PDP Mulls Caucus, BoT and NEC Meetings to Approve Guidelines for Primaries

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 Baring any last minute changes, the National Working Committee (NEC) would summon three separate meetings of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) caucus, Board of Trustees (BoT) and the National Executive Committee (NEC) for the purpose of approving the various guidelines for presidential, National Assembly and governorship primary elections.

By the INEC guidelines, the political parties are expected to commence the processes of conducting their primary elections into various elective offices for the election in October this year.

According to a member of the PDP NWC, the leadership of  the party is expected to meet today to finalise deliberations for the PDP national caucus, BoT and the NEC meeting.

THISDAY gathered that the NEC meeting and other meetings were long over due as the last executive meeting of the highest organ of the party took place in March this year.

Today, NWC is expected to set the dates for NEC meeting to approve a convention for the mid term conference of the party to ratify the appointment of Adamu Mu’azu as the national chairman of the party, as he is expected to sign all documents with the national secretary for the presidential convention of the party.

Also, some members of NWC are arguing that the mid term conference be merged with the presidential primary because of time constraint.
The NWC member told THISDAY that the party needed to act fast because of the utterances credited to Governor Sule Lamido of Jigawa State that the perceived adoption of President Goodluck Jonathan by the North-west zone of PDP was not unanimous.

According to the NWC member, “from the look of things, the utterances of Lamido has thrown spanners into the planned affirmation convention by PDP in November to affirm the president’s re-election bid.

“We are therefore expected to go back to the drawing board and then prepare for Plan B as Plan A seems to have been thwarted by the insistence of Lamido.”
According to the source, the party would still continue to work on the assumption that Lamido would still see reason and drop his presidential ambition to enable the party present President Jonathan as a consensus candidate to avoid any distraction.

For this reason, the source said: “We have to be ready at all times, for whichever way the elders of the party would adopt in this regard. We don’t want to be caught not ready. If they agree for a national presidential primary, we are ready.”

Meanwhile, the presidency yesterday reviewed the job creation programme of the federal government and submitted that total adherence to the principle of continuity in projects of past regimes was a source of success to the job creation efforts of government.

Briefing journalists at the PDP national secretariat in Abuja yesterday, Special Assistant to the President on Job Creation, Mrs. Josephine A. Washima, said President Jonathan’s insistence on the completion of projects in the transportation, power, agricultural and textile sectors had helped in no small measure to create more jobs for Nigerians.

The presidential  aide called on Nigerian youths to take advantage of government’s employment generation activities to get out of unemployment, pointing out that the right environment is being provided for a private sector driven economy in Nigeria, a situation she explained was in vogue in many countries.

Washima explained: “Job creation is different from employment. A lot of people get that mixed up. Job creation is the opportunities that generate employment. We don’t have employment letters or we don’t have employment to give to you but we have activities that if followed to the letter, would eventually begin to generate employment. There is no country in the world that the government provides more than 10 per cent employment but the government has a huge responsibility in making sure that there is an enabling environment to kick-start activities that will generate employment.

“And I think for this administration, looking at what we are doing in the agricultural, power, transportation sector among others, there are activities that if the Nigerian people can key into it, they are potentials for job creation and employment in those sectors. And those are just few of the sectors. We are looking at reviving the textile sector which was also a sector that provided huge employment for Nigerians. But suddenly, something must have gone wrong somewhere.”

According to her, Jonathan administration had done much despite the series of challenges it inherited.

“I want to make it very clearly that this government inherited most of the challenges of this country. And you don’t expect these challenges in less than three years, even in seven years. So, it is something that we have to look at very critically.

“I was opportune to be in Rwanda last year to discuss unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa. And one of the issues that one of the professors from Botswana discussed that I picked up was political economy of youth unemployment. And in this regard, we are talking of lack of continuity of programmes and activities that are created by a different administration that would eventually lead to economic and sustainable development. And when those activities are not continued, an administration comes in and starts new activities. It is just like you start to build a house, I come in and take over that building, break it down and somebody else comes in, takes over the building and breaks it down, it becomes very difficult. These are very common things that happen in our day-to-day activities.”

On the need for Nigerian youths to develop positive attitude towards exploiting government’s job creation programme, Washima stated: “Also, we have to look at the attitude of the Nigerian youths towards employment. There was an argument sometime when people said a lot of Nigerian youths have issues of unemployability. People seek job here maybe just because of the economic situation or their financial situation and that is the major motivational factor. And once finance is a motivating factor for getting a job, you are going towards failure.”

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