The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will be reaching out to its founding fathers in the bid to reposition itself for the 2019 general elections. An itinerary on the consultative visits signed by the chairman of the Adhoc Committee on Publicity, Chief Raymond Dokpesi, stated that the party leaders will hold separate meetings with former President Goodluck Jonathan and former national chairman of PDP, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur today. The delegation will on a later date meet with former military President, General Ibrahim Babangida. Tukur had, last year, announced that he was retiring from partisan politics, but a source said he is still in the plan to rebrand the party.
A member of the committee, Professor Tunde Adeniran confirmed the planned consultative visits by Prof. Gana group.
The party, which last week held discussions with seven political parties to form a new platform, United Forum of Democrats (UFD), to tackle the All Progressives Congress (APC), is leaving no stone unturned to woo back its founding fathers.
A pointer to this was the presence of former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Mallam Adamu Ciroma and Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu at the presentation of the report of the Strategy Review and Inter-party Affairs Committee last week.
The committee, which was headed by former Minister of Information, Prof. Jerry Gana, was further mandated to reach out to other PDP founding fathers and brief them on the plans to return the party to its past glory.
Adeniran disclosed that the idea is to reassure them of the plan to restore the PDP to the vision of the founding fathers.
“We intend to meet the stakeholders, everybody, including the founding fathers of the party to intimate them on the present situation in the party and the efforts being made to reposition the party. “We intend to go back to the core values of the party, the mission, the vision of the party, so that genuine internal democracy can be restored.
“We want to make sure that things become as it should. No doubt, some mistakes have been made in the past where due process was not followed in many things and then the triumph of impunity and lack of succession in leadership, all these things are to be corrected now.
“So, we believe that the ways of doing things such that people’s confidence will be restored to the party and for them to support the party and lift it up to take over power again should be restored.
“For us to achieve this, we believe that every stakeholder is important, particularly the founding fathers of the party,” he said.
The Court of Appeal sitting in Port Harcourt, Rivers State will, Thursday this week, deliver judgement in the PDP leadership tussle.
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