A former governor of Bayelsa State, Senator Seriake Dickson is making frantic moves to reconcile with the former Nigerian president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, just a few weeks after his successor, Senator Douye Diri, resigned from the PDP.
Dickson has since vowed not to follow Diri’s political path. Diri’s deputy, Senator Lawrence Ewrujakpor, known to be Dickson’s protégé, is also staying behind in the PDP with Dickson.
Dickson’s reconciliation efforts are seen as a strategy to get Jonathan by his side since Diri is at the verge of joining another political party.
The calculation, TNN learnt, is that with Jonathan, he would be able to fight Diri and whatever political interest the governor may have, ahead of the 2027 election.
Dickson is said to be fighting to ensure that Diri’s deputy becomes governor in 2028. Those in the corridors of political power in and around the state say Dickson has been very unhappy that Diri decided to leave the PDP.
Penultimate week, he was said to have sent a youth leader in the state to meet one of Jonathan’s associates in Yenagoa, with a view to setting the stage for the reconciliation meeting, knowing how close the associate is with Jonathan.
The youth leader, according to sources, initiated calls to the associate but has been unable to secure an appointment for the first meeting as at the time of this report.
Those privy to the arrangements confided in TNN that the plan has been for the former president’s associate to first receive the youth leader and his group; after which they would plead with him to fix a meeting with Jonathan, where Dickson would be present.
But it was learnt on Tuesday that the effort has so far yielded no results. It is not clear if Jonathan will be available to meet or work with Dickson, who had pilloried him, after he left office as president.
Dickson was reported to have said that Jonathan did nothing for the Ijaw Nation while he was president of Nigeria. He had also accused the former president of working with the opposition party in 2019 to enable the APC win the gubernatorial election that was eventually upturned by the Supreme Court on the eve of the swearing in of the then winner, David Lyon.
As governor of Bayelsa State at the time, Dickson was angry that some APC leaders visited Jonathan after the election that the PDP lost. At that visit, Dickson had said: “My reaction is that President Jonathan remains a leader of our country. He is at liberty to receive members of any political party but in the context of all that is going on, I know that the insinuations(that he helped the APC to win) are not misplaced.
“APC came to Bayelsa to take his state and people by force. With the comments they are making about him, Oshiomhole coming to Bayelsa to praise Jonathan, what they were doing is laying the foundation to perpetrate fraud and violence.
“I can see the strategic content. They used Jonathan to expand the notion of disagreement and after the rigging, they go to him like Pontius Pilate to wash off their hands and put it at his doorsteps to say he sanctioned it.”
TNN called Dickson’s phone via Whatsapp twice on Tuesday buthe did not take the calls and not return them.
