Former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, Emeka Ihedioha, has opened up on what led to the defeat of the Peoples Democratic Party in the last general elections.
He said the former ruling party took some wrong steps, which led to its defeat after 16 years in power.
Ihedioha made this revelation yesterday while briefing newsmen at the beginning of a two-day sitting of the party’s post-election review committee for the South-West zone in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital.
The National Working Committee of PDP had on May 5, 2015, constituted a post-election assessment committee, chaired by the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, to review and evaluate the party’s performance in the just-concluded general elections.
“It just appears to all of us that Nigeria is still largely a PDP state. In every ward, local government areas, states, zones and indeed in the entire country, PDP remains the most popular party by our reckoning. What has happened to us was that we made very costly mistakes. We took steps that we shouldn’t have taken. And those steps today are beginning to hunt us,” Ihedioha said.
He stated that the committee had last week invited all the state and zonal chairmen of the party and briefed them on the various programmes “that we wish to adopt to reach out to the various states.
“Consequently, we set up three groups; each of these groups consists of statesmen and women of our great party to visit two zones each. Our group is responsible to finding out what happened in the North Central and South West zones.”
The former deputy speaker added: “We concluded our findings on our programmes at the North Central zone yesterday (Tuesday) evening, and today (Wednesday), we’re here to commence work as regards the South-West zone. We requested all the state chairmen and the zonal chairmen to intimate all stakeholders of our party, who have any submission to make to us, because we’re interested in finding out what actually went wrong and we believe that it is when we find out what went wrong that we can apply solutions”.
