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Ogun PDP rejects Markafi’s dissolution of EXCO

By Charles Coffie Gyamfi, Abeokuta
18 August 2017   |   4:22 am
The factional Chairman of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Ogun State, Adebayo Dayo has rejected the purported dissolution of the state executive council.

Ahmed Markafi

• Says there would be no congress until 2020
The factional Chairman of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Ogun State, Adebayo Dayo has rejected the purported dissolution of the state executive council.

He disclosed his faction’s position yesterday at a press conference in the PDP Secretariat, Abeokuta, the state capital. Sikirulai Ogundele leads the other faction.

Dayo said the dissolution by the Senator Ahmed Markafi-led National Caretaker Committee was a “selective injustice.”

He urged the committee not to be used by “anti-democratic and desperate elements” who are seeking to control the party in the southwest.

He stressed that the state executive was created through the PDP’s extant process and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The Markafi-led committee had, on August 12 dissolved the Ogun and Osun states’ executives at the party’s non-elective national convention in Abuja.

Dayo stressed that his EXCO had been validated by a Federal High Court judgment.

According to him, the party’s 71st National Executive Committee that preceded the May 2016 convention in Port Harcourt ratified the congresses in 31 states, including Ogun.

He expressed concern that Markafi, who publicly acknowledged the ratification, would not revert to the decision taken at that National Executive Committee.

Dayo explained that the Markafi committee, in a letter in July 2016, also authenticated the EXCO and listed them among the delegates who attended the aborted second convention.

While quoting Article one, sub-section two of the PDP’s constitution, he said: “We strongly posit that the national convention cannot repudiate a validly constituted state executive, which had been further legitimised by the judgment of a Federal High Court, which it did not appeal against.”

Dayo disclosed that the PDP in Ogun would approach the Supreme Court, if the national leadership succeeds at the Appeal Court.

He explained: “For us in Ogun State PDP, there cannot be fresh congresses until 2020, neither would any caretaker committee be established for the same purpose.”

Wondering why the national body “could contemplate illegality and impunity,” he said: “The fact that the committee acted in deviance of two new subsisting court orders and judgments made all the decisions taken at the convention to be illegal.”

On the meeting by the PDP South West Stakeholders and Reconciliation at the Government House, Akure, Ekiti State, Dayo said “Fayose is part of the party’s problem, how could they hold a meeting in his house, since the party is beyond the governor?”

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