2019: Kogi PDP aspirants reject automatic ticket for Dino Melaye, others
…Kick against ‘Right of first refusal’
Ahead of the 2019 general elections, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, National Assembly aspirants from Kogi State om Monday rejected moves by the national leadership of the party to give automatic tickets to Senator Dino Melaye and others who recently defected from the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC to the Party .
Addressing news men in Abuja yesterday, the aspirants said they got intelligence report that contrary to the earlier position of the national chairman, Prince Uche Secondus to conduct credible primary election, there are clandestine schemes by the party leaders to organise “predetermined and pre-arranged manipulated primary election” to pick anointed candidates.
In the text which was read by a senatorial aspirant, Dr Halifa Alfa, on behalf of all the aspirants, they claimed that the clandestine scheme to impose Senator Melaye and other defectors came to the fore when when of the aspirants went to house of one major stakeholder of the party in Kogi state where he met Senator Atai Idoko who informed him that “he was only wasting his time purchasing nomination form for House of Representatives.”
According to her, Senator Idoko told the aspirant that the PDP National Working Committee “had resolved and concluded plans to give the party’s ticket to serving Senators and House of Representatives members on a right of first refusal basis and to the exclusion of all eligible aspirants.”
According to her, “As if this was not enough, Senator Dino Melaye met with all the Local Government Executive members of the seven local governments that made up Kogi West senatorial district on Friday, August 31 and he boasted to them that the issue of senatorial ticket had been settled by the highest organs of the party
“According to him (Melaye), the party had resolved to give the ticket to him, being a serving senator decampee into the party regardless of the interest, aspiration, eligibility and qualification of the other aspirants.”
While warning of imminent implosion in PDP if the party leaders go ahead to impose Senator Dino and other defectors, the aspirants said they will stand with the party only on the condition that the candidates of the party emerges through “a transparent, free and fair primary election.
“However, if the party does not conduct a transparent primary election that gives equal opportunity to all we might be forced to work against the interest of the party.”
They attributed the failure of PDP in 2015 to “lack of internal democracy, imposition of candidates and lack of adherence to the party’s guidelines, constitution and principles of democracy.”
The Kogi PDP aspirants faulted the use of right of first refusal by PDP leaders to hand over the party’s ticket to incumbent office holders, insisting that in all democratic institution elective political office holders return to the party at the end of their tenures to renew their mandate and request for a new mandate through democratically sanctioned elective processes.
