PDP: The BOT madness and Question Unanswered

Austin Okoro DDM NEWS

In a dramatic twist to the saga surrounding its National Secretary position, some members of the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Wednesday, February 5, 2025, decided to engage in a naked dance in the marketplace.

Such a shameless display that only children or adults under a spell could muster.

It was total madness, enough to ask the dissidents who gathered at Transcorp Hilton, Abuja, this all-important question: Who has bewitched you that you decided to embarrass yourselves?

To put things into perspective, at the end of its 79th meeting on Wednesday, January 29, 2025, held at the party’s national headquarters, the BoT set up a committee headed by Barr. Kabiru Tanimu Turaki, SAN, to “interface with the parties, study the situation, and report to the Board for further action” regarding the disputed position of National Secretary, currently occupied by Dist. Sen. Samuel Anyanwu.

The BoT’s exact words in paragraph 3 of its communiqué at the end of that meeting state:

“In the effort to resolve the current crisis over the position of the National Secretary of the Party, which is presently before the Courts, the BoT set up a committee led by Barr. Kabiru Tanimu Turaki, SAN, to interface with the parties, study the situation, and report to the Board for further action.”

The big questions those BoT members need to answer are: When and where did your committee sit to interface with the disputing parties [in this case, Sen. Samuel Anyanwu and Ude Okoye] and properly analyze the gamut of legal documents arising from the case?

Why did the BoT choose to call an emergency meeting at a hotel instead of the NEC Hall at the party’s National Headquarters?

Has the BoT, which had duly acknowledged that the matter is before the court, now decided to assume the position of the Supreme Court to give a verdict on the matter?

Why did the BoT choose to disregard a legally obtained Stay of Execution, which retains Sen. Anyanwu as National Secretary [a normal and legitimate practice] pending the determination of his appeal before the Supreme Court?

One can easily look at the actions of those BoT members and see crookedness and mischief.

Not only did they set out to turn the party’s constitution and procedures on their heads, but they have also taken the nation’s laws to mean nothing in such a bewildering manner.

Suffice it to say that they have taken their inordinate quest to oust Sen. Anyanwu—who was duly elected at a National Convention—to a level where members of the PDP who truly love the party must send them notes of caution for attempting to reduce the BoT to an association of jesters.

Who would have imagined that the seemingly mature men who gathered for that jamboree do not understand what it means for a court to stay an execution when a judgment debtor has not exhausted all legal avenues to seek redress?

If they are not checkmated now, assuredly, at the end of this battle, the PDP BoT will struggle to command as much respect as it has earned in the past, even as its role remains merely advisory.

Those who support Sen. Anyanwu should not fret. He has the full backing of the law, and with his detractors now choosing to behave like minors, they might just be making a superhero out of the PDP National Scribe by the time he, expectedly, laughs last.

Lancelot Obiaku, a public affairs analyst, writes from Owerri.

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