Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara state will defect to the All Progressive Congress (APC) next Tuesday.
There are strong indications that, the APC officers both from the state and the national level would receive Governor Matawalle in Gusau where he was expected to announce his detection from the PDP.
Analyzer News gathered that, Matawalle has been planning to dump his party, the PDP and join APC since the time when his colleagues from the Southern part of the country accused him of controlling the gold mines in the state.
Matawalle was bitter when the PDP Southern Governors embarked on campaign of calumny against his plan to sell gold to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
His defection is coming barely a month after the Cross River Governor, Ben Ayade, left the PDP for the All Progressive Congress, APC.
Recall that, Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State was the first Governor to dump PDP and joined the APC earlier in the year.
The National headquarters if the PDP was however not aware of Matawalle’s defection to APC.
The spokesperson of the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan stated that “The headquarters of the party was not aware of Matawalle’s plans to defect as he had not officially notified us”.
“Givernor Matawalle has not officially written to notify us that he will leave the party’.
“On account of that, we cannot say we are aware of his plans,” Ologbondiyan said.
When contacted, Special Adviser on Media to the Governor, Zailani Bappa, said he only read the rumour of his principal’s planned defection on the social media.
“Officially, I’ve not been informed so I can’t confirmed if it’s true or not,” he said.
APC which had been in control of the state since 2015 lost its bid to govern Zamfara following a Supreme Court judgment which ruled that the ruling party did not conduct valid primary in the build up to the 2019 governorship election.
The APC governorship candidate, Mukhtar Idris, had been declared winner of the election after he polled 534,541 votes but the apex court upheld the judgment of the Court of Appeal, Sokoto Division, which ruled that no valid primary was conducted by the party in the state.
In a unanimous judgment by a five-member panel, the court decided that a party that has no valid candidate cannot be said to have emerged winner of the election.
The court then voided all votes cast for the APC, from the governorship to the state Assembly and ordered that the runner-up candidate be sworn in.
Matawalle, who was the PDP governorship candidate and came second in the election polling 189,452 votes was then declared the governor-elect by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and sworn in.
The total registered voters in the state stood at 1,717,128 while the accredited voters were 823,294 with 792,938 as total valid votes.
The chances of Zamfara APC to retain the state during the 2019 general election began to wane after INEC said it would not allow it to field candidates because it failed to meet the October 7, 2018 deadline for conducting primaries to elect candidates for the elections. The commission subsequently barred the APC from fielding candidates.
With the new development, PDP has lost three governors within three months.
