Honourable Diket Plang is a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Plateau State and also Special Adviser on Public Affairs to Governor Simon Lalong. In this interview with ISAAC SHOBAYO, he speaks on succession and why it has been difficult for the previous governors to install successors.
You have served in different administrations in Plateau State since the advent of the Fourth Republic. Why is it difficult for governors to plant their successors?
Each of those governors you mentioned was able to complete their maximum tenure of eight years in office. Normally, after the two terms tenure of a governor, the major opposition party gets more fierce because there are people out to take over from him and he also may have the plan of a successor within the party. In most cases, the opposition both within and out of the party is always huge. The fierce battle has many reasons because no one wants to be left in the cold after eight years; both the party and individuals want to be relevant in the scheme of things. If the opposition loses again, it then means that they would have to wait for another four or eight years.
If you look at the previous governors that could not put a successor in the case of Senator Joshua Dariye, he ended up his tenure with huge opposition against him both within the PDP and government at the national level. So, this made it impossible for him to put a successor in office and in the end, he had to move out of the party to the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). He couldn’t install a successor for the fact that he was also suspended from office, but was returned by the Supreme Court when he couldn’t do anything again.
That of Senator Jonah Jang was due to lack of internal democracy. If there was internal democracy within the PDP then, there would have been no election. PDP would have won the election hands down. There was the understanding that the candidate for the governorship should have come from the Southern senatorial zone. But Jang in the Northern Plateau finished his eight years and decided that his successor will come from the same zone again, but not just that also from his ward. The person he brought was like his biological relation. This brought a lot of discontentment from the entire people of Plateau State and his party. The process of producing the candidate lacked internal democracy and that was why he lost out and could not produce a successor. If he had allowed the Southern zone to produce the governorship candidate, PDP would have won the election.
What are your party and the governor doing to break the jinx?
It is so clear that this time, the governorship will come from the Central zone by mutual understanding. Governor Simon Lalong is on the same page with the party in the state, national level and the ruling government at the centre. The governor is a democrat to the core. He is not dictatorial and therefore the candidate of the ruling APC in the state will emerge through a democratic process that will be devoid of rancour and in a transparent way. I am sure that Governor Lalong will not find himself in an environmental situation where both Dariye and Jang exited from office. The background of Lalong is quite different from his predecessors. He remains the longest-serving Speaker in the history of the state coupled with the fact that he is a lawyer. But I want to assure you that APC will win back to back in Plateau State. Apart from the achievements of the APC-led administration in the state, the party is fully on the ground.
But there’s an insinuation that he has a preferred aspirant among those jostling for the ticket of the party?
Governor Lalong will not be dictatorial and therefore the candidate will emerge without interference
and then