By Chukwudi Nweje
Chief Ola Apena, former deputy state chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Lagos State has decried the leadership crisis rocking the party and the controversy surrounding claims by the party’s 2023 governorship candidate, Abdul-Azeez Adediran popularly known as Jandor that he is now the apex leader of the party in the state, among other issues.
What do you make of the comment credited to Abdul-Azeez Adediran that those who worked against the PDP in the 2023 elections have ceased to be members of the party in Lagos State?
That is how it should be because if you work against your party, you cannot come around and claim to be a leader of the same party. Working openly and canvassing for other parties without a proper merger or alliance between your party and that party in question means you have relinquished your membership, leadership or whatever claim you have in that party. So, Jandor’s statement is in order as far as I’m concerned.
How about his claim that he is now the apex leader of the party because he was the governorship candidate in the last election?
There are so many interpretations to what he said that day because I was there but the point is that the party’s candidates in the gubernatorial election are automatic leaders of the party in their respective state. Of course, that does not remove the fact that we have another leadership level. But when you look at the level of stealing in that gubernatorial election; point to me any leaders of note in PDP apart from a few that did not participate in shenanigans, including the state chairman.
He came out openly to say that members of the party and the public should go and vote for the Labour Party. We have leaders that Jandor is still answerable to as his leader but not those who engaged in anti-party activities. So, it doesn’t matter whatever interpretation you give to it, the point is that those who canvassed for Labour Party under any arrangement cannot in all honesty claim to be members of the party.
Is there anything happening in Lagos PDP other than what Jandor said because his campaign director general said he never contested to win?
Well, there are no other things because apart from when we were in office when I was the deputy chairman, we were able to run the party in such a way that we had eight House of Representatives members and eight House of Assembly members. The governorship was rigged because if you look at the figures of Jimi Agbaje then and the figures of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, you will see that it was rigged.
The problem has always been that we have this set of dealers who masquerade themselves as leaders in the PDP in every election circle. What they are interested in is the money; they are not interested in winning elections. The struggle you see now is the struggle for the soul of the party to position themselves for another run of money-making venture.
We have intelligence that some of them even work for the All Progressives Congress (APC) but pretend to be leaders in the PDP. So, what you see going on now is struggle for the soul of the party by those who want to hold the party down and those who believe that the party must be freed from these dealers who will always find one excuse or the other to truncate the success of the party at the polls.
And talking about the former campaign director general; he was talking about Jandor being a mole in the party. Well, who is a mole? Yes, he came from the APC. We all saw before he came from the APC that he had been warming up to be the gubernatorial candidate of the APC but they shut the door against him and he found the PDP appealing.
He came and he was welcomed and about seven governors came and everybody was there. And he was loyal to all the leaders of the party. Then, the primary election came and he won the primary. During the campaign, we went to all the 245 wards in the state because I was in the team and it has never been done by any gubernatorial candidate. We were subjected to many things. Of course, you don’t do such things without some hardship, money is involved, and sleeplessness is involved and we were attacked in Surulere, Badagry, Kosofe and Agege. But we endured everything.
The election came and we lost, but election is a process, it doesn’t stop at losing the election. We saw an opening in our process of reclaiming our mandate and we challenged the process. We went to the tribunal, we spent money there, we lost there and we went to the Court of Appeal and up to the Supreme Court, challenging this same party that Jandor is alleged to be a mole in.
How can he be a mole? A mole would have stopped at losing the election and went back to his party. Dr Seye Dairo himself is a mole. As a campaign director, he was nominated but I joined the campaign team because I was working for Ade Dosunmu for the governorship. So, it was when Jandor emerged, as a party man, I was approached to come and work for Jandor. I went there but I realized that Dairo was not working for the success of the candidate.
So, he was sidelined and about two days to the election that was when this shenanigans about working for the Labour Party and all the rest came out and he left. So, who is a mole? How can a mole be calling a committed party member a mole? I know the constitution of the party and what they did and the punishment for anti-party activity is an explosion and we will get there.
The state chairman of the party and local government chairmen have called on Jandor to withdraw his statement and apologize to the leaders. Do you think he should tender an apology?
That is laughable because these are people who ordinarily should have been expelled from the party. But I think the national leadership is just trying not to heat up the system just as they have been taking it cool with the likes of Nyesom Wike and his gang of five governors. If not for that, why would Philip Aivoji of all people be talking as a chairman of the party? Do we even have a chairman in Lagos State?
I’m saying this categorically because he and the chairmen of local governments claimed that the national leadership gave them the go-ahead to work against the party. They even mentioned former Vice President Atiku Abubakar but he came out to deny that. I’m sure the National Working Committee of the party will also deny it because for you to work for another party during an election, there must be a merger or an alliance between your party and the other party and that alliance must be approved by the national because that is the only organ of the party that is empowered to form alliances.
You can’t do it at the state level, the local government level and ward level. If you do that, it is anti-party because the party resides at the national level and that is why if you want to sue the party, you can’t sue the Lagos State chapter of the party, you can only sue the national.
What is the way out of this entire quagmire in Lagos PDP?
The way out is for those who worked for the opposition to stay in the party they worked for. Let those who worked for the Labour Party stay in the Labour Party and let those who worked for APC stay in APC. Some have already gone to APC and let those who are still remaining leave the party. They are wreaking havoc in the party.
It is better to go to a battle with 10 committed soldiers than go with a battalion of unfaithful people. If we keep on doing the same thing the same way, we will continue to get the same results. So, let us have a breath of fresh air and the national leadership would have to do something drastic about it.
You said the national leadership has to do something but it is yet to sanction those who openly worked against the party like the former governors…
Your question is the way forward and the only way forward to me is for the national leadership to take a decision. But then, I know we have a problem at the national level but it is not insurmountable. Sometimes you have to be strategic and diplomatic in the way you go about things. Now that the dust of litigation and the election process for 2023 has been concluded, the next thing is politicking and providing opposition to the ruling party.
Because of the level of disloyalty and stealing that went into the election, talking about the five governors and individual disloyal members, what we are experiencing in Lagos is not only about the state. It happened across the states. The national leadership will have to take some measures so as not to rush into punishing those who are not supposed to be punished.
But in Lagos State, our case is very clear because those who did anti-party activities came out openly and they were on videos campaigning for other parties. They cannot deny authorship to a video where they openly canvassed for another party. One thing is certain, if PDP has to remain not only in Lagos State but at the national level, something drastic must be done, if not, there is no point.
If people whose stock in trade is to betray the party every four years are allowed to stay, then there is no point fielding any candidate because we will just be wasting our energy and resources. Let me tell you something; whether anybody likes it or not, Atiku will not be contesting forever. Atiku brought money in 2019, they embezzled it. He brought money in 2023, they embezzled it.
I don’t know whether Atiku will be running in 2027 and whether he will be bringing that kind of money for them to embezzle. So, where does the future of the party lie? Let us sanitize the party. It is either they come out and admit that they are guilty and show remorse or they leave the party. If they are to be pardoned at all, they must show remorse for us to be convinced that they won’t go back to their vomit.
But with all these grandstanding going on, you can be rest assured that if another election circle comes, what they are only interested in is who is going to be the national delegate because of the money they will share at the Eagle Square.
The party is preparing for a national convention; do you support the idea that it should conclude the zoning arrangement before the convention to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2023?
Of course, the rotational thing was a brainchild of PDP right from its inception and it was done for equity, inclusion, sense of belonging and all the rest. We must not run away from the fact that we are yet to be a country. We are just a bunch of nations; Igbo nation, Yoruba nation, Ijaw nation and many others but evolving into a country has not been there.
There is always this mutual suspicion between the North and South and the issue of rotation, particularly with regards to the six offices of the national chairman, president, vice president, Senate president, speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary to the Government of the Federation, is not one to be ignored.
We have six geopolitical zones, South-South, South-East, South-West, North Central, North-West and North-East. These six offices are first and foremost, usually spread across. Another aspect of the rotational thing is that wherever the national chairman comes from, the party’s presidential candidate does not come from there. So, any attempt to distort it will have dire consequences for the party.
You know what we went through in the last general election. If we don’t want a repeat of that, we must put our house in order. We must agree on which zone is producing which position. Between the North and South, who is producing the national chairman and the presidential candidate which goes equal. The presidential candidate and the national chairman cannot be from the North at the same time. I think the stakeholders of the party must as a matter of urgency resolve these issues before they go for the national convention.