Stakeholders of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ekiti state, including current and former local government chairmen, women leaders, secretaries and treasurers in the 16 local government areas of the state, have expressed confidence in the leadership of the party as well as announced the adoption of former governor, Ayo Fayose, as the preferred candidate for the governorship ticket of the party.
The stakeholders, who also implored the party to handle the selection of gubernatorial candidates for the 2014 polls with “utmost transparency,” added Fayose got their support because, according to them, “we need somebody who is competent to challenge the state governorship with a high measure of success in the race and whom we know well.”
The stakeholders, who are part of the statutory/automatic delegates to the governorship primaries of the party, after a meeting in Ado Ekiti, the state capital on Thursday, insisted that all stakeholders must be involved if the party decides to select its candidate either through consensus or through primaries.
They said, “as statutory delegates to the party’s primary, any primary or consensus arrangement to pick the party’s candidate for the poll must be free and fair and allowed to be an Ekiti affair,” saying the PDP could not afford “to waste the opportunity the election would give it to show its relevance in the politics of South West presently dominated by the Action Congress of Nigeria.”
