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‘How I was used and dumped by PDP’

By John Akubo, Lokoja
01 February 2015   |   11:00 pm
THE National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Adamu Mu’azu, may not be alone after all in his recent assertion that injustice was responsible for the mass defection of party members to the opposition.   Adding credence to this observation is Senator Alex Usman Kadiri, erstwhile stalwart of the PDP, who has joined the opposition All…

Kadiri--

THE National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Adamu Mu’azu, may not be alone after all in his recent assertion that injustice was responsible for the mass defection of party members to the opposition.

  Adding credence to this observation is Senator Alex Usman Kadiri, erstwhile stalwart of the PDP, who has joined the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC). 

  Notwithstanding his contributions to the PDP, those who were not original members of the party, but imposed as governor and leaders, sidelined Kadiri.

  At the inauguration of President Jonathan’s campaign organisation, Mu’azu, in his speech, turned to Jonathan and said: “Mr. President, I want you to discuss with your governors, senators, members of the House of Representatives and other elected officials.

  “We say that members of the PDP should not be used and dumped again. People leave the party because of lack of equity or justice.

  “‘Monkey dey work, baboon dey chop’. That must stop. This time around, monkey must work and monkey must eat.

  “A lot of people who left (our party) did so because of injustice in our party. The party is full of injustice.

  “The membership of the APC, LP, APGA and others are increasing because of this. All these members are from our party. We must find out what is wrong and correct it.”

  In an interview with The Guardian over his defection to the APC, Senator Kadiri set the record straight, insisting that he was “used and dumped.”

  He said he confronted the PDP chairman in the state several times, and yet, the party ignored him.

  “I believe I have contributed so much for the party at the state level and at the national level that I don’t deserve to be so treated,” he said.

  “My dumping the PDP for APC is not a sudden happening; it came up as fallout of a catalogue of misdeeds on the part of the PDP. 

  “They were no longer inviting me to meetings that I was supposed to be invited in line with the constitution of the PDP.

  “I confronted the state PDP chairman on different occasions in front of the North Central Zonal chairman of the PDP, Alhaji Aitogo in Senator Ogbeha’s house in Lokoja. 

  “I requested to know from him if I have been expelled or suspended from the party? He denied.”

  Kadiri said the second occasion of challenging the party leaders over his neglect was in Captain Idris Wada’s House in Odu, when his father died.  

  “I felt neglected as if I have not been involved in all the PDP activities,” he said.

  “Three months later, the situation had not changed, as I was not being invited despite all kinds of meetings — stakeholders’ meetings and all that. I was still excluded. 

  “So, I wrote a letter to the state chairman of the PDP and I made him to sign having received the letter.

  “The letter was copied to my local government chairman, as well as my ward chairman. As I am talking to you, being the 24th of January, I have not received any response from anybody.

  “We have been shouting; impunity is the alternative word for the PDP; they do things and believe that nobody can challenge them.

  “Those who are in power today believe they own PDP and they have been steering the ship of the party to the point of wreck. I think they have virtually wrecked it. It is their making.”

  Senator Kadiri indicated that some of his colleagues still in the PDP spoke with him after he joined the APC; a good number of them sent text messages to him, which he has not deleted from his phone.

  His words: “The messages are very instructive. I wouldn’t mention names but at a point in time, we will all answer our fathers’ names. 

  “One said, Oh, he was even surprised that I waited this long; another said it was catastrophic; all kinds of phrases.

  “I know Adamu Mu’azu and he knows me as Alex Kadiri. He knows me in person and he knows that for me to take a decision like I have taken means that I must have been pushed to the wall, and I was really pushed to the wall.”

  He labeled the PDP, as a party, as the same thing at the state and at national levels, saying he would be better off in the APC, his new party.

  “Like I told somebody, APC is a ‘new party.’ What I may suffer in APC cannot be worse than what I have suffered in PDP; it is a new beginning,” he said.

 On advice to Governor Wada on how the state should move forward ahead of the February elections, Senator Kadiri, who hails from the same area as Wada, spoke in affirmation.

  “I think every well-meaning Nigerian, every well-meaning Kogite, every well-meaning Igala and Dekina person must have spoken to this governor on the course to follow but all of them are deaf,” he said.

  As a stakeholder of Kogi State and all that has transpired in the last16 years, Kadiri said, “Kogi has been very unlucky; we are an unlucky state.” 

  He continued: “May be you were not at the public domain when the agitation for Kogi State started. I was the assistant national secretary of the Kogi State Movement. T.W.B was our secretary; Ahmadu Ali was the chairman. 

  “In my custody today, I still have all the manuscripts from which we typed for the request, which we sent to the National Assembly in 1981. 

  “All the aspirations we had for Kogi, none has been actualised, right from the military to Abubakar Audu, to Ibrahim Idris to this current fellow (Wada). 

 “In the first place, they have no vision for the state; therefore, they also had no mission.

  “Like a friend told me in Okene, “When we asked you people to give us somebody to govern this state, you gave us a tailor (Audu); we said the tailor was not good and you gave us a carpenter (Idris); what do we call the one (Wada) that you have given us now? 

  “This is a highly placed citizen of this state. The questions he asked me, I couldn’t reply because I understood where he was coming from. 

  “We ended up now with somebody as is a governor of the state, who was not even a member of the party that put him up for election. 

  “He was never a gubernatorial aspirant; he had no thinking as to what to do if he got power because he never asked for it; he never struggled for it because he was not in the system. 

  “But somebody brought an in-law to cover his track and look at where it has landed us.”

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