BARRING any changes, the All Progressives Congress, APC is set
to adopt former Head of State, Gen. Mohammed Buhari (retd) as its consensus
candidate for the 2015 presidential election.
Saturday Vanguard’s
investigation, yesterday, revealed that the issue featured prominently at the
October 17, 2014 National Executive Committee, NEC meeting of the party.
It was gathered that the party’s national leader and former
governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, in the course of the
meeting, OPENLY declared
his support for Buhari as against the expectation of former Vice President
Atiku Abubakar, another presidential aspirant who was present at the meeting.
A source at the national secretariat of the APC said
Tinubu’s OPEN support
for Buhari was hinged on the popularity of the former military ruler.
Buhari and Atiku
According to him,
Tinubu was bitter that his earlier advice to aspirants from the North to agree
among themselves for a consensus candidate was not heeded
To that end, he chose
to queue behind Buhari’s candidature.
The source added that
Tinubu, who was excited by Buhari’s 12 million votes in 2011 presidential
elections has decided to bankroll Buhari’s campaign to any length it will take
to win the votes of the majority of Nigerians.
He stated that the
party believes it is only Buhari that can give President Goodluck Jonathan of
the ruling Peoples democratic Party (PDP) a good run for his money.
He also stated that
most national leaders of the party who are loyal to Tinubu do not welcome
the idea of primary election to choose their presidential candidate.
“Tinubu said it OPENLY that
day that he would support Buhari. He told everyone who was present,” the added.
To pave way for Buhari, the party may not
conduct primaries as Atiku is said to have the structure to win delegate
election.
Mini-convention
So, the APC
has SCHEDULED to
hold a mini convention on next Wednesday to enable it amend some portions of
its constitution that are incongruous with the electoral act on political
parties primaries should a party decide not to conduct such.
It will be recalled
that Lai Mohammed, APC’s national publicity secretary told Journalists at
the end of the NEC meeting that the party was going to hold a mini-convention.
“Principally, we
proposed certain amendments to the constitution of the party that will allow
the party to function much more efficiently and to that extent we will hold
what I call an extraordinary convention of the party on the 29th of this month
in Abuja to submit the proposals for the amendment to the national convention
of the party,” he said.
Speaking further on
the modalities for the primary election, Mohammed said: “It is part of
the reason we need to amend our constitution because the Electoral
Act as amended says that one can conduct a primary but if you are going
to, then one must be explicit on how you are going to conduct it and that is
why we need to amend our constitution.”
Obviously, the
development would limit of the chances of other presidential aspirants which
included Governors Rochas Okorocha of Imo State and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of
Kano State and former chairman of Leadership newspaper, Mr. Sam Nda-Isaiah.
But another source at
the secretariat hinted that some of them might consider dropping their ambition
since the leader of the party has shown support for Buhari.
No comments:
Post a Comment