Our presidential candidate will be voted by all party members – PDP

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said it was planning to apply option A4 in electing its candidates for all coming elections, including presidential candidate for 2019 general polls.

It said that if approved by the membership of the party, the application of the method may begin with upcoming congresses of the party. National Publicity Secretary of the party, Chief Olisa Metuh, disclosed this when he received the former chairman of the National Patriotic Party (NPP) of Ghana, Mr Peter Manu, at the party’s national secretariat on Friday in Abuja.

Metuh said that the decision was part of the reforms to reposition the PDP for the 2019 general elections. He said that the system would not be restricted to presidential election as it would be applicable to others elective positions such as governorship, senatorial, house of representatives and down to the wards.

He explained that with the proposed system, party members would have to queue behind the candidates of their choice. “We are going to change our system to be that our presidential candidate would be voted for by all party members in the country. It would be at the ward level. “We will no longer elect presidential candidate at the national convention.

It will now be for every party member to vote for whoever would be our presidential candidate. “Whoever would vie for our presidential ticket would have to tour the entire country before he can be elected. “This is part of the reform we are coming up with. “Basically, this would be the last convention where we would have people to be elected at the national convention. We are taking the party back to the Nigerian people,’’ Metuh said. He said that the proposed reform was part of Sen. Ike Ekweremadu’s committee’s recommendations on how to reform and reposition PDP. He added that the proposed amendments had been sent to the state chapters for their inputs in line with “our desire to have peoples opinion’’. “After their inputs, the recommendation would be sent to the National Executive Committee (NEC) for approval. Earlier, Manu had said that the process of electing presidential candidate was one of the reforms his party adopted after it lost election to opposition party in Ghana in 2018.

“When we lost election, there was need to review and make amends and these amends led to some critical reforms in the party structure and organisation. “We realised for example, that the modus operandi of how our presidential candidate was elected had a hand in why we lost the general election. “There were as many as 17 presidential candidates in our 2008 contest when our incumbent president, John Kufor, was exiting and all the 17 presidential candidate were running for votes from a mere 3,500 delegates.

“So, it was money, money, money until the day of congress,’’ he said. Manu said that NPP realised that the then opposition party, which was now in government, used that against his party “and cast spell on us as being corrupt, that we were throwing money at the people’’. “ So, the first thing I did as the national chairman of the party was to expand the delegates system to cover the nooks and cranny of the party structure. “ So, the party structure was reorganized to start from the polling unit level where a five-member executive was elected.’'