How quickly love turns into hate when people are on opposing sides – is a lesson in the vanity of life that’s worthy of note.

Governor of Ekiti state, Ayodele Fayose – who in the not so distant past, hailed Ali Modu Sheriff as the right man to reposition the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after falling to defeat at the hands of the All Progressives Congress (APC) at the 2015 presidential election – has turned around to compare him to a ‘woman with HIV who is set to marry an unsuspecting man’.

This is how it played out that friends became foes.

When Ali Modu was announced as the acting National Chairman of the PDP, former ministers, Board of Trustee members as well as founding fathers of the former ruling party vehemently kicked against his selection.

Fayose however, was one of the governors who stood behind Sheriff and vouched for him.

Sheriff had clear instructions; stay in office for 3 months and not a day more during which he was to see to it that a National Convention took place and election into national positions of the party were effected.

Subsequently, PDP governors got wind of Sheriff’s alleged plan to stay on, as the party National Chairman even after the party convention and they plotted to kick him out.

The plan came through on May 21, when at the National convention, PDP governors and stakeholders unanimously sacked Sheriff and instituted a caretaker committee led by Ahmed Makarfi.

Sheriff however, would not go down without a brutal fight.

He called the party’s attention to a court order previously obtained by the founding patrons of the party which had declared that the National Convention should not hold.

Sheriff therefore said the convention which sacked him as National chairman was illegal and thereby refused to relinquish control of the party.

On Thursday, June 16, Sheriff’s supporters and supporters of the Makarfi-led PDP clashed in a rain of fists and sticks at the party secretariat in Abuja which left one person with a deep cut in his head.

The showdown on Thursday came hours after a meeting of the party’s Board of Trustees, the PDP governors and the Makarfi-led Caretaker Committee which ended at about 1.10am.

The party had among other things decided to continue with ongoing legal action against Sheriff in the hope that it would end his claim to the chairmanship of the party.

Fayose after the meeting was quick to admit that he was one of the pillars of the party who approached Sheriff to take the job of the acting national chairman of the party.

He however, revealed that he only convinced him back then because he did not know that Sheriff had a selfish agenda.

“Without doubt, I did not beg him but I supported his coming.”

“And when you act within the ambits of time, the information you have at a given time, I am not someone that will say I did not support Sheriff. But when you want to marry a woman, and on the wedding day, they tell you that the woman has HIV, will you still remain in the marriage? I am out of it.”

He also said that Nigeria needed the opposition of the PDP in the interest of democracy and that the whole fracas within the party would soon be quelled.

“Rising from the meeting, we must put it in the public domain that the PDP, whatever we are going through today, is a phase and very soon, the whole issue will be over.”

“But we need to put it very clearly that Nigeria, as a country, needs an opposition party to make the average Nigerian gets the value for his or her votes. Any attempt to destroy opposition in Nigeria is not going to be in the interest of democracy.”

“We stand as a party to condemn interference, subtle and strategic effort to destroy PDP in Nigeria.”

Also reacting to Sheriff’s contest of the party’s leadership, Ahmed Makarfi had this to say;

“Actually, those who remember how Boko Haram was born; that is how it started. How thugs were brought into Abuja and some people forced themselves into the secretariat. In the process, documents and some property belonging to the party cannot be accounted for. This cannot be without some support from some quarters, definitely not from the PDP.”

“Therefore, we deliberated on this and we have taken a position to stand by democracy, to stand by our right and to stand by our party.”

“We have it on record that the former Chairman – Sheriff – a day or two before he forced himself into the secretariat, had a meeting with one of the governors of the party in power and then the next day, this event took place; this therefore creates suspicion.”

It is safe to believe that the last of the PDP drama is yet to be seen.