By Jamiu Yusuf
ABUJA: The camp of Federal Capital Territory FCT minister, Nyesom Wike, has dismissed the Peoples Democratic Party’s PDP latest zoning decision as belated, but however insisting it validates the position Wike and the G-5 governors took ahead of the 2023 elections.
Reacting to Monday’s resolution of the PDP National Executive Committee NEC to zone the 2027 presidential ticket to the South while retaining the national chairmanship in the North, Wike’s spokesman, Lere Olayinka, said the move amounts to an afterthought.
“The PDP has only gone back to its vomit. Sadly, they know the truth. Wike simply said, take the chairmanship to the South if you want to gain the presidency, but they said no, they must take the two, and the PDP lost,” Olayinka stated.
According to him, the decision amounts to an open admission that the party erred in 2022.
“They have realized the mistake they made in 2022 and are correcting it in 2025. But is it not too late already, bearing in mind that the only way the zoning can be justified is for the South to conclude its eight years, while the presidency returns to the North in 2031?” he asked.
Olayinka noted that Wike and his allies had consistently warned against concentrating both the presidential ticket and the national chairmanship in one region, a warning the PDP ignored to its detriment.
“Recall that the FCT Minister and the G-5 had insisted that the presidential candidate of the PDP and its National Chairman must not remain in the same zone, insisting that since Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, from the North, had emerged as the presidential candidate, Senator Iyorchia Ayu, also from the North, must resign to pave the way for a National Chairman from the South. Ayu, however, refused to step aside, with Atiku and his group backing him. The aftermath was the electoral misfortune the party suffered in 2023, followed by instability after the elections,” he recounted.
He further argued that the NEC’s latest resolution was nothing more than a belated endorsement of Wike’s position.
“Now that the party has realized its mistake of not listening to Wike and the G-5 in 2022, and have chosen to do what they said, three years after, have they not been vindicated now?
“For the NEC to now say that since the national chairmanship is in the North, the 2027 presidential ticket will go South, is simply the party coming back to eat its own vomit,” he added.
