip by some people and by those who are doing coalition believing that they will sustain that fight, those who want to run election in PDP will get discouraged out of fear they will join them in coalition.
“They are already working with coalition so there was no basis for that crisis of okay let’s even assume that there’s basis for it, his tenure expires November so why fighting for four months, there is zoning committee already, I don’t have the report yet but the information at my disposal is that they’ll still maintain the same position that in the North and in the South but not in the state that they are now.
“By implication if the secretary is going to South it will not be in Imo so you have zoned him out; so why are you fighting to the point it got to where it got to. There were those who felt their ego were bruised and what I don’t know and there are those who were working for the coalition to make sure it does not work.
“So let me come back to the Wike thing. I repeat I am working for PDP, Wike has his reason and why he took his position, I can’t question him, he has the right to it because you can’t put nothing on nothing.
“The moment the fundamentals that make a party a party is breached you cannot now be treating the reaction because we all react to things in different ways.
“There are those who go into their shell when they are being hit, there are those who cry, there are those who confront the situation and say hey “all die na die, we die here”. So why did you allow one man’s ambition to get us into that?
