A Chieftain of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Adamu Garba II, has urged the leadership of the party to postpone the party’s convention scheduled to hold on February 26, 2022, saying going ahead with it could lead to implosion.
He said the exercise shouldn’t take place until warring factions within the party resolve their differences.
The 2019 presidential aspirant of the party made these remarks recently while speaking in an interview with AIT.
He said: “Our party the APC, will be going into the convention on February 26 as decided by the National Working Committee (NWC), but we are only going into that convention as a divided party.’’
Adamu said the APC has 14 states with different factions contesting the leadership of the state executives of the party.
“Imagine if these 14 states delegates and executive members come to the convention ground, you have two excos from Delta State and Kano State among others. Is that what we are going to have on the stand? This implies that there is a very serious level of selfishness, from the elites of the party. We can’t agree on something that is very sacrosanct and expedient for the development of the country, but we pay more attention to what we should get into our pockets.
As a party, if we get into the convention ground by February 26th with the kind of challenges that we face now, we might likely face implosion. That is why one of our APC party members, Senator Orji Uzor Kalu requested that the party postpone the convention, maybe till a later date. Very fantastic opinion, though we condemned it then. But frankly speaking, I don’t think that as we are now, we are even ready to go into this convention ground as a divided home, simply because we have different factions in the party in different states and we don’t know what might be the outcomes of this convention.’’
He said going ahead with the elections might spell doom for the party, which might be tantamount to destroying the legacies of President Buhari and causing a lot of problems, which might also transcend across every part of our national life including governance.
Also, there are insinuations that some elites of the party are already seeing the storm coming for us. They are pushing to have the convention in a hurry, so there can be an implosion.
On political power, Adamu said: “The critical questions we need to be asking is what is being done to address the situation and why the northern region is facing development challenges. The answer is not because the people are lazy and not because the people are not thoughtful. It’s not because our people cannot do something, it’s simply because our people have no access to proper markets.
“That’s what is happening, and the biggest challenge is, you find something in Zamfara, before you carry that thing to a market in Lagos, it will cost you a whole lot of money. It is cheaper for me to import fruits and vegetables from South Africa than to take them from Jos or Benue State. Because we have an infrastructure deficit, taking these things to Lagos or the city centres is a problem. So what we need to do is to attack the infrastructure properly by investing heavily in infrastructure and bringing down inflation. That is what policymakers need to look into, but as long as we keep seeing it as rhetoric, we will have problems.
I recently visited Kebbi State, the governor there, His Excellency Atiku Bagudu did not just focus on building mighty bridges and roads, he focused on building what is called human infrastructures.’’
On what the APC- led administration plans to leave as a legacy, Adamu said: “We are looking and addressing this subject, as a key leadership challenge. That is why we are advocating for a complete transformation.
Nigerian lives are daily threatened. You can’t ply our roads again, you can’t go to the farm. People are getting desperate. Go to city centres, you will see that many people are leaving their villages for the cities. This is a very serious problem.’’
