The presidential declaration by President Goodluck Jonathan scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday, might be postponed by one week.

A member of the Media and Publicity sub-committee of the Presidential Declaration Committee, headed by Dr Bello Haliru, gave this hint to LEADERSHIP last night.

“Under the circumstances the party finds itself today, I think a one-week postponement is being considered for presentation to Mr. President,” he said, adding that barring any change in plans, the postponement may be announced today.

It was, however, learnt that this (postponement) is yet to be discussed by the committee, the president and the PDP national leadership.

The party also appears confused regarding how to handle the Adamawa State governor, James Bala Ngilari who is interested in contesting the seat he is presently occupying.

The PDP is in a fix whether or not to allow him to participate in the governorship primary following an earlier agreement the party leadership brokered in the run-up to the Adamawa State governorship by-election, which, by the way, never held after a court declared Ngilari governor.

On President Jonathan’s declaration, LEADERSHIP learnt that all arrangements geared toward a successful declaration had been firmed up with hotel reservations for dignitaries from outside Abuja made a week ago.

Regardless, the source said that owing to the internal wrangling within the party, especially as issues of party tickets were yet to be resolved, the committee had been making efforts to ‘bring on board’ all stakeholders to reach a consensus on the planned postponement of the declaration.

He said, “You know the issues that have come up within the party in the last three weeks or so; we have seen the various dimensions the issue of senatorial tickets as well as the governorship tickets in most of our states have taken so far.

“As a party, we want to go into the declaration as one united family with minimal dissenting voices or cleavages within us in the PDP. For instance, we know there are some governors who, though members of the Presidential Committee, appear to be angered by the reported deal between the president and the senators; yet there are some senators who are also not too happy that some governors are working against them.

“So under such confusion, the best thing to do is to consider the possibility of postponing the event in order to bring all stakeholders to the table for us to move forward. This is very important because if you look at the entire scenario, more than half of the states controlled by PDP are affected one way or the other, and we are already making efforts to convince the president to shift the programme to a later date, possibly by one week,” he said.

•Adapted from a Leadership report. Photo shows President Jonathan.

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