Stakeholders in the Niger PDP endorse Beji for Chairmanship

Senator Zaynab Kure, the former Deputy Governor of Niger State, as well as Dr. Shem Nuhu Zagbayi and Mr. Umar Nasko, the PDP’s Governorship Candidate for the 2019 Election, have all endorsed Mr. Tanko Beji for a second term as the People’s Democratic Party’s Niger State Chairman (PDP).

The trio also asked all of their supporters to vote for Beji during the Saturday congress in various posts on their platforms yesterday.

They all agreed that Beji had put in a lot of effort for the party and deserved a second term as state chairman.

Previously, the party’s stakeholders from the three senatorial zones met in Bida last weekend and made similar decisions.

However, the camp of one of the Chairmanship Aspirants, Mr. Mukhtar Ahmed, was absent at the meeting in Bida, in addition to not attending the statekeholders meeting held at the party secretariat last week.

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The Ahmed camp has declared all plans for the congress to be illegal because the committee in charge of it, particularly its chairman Mr. Theophilus Dakkas Shan, the Zonal Secretary, Mr. Maurice Tsao, and the Zonal Treasurer, Mr. Emmanuel Ibrahim Ijah, were barred by the court from holding the special stakeholders and caucus meeting last week.

On behalf of the group, Abdulazeez Malami Abdullahi, Abdulmalik Garba, and Mohammed Idris Goro filed a lawsuit.

“With the restraining order, any action taken by the Shan committee is null and void because nothing can be put on nothing,” the group stated.

The court papers, a copy of which is in the possession of THISDAY, were filed on July 29, 2021, before Justice Binta Bawa, the Niger State High Court’s vacation judge.

In his interlocutory order, Justice Bawa restrained the defendants/respondents from holding the state caucus on July 29 or any other type of meeting in the name and capacity of the caretaker committee or whatever called or how called on behalf of the PDP Niger state chapter.”

The defendants/respondents were also barred from posing as a caretaker committee because their term had expired on May 21, 2021, and had not been renewed or extended by the PDP working committee.

Shan told reporters that his committee is not a “caretaker committee,” but rather a body “overseeing” the affairs of the PDP Niger State, and that the national working committee has given him the authority to hold the August 7 congress.

Because of two previous congresses that were botched, the PDP in the state has been in crisis for over a year.

As a result of the crisis, the party has split into two factions, one led by a former member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Mukhtar Ahmed, and the other by the state’s immediate past chairman, Mr. Tanko Beji.

The national leadership had attempted, but failed, to mediate a truce between the two warring factions. Even Senator Bukola Saraki’s peace and reconciliation committee, as described by Mr. Shan, was unable to reconcile feuding parties “struggling for the “beautiful bride” (PDP).