From Jude Owuamanam, Jos
A member of the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and a former Governor of Plateau State, Sir Fidelis Tapgun, has told Governor Caleb Mutfwang to congratulate his rival, Nentawe Yilwatda Goshwe as the governor-elect of the state.
Daily Sun had reported that a three-man panel of the Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja had sacked Mutfwang and declared Nentawe as the winner of the 2023 governorship election on the fact that he (Mutfwang) was not validly nominated as the candidate of the party for the election in the state.
Nentawe had gone to the appellate court after the Governorship and State Assembly Election Petitions Tribunal in Jos had upheld Mutfwang’s election.
Tapgun, who spoke to selected journalists in his country home in Jos, the state capital, said that he completely aligned himself with the ruling of the appellate court that as at the time Mutfwang was nominated as the candidate of the party, PDP had no structure as a result of internal wrangling that rocked the party and its inability to obey the judgment of Justice SP Gang of the Jos High Court, which asked the party to go and conduct a congress to elect a proper state executive council.
According to him, It would amount to a waste of time and resources if Mutfwang should appeal to the Supreme Court because the case has been won and lost. He described the fate that had befallen the party as self-inflicted, saying that he had long warned the party that it would have a Zamfara scenario in it hands.
The following were part of the conversation:
Question: What you’re saying in essence now is that PDP has lost Plateau
Ans: Completely.
Question: And that any recourse to Supreme Court is an exercise in futility
Ans: It is a waste of time as far as I am concerned. Complete waste of time. As far as i am concerned, let him save his money and congratulate Nentawe because this thing is over. No deceit. He should just look at the new era coming and congratulate Nentawe for going through the process. It’s a difficult decision, but we can’t do anything because we inflicted the wound on ourselves.“
Tapgun traced the genesis of the party;s problem to 2015 when the party negated the zoning policy of the party and chose a candidate from the northern zone where the then incumbent governor came from.
He said, “Really think this thing that has happened to us is self-inflicted. Self-inflicted because we caused everything that has happened. And when I say we, I am not saying everybody. There is one person that I want to single out in this state. And that is (name withheld). He has been the fulcrum of all these problems we have been facing.
“You know I thought he should have learnt a lesson in 2015 with the mistake he made in imposing a candidate from the northern zone against the zoning principles of zoning in the state. People voted against it and that’s why APC came into the political scene in the state. I thought that he should have learnt a lesson from it and rectified it. At that time we lost only one position; and that’s the governorship, now we are losing all.”
Tapgun said that he made every spirited effort to reconcile the two factions before the 2023 election and had even warned them that the Zamfara scenario might play out in Plateau if they went into the election without a properly constituted exco.
He added that he sounded the same warning to Mutfwang when he (Mutfwang) came to his house after emerging as the candidate of the party.
Tapgun said, “All along I have been working to ensure that we got it right. Mutfwang himself when he emerged as the candidate of the party, he came here (to his house). He said that he just came to tell me that people are saying that he’s somebody’s boy and all that. I said look, that’s not the issue, but the issue is that you have emerged and are carrying the party’s flag. He said yes and I asked him as a party man whether he was aware of all the court cases that had been going on. He said he was aware and I asked him what he had done about them.
“He said that since he emerged as the candidate he had organised lawyers and had looked at the cases. He said that he had even taken it to the national headquarters of the party where the national legal adviser, whom he said was his classmate in Zaria. They said there was no problem. I asked him whether he was satisfied with that and he said yes. I said Okay. I told him if he was satisfied with that, I was not. I then told him he will not see me in any of his campaigns, but assured him that he would not hear me campaigning against him as a party man and a member of BOT. I told him he would not see me in any of his activities because I wont be part of it.”
He advised the party members to try and reinvent the soul of the party because it has been irretrievably lost.
Tapgun added, “PDP will have to go back to the drawing table but I am being sincere with you that it’s going to be a herculean task with anybody who’s going to be saddled with the task of reorganising the party at national and state level. I am speaking from the bottom of my heart. PDP has lost its soul. The locust has eaten everything.”