Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has rebuffed repeated pleas from concerned member of the Peoples Democratic Party to help revive the party following its defeat in the March 28 presidential election.
Concerned about the future of the party, after its candidate and sitting president, Goodluck Jonathan lost the March 28 Presidential election to Gen. Muhammad Buhari of the All Progressives Congress, some of its leaders have been reaching out to Obasanjo to return to the party and help build it ahead of future elections.
The former president had in February directed a fellow PDP member and ward leader to openly tear his party membership card at a forum in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
According to a report by Premium Times, an online newspaper, among those persuading Obasanjo to return to lead the party were serving governors and federal lawmakers who believed the party should play viable opposition in the next dispensation.
Obasanjo’s close allies said the anxious party men have been pressuring the former leader, who was the first elected president on the party’s platform, by either visiting him or through telephone calls.
It was learnt that the former president, who was also the PDP leader and Chairman of its Board of Trustees, has repeatedly rebuffed the request to return to the party.
Sources close to the former president said at some point, he told those mounting pressure on him that rather than returning to the party he would encourage viable opposition from other standpoints.
“I’m done with party politics here on earth and in heaven. Period,” Obasanjo was overheard telling a PDP chieftain who telephoned him recently to raise the matter.
Obasanjo was also said to have told some people pressuring him that he could have considered returning to the party had his membership card not been publicly thorn before the general elections.
He was quoted as saying his membership card has been shredded and that “as it is now, a goat has eaten up the pieces”.
Obasanjo himself has confirmed that he has been under pressure to return to the PDP but vowed not to do so.
“I’m not ready to discuss partisan politics because I’m done with it,” he said in a telephone conversation with Premium Times.
Recalled that the outgoing governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, had after a meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan in February, assured that the PDP would beg Obasanjo to return to the party.
“When a father is angry with his children, the children should beg him. Baba is more than a party man. He is an icon, a national symbol and a leader and inventor, a creator of all the institutions today in Nigeria from the president to the governors, who are his own sons, are all his creations.
“And so when a father is angry with his children, we will only say we are sorry to him. But then, we cannot be renounced for whatever it is…….We might have made some mistakes, but abandoning us is not the solution because the country is first before anything else. So, he is our Baba even up to the president.”
But Obasanjo told PREMIUM TIMES he has foreclosed any possibility of returning to the PDP. “I agree that Nigeria needs a strong and viable opposition and I will continue to encourage that.
“I will continue to do that even without belonging to a political party. I have moved beyond party politics.”
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