Why we didn’t recommend zoning for PDP in our report – Mohammed

GOVERNOR Bala Mohammed has explained why the People’s Democratic Party committee on the review of the 2019 general elections, led by him, did not recommend zoning of the presidential ticket in its report.

Mohammed said zoning the presidential ticket may cause some regions to feel excluded during the 2023 general election.
He said this while speaking on Channels TV last night.

The governor, who attributed the defeat suffered by the party in 2015 to lack of internal democracy, maintained that the party would provide a level-playing field for all candidates, and encourage a merit-based process to forestall a repeat of 2015 performance.

He said, “In 2015, we lost because we were so over-confident and there was too much internal wrangling. We lost in the north, even in the states where we had comparative advantage, because of the wrangling that particularly came out of our lack of internal democracy,

“And that is why today, we are saying that we have seen some zones that have not had a shot at the presidency for a long time — the south-east and the north-east. But we’re not yet going to say that the choice of the presidential flagbearer should be left exclusively to those zones. We’ll give a level-playing field because good things are from every part of the country, and we have good hands.

“We are just saying that if we zone completely to those places, there may be some feelings of exclusion. There will be some feelings of even shortchanging Nigerians in terms of presenting the best. The merit-based leadership recruitment that we want to do, is even at the same time, looking at history.”

He, however, alleged that his party didn’t squarely lose the 2019 presidential election noting that the ruling All Progressives Congress won the election through “manipulation”

When asked if the party tendered evidence to the court when it challenged the result of the election, the governor said the party presented evidence but it was not accepted.

“We do not want to be the weeping boys, we have looked inward to see what had prevented us from winning the election. We have a lot of evidence, which we tendered but was not accepted. The issue now is that we know we are all Nigerians. We know the nooks and crannies of Nigeria. We know what happened in 2019,” Mohammed said.

“We are not only looking at the other side and playing the blame game; that is the fault of this present administration. We’re also critical in ourselves, where we have some gaps, loopholes and inadequacies.” he added.