Ali Modu SheriffWith the crisis in Nigeria’s main, but factionalised, opposition party continuing to worsen, the Ekiti State Governor, Mr. Ayodele Fayose, described Saturday’s visit of Senator Ali Modu Sheriff to former President Olusegun Obasanjo, as the “coming together of collaborators (for) the total annihilation of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)”.
Mr. Sheriff was elected PDP chairman at a controversial convention that was later labelled null and void by another faction of the party led by Mr. Ahmed Makarfi, a former Governor of Kaduna state. Mr. Sheriff was the former governor of Borno state.
The Makarfi led-faction failed to hold its own convention some weeks ago after some heavily armed Federal Government security agents, apparently obeying orders from President Muhammadu Buhari’s men, prevented members from accessing the venue of the convention in Port Harcourt.
However, members met somewhere else and decided to appoint Mr. Makarfi as acting Chairman of the PDP for a year.
Since then, several court orders have left Nigerians confused and members of the once ruling party divided and unsure of who was really in charge – Makarfi or Sheriff.
On Saturday, Mr. Sheriff paid a visit to Mr. Obasanjo, who once was one of the strongest pillars of the PDP before he tore his membership card before last year’s presidential election, after he fell out with former President Goodluck Jonathan, the man he chose in 2006 to be the running mate of the Late President Umaru Musa YarÁdua who died in office, paving way for Mr. Jonathan to take power.
But the relationship between Mr. Jonathan and Mr. Obasanjo collapsed and Mr. Obasanjo wrote an open letter to him, saying corruption had reached an unbearable level. Mr. Obasanjo himself is perceived to have enriched himself while in office, although he left billions of dollars in the foreign reserves.
On Saturday night, Governor Fayose, a vocal member of the PDP who first backed Mr. Sheriff before repudiating him in public and attacking him consistently in the media in the weeks and months that followed labelled Mr. Sheriff’s visit to Mr. Obasanjo, also known as chief Obasanjo or OBJ as useless.
He said it was on record that both Mr. Obasanjo and Mr. Sheriff “collaborated to destroy the All Nigerians Peoples Party (ANPP) and their meeting today must be to further collaborate to destroy the PDP”.
In a statement by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Mr. Lere Olayinka, Mr. Fayose said “Sheriff can as well begin to sleep in Obasanjo’s house, it is good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“Since Obasanjo is no longer a member of the PDP and he has consistently maintained that he can never return to the PDP, only those in the same league with him can go about visiting him.”
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