The newly-formed All Progressives’ Congress (APC) is gearing up to name its National Chairman and National Secretary by Monday as it begins to intensify effort to dislodge the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) from the centre in the 2015 elections.
According to sources, some prominent leaders of the opposition met in the early hours of yesterday at the Lagos Lodge, Asokoro, Abuja where they decided that the national chairman, secretary and treasurer of the three parties merging into the APC – Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP) – would form the interim national officers. These officers would then meet on Monday and pick the national chairman, secretary and treasurer that would interface between the party and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
“We have not named anybody as chairman for the interim committee. What happened at the Lagos Lodge was to ask the national chairman, national secretary and the treasurer of each of the three parties to constitute a committee. This committee would be our link with the INEC. The fact of the matter is the Electoral Act does not recognise interim officers, but since we need three people to sign our letter seeking INEC’s approval, we asked the nine-man committee to pick three among them as the signatories,” an insider told .
According to him, the committee would be in charge until 30 days after the letter to the INEC, and if the INEC did not reply, it means the merger has been duly approved. It is then that the interim national officers would be named, he said.
“This committee would write a letter to the INEC seeking the approval and, if after 30 days, the INEC did not raise any objection by not writing to us, it will be assumed the merger has been approved. This is when the interim officers that would organise the convention would be named. What really happened was that when we had the merger committee on ground, each of the three parties had chairman of the merger committee; so we had three co-chairmen but we had to ask them to give their report to their parties when we noticed that some members of this merger committee had been trying to entrench themselves with a view to positioning themselves for the coming convention.”
Former minister of foreign affairs Chief Tom Ikimi was the ACN chairman, merger committee; former presidential candidate for the ANPP in the 2011 general election, Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, stood in for the party; and Alhaji Garba Gali, former deputy governor of Bauchi State, was the chairman merger committee for the CPC.
Our source disclosed that, with this new development, “Those who constitute the committee would not be allowed to seek any election at the convention since they are the ones to organise it. That is democracy for you”.
When asked to confirm the story doing the round that former FCT minister Mallam Nasir el-Rufai had been named interim National Secretary of APC, the source, a national officer of one of the parties, faulted the claim. “Nobody has been named as a national officer. Reporting that el-Rufai is the interim national secretary is misleading. When the offices are zoned, and the CPC is given the national secretary, then, el-Rufai may be if his party gave him,” he satated.
Those that were said to be at the Lagos Lodge meeting included Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, General Muhammadu Buhari, Chief Bisi Akande, Lai Mohammed, and Chief Tomi Ikimi.