The PDP will, next year, launch an aggressive campaign to regain the grounds it has lost to the massive onslaught by the All Progressives Congress (APC), Sen. Gyang Pwajok, has said.
“No doubt, the PDP has lost so much to the APC; we have maintained some studious silence and shall react like a wounded lion beginning from early 2014,’’ Pwajok told newsmen in Jos.
Pwajok, who attributed the loss to the focus on contending national issues by President Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP leadership, vowed that the situation would change in 2014.
“The challenges have been massive; security, management of limited resources, the national dialogue and persistent insurgencies.
“These challenges have been time consuming and require full attention, so what the party has done is to support the president to discharge his leadership role while the opposition has been busy playing politics,’’ he said.
He rejected suggestions that the PDP did not do enough to placate the dissenting governors and other members to stay in its fold.
“I think the dissenting governors had a mindset; they wanted to leave. All repeated attempts to placate them met a brick wall.
“We were part of some of the sessions; most of their demands were unrealistic and appeared only designed to justify an exit,’’ the senator claimed.
He agreed that the defections were a “major offensive’’ on the PDP, but was confident it would not pose serious threat to the party during the 2015 elections.
“It is just an assemblage of politicians whose cardinal objective is the presidency. They remain increasingly strange bed fellows whose collective motivation to capture the presidency is their binding point, but their individual ambitions could signal their collapse in the near future.
“Again, the defectors have been promised automatic tickets in 2015 and total control of the APC structures in their states, but they seem to forget that those that formed the APC had their ambitions.
“There is also another irony. The APC leaders will tell you that the PDP is populated by rogues, but it is the same `rogues’ that they are wooing to their fold and calling them saints.
“May be, politicians take the silent majority for granted, but I think that the voters are watching and waiting; they are appreciating the hypocrisy of the opposition and waiting for the elections, to pass their judgment,’’ he said.
Pwajok accused the APC of not telling Nigerians anything new other than the quest to replace the PDP, adding that the party has no particular agenda towards a better Nigeria.
He said that it was “too early’’ for the APC to celebrate, as those that defected would contribute very little to the party “since many of them are serving out their tenures”.
“Besides, there is the high probability of implosion in the APC when ambitions are not realized, and that could result into a new wave of massive dispersals,’’ he said.
He accused the opposition party of been obsessed with the presidency leaving out critical issues like the governorship and peculiar challenges in states.
Pwajok, therefore, challenged the PDP to be more creative, strengthen its internal democracy and ensure wider consultations so as to overcome the new political challenges.
Reacting to the senator’s comments, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, APC Coordinator in Kaduna State, said that the party had not promised automatic tickets to any of its new entrants.
“That is certainly not a cardinal principle of the APC; we regard every one as equal and shall treat everyone as such,’’ he said.
He also rejected suggestions that the party was only interested in the presidency.
“We are focusing on wrestling power from the PDP at all levels of governance; the APC is not about Buhari’s ambition. It is far more than that.
“We need quality governors, senators and members of representatives. In fact, we believe that governors are more important than the president because once the governors are good, the president will not have much worries.’’
