Human Rights Activist and Legal Practitioner, Mrs Ayo Obe, is uncomfortable with the process adopted by the People’s Democratic Party for the 2015 presidential ticket.
Speaking on Channels Television few hours after President Goodluck Jonathan picked his presidential nomination form at the PDP secretariat in Abuja, she said that it sends a wrong signal for a sitting president not to go into primaries with other interested aspirants.
“I think the attempts to manoeuvre out the opposition within the party speaks to a lack of confidence which people find surprising in an incumbent president.
“Normally an incumbent president, firstly, within his own party, should be big enough to withstand any form of competition, not to talk of an incumbent president in the wider election having the confidence to say that he can beat all comers.
“You find all these little little things that are being done as though the President doesn’t have enough confidence in his ability to win even within his own party.”
The leadership of the PDP had endorsed President Jonathan as their sole candidate for the 2015 presidential election but some interested members of the party have complained of being denied their rights to challenge the President for the party’s ticket.
Mrs Obe said; “Its one thing to say that ‘I have emerged by consensus’ but when there are clearly people within the party who want to contest, then I think that it looks better from the perspective of that candidate to allow those people and contest with those people.”
She also suggested that this could form a precedence for incumbent senators, governors and those in other elective positions to demand automatic tickets.
According to her, some persons within the PDP would be of the opinion, “If its good enough for the President, then it should be good enough for us, in the name of continuity and wide acceptance and so on and so forth.”
