Last Monday General Secretary of the PPP, Mr Clement Rohee, reacting at his press conference to questions about that morning’s SN’s headline ‘PPP executives jockeying for top position – Jagdeo, others seeking to consolidate support before crucial congress,’ deemed the media as “stray dogs, going by the smell of things and rummaging the PPP neighbourhood for new and old juicy inaccuracies and speculations.” The article in SN and the questions from the media obviously touched a raw nerve.
It would be unprecedented for a PPP Congress to be postponed except if an issue of national importance gets in the way. For example, Congress was not held in 2011 because of elections year, nor in 2012 because the PPP’s minority government was under siege. There might have been other cases in the past but there have been no postponements of Congress for purely internal reasons.
There is no power struggle going on in relation to the choice of presidential candidate for 2020. Jockeying and positioning are taking place quietly but are not generating any overt controversies. The main contender will be Bharrat Jagdeo, if the appeal in the two-term limit case, in which Chief Justice Chang ruled the