By Razaq Bamidele

THE interim National Chair­man of the Peoples Demo­cratic Party (PDP), Senator Alli Modu Sheriff has been endorsed as the sole candidate for the chairmanship office at the party’s National Conven­tion coming up in Port Har­court, Rivers State.

Sheriff was endorsed by all the delegates that attended the North-east zonal congress in Taraba State yesterday.

Our correspondent reported that the endorsement motion was moved by the Taraba State Governor, Darius Ishaku and seconded by his Gombe State counterpart, Ibrahim Dankwabo before all the 450 accredited zonal delegates in attendance unanimously en­dorsed him to represent the zone as the sole chairmanship candidate in Port-Harcourt with the assurance that he would have their 100 per cent votes.

In his acceptance speech, an elated Sheriff thanked the leadership and delegates of the party in the North-east for the confidence they had in his leadership that prompted them to honour him with the sole candidate ticket for the zone.

In an emotion-laden speech, the interim chairman extended an olive branch to aggrieved members of the party who were kicking against his lead­ership and also threatening to have a parallel convention, urging them to bury the hatch­et and come together for the benefit of the party.

In the same vein, Sheriff, who was a former governor of Borno State also apologized to whoever he might have wronged in the course of his duty.

He stressed that PDP never intended to slight any member of the great party but was all out to unite the party and not to divide it.

According to him, he felt it was his duty as a leader to reach out to aggrieved mem­ber of the PDP with a view to bringing them back into the fold as members of the fam­ily, which they were, stating emphatically that, “those who have been making scathing re­marks against some respected leaders of our great party were not doing so by my authoriza­tion.”

While accepting responsi­bility for anything that may have gone wrong in the party before now, Senator Sheriff said, “as a leader, I don’t bear grudges or engage in alterca­tion with fellow party mem­bers. He called on all party members across the country to bury the their differences and come together to support his leadership.

“It is by doing this that the PDP can bounce back to pow­er in 2019,” he enthused, ob­serving that, “infighting was one of the factors that caused the failure of the party in 2015 and we cannot toe the same path of internal wrangling to avoid a repeat of the 2015 mistake.”

On a final note, the en­dorsed North-east chairman­ship sole candidate asserted that, “this is what informed my call for a ceasefire and re­turn to the discussion table in the interest of the party.”