Assailed by knotty legal challenges and the possibility that it may not feature on the ballot in the forthcoming Anambra State gubernatorial poll, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) may have initiated talks aimed at adopting an alternative political platform.
It was gathered that the move is with a view to beating the July 30 deadline for withdrawal and replacement of candidates and the August 6 deadline for the submission of nomination forms (EC13B) by political parties for the November 6 governorship poll in the state.
A chieftain of the party told The Guardian in Abuja, yesterday, that the party had been looking into issues surrounding the parallel governorship primary, which threw up Mr. Valentine Ozigbo and Senator Ugochukwu Uba as rival candidates for the governorship election.
He said the party sees the refusal by a member of the PDP Board of Trustees (BoT), Chief Chris Uba, to withdraw multiple litigations against the party as sinister and ill motivated.
Although the party chieftain said stakeholders from Anambra State were working out details, he noted that the emerging coalition involves members from across party lines calling the bluff of one family that insists on holding the state to ransom politically.
“We have barely two weeks to the deadline for the withdrawal and substitution of candidates for the Anambra poll. I think the popular stance of stakeholders of the party is to adopt another party as a special purpose vehicle for a PDP candidate to participate in the election,” the source from Nasarawa State, remarked.
In a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Mr. Kola Ologbondiyan, PDP accused Justice O. A. Nwabunike of the Anambra State High Court of allegedly frustrating it in a desperate effort to delay an appeal to his ruling, in which the court ordered INEC to accept no other candidate but Senator Ugochukwu Uba as PDP standard bearer for the November 6, poll.