The All Progressives Congress (APC) has said its former National Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, lacked the gut and courage required to entrench party discipline during his time in office.
The ruling party was reacting to Odigie-Oyegun’s attack on his successor, Adams Oshiomhole, who h said lackthe temperament and capacity to run a political party.
But speaking to newsmen on Tuesday, the APC National Publicity Secretary, Lanre Issa-Onilu, said the National Working Committee led by Odigie-Oyegun lacked the courage required to confront the “pockets of political despots,” who could not operate by the party’s rules.
He said, “Let me agree that the NWC that led the party into the 2015 elections and continued till June 2018 did nothing different from what you would find in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It was a period the party was seen as a mere vehicle to attain political office.
“The system accommodated impunity as certain members appeared to be superior to the party. Their interests were far more important than the collective interests of the APC, even when most times such interests were at variance with the ideals the party stood for.
“The leadership under Chief Oyegun, with due respect to him, condoned all sorts of acts of indiscipline from certain members. It is not surprising that the current National Working Committee inherited such a huge mess, where the party was struggling to differentiate itself from the delinquent PDP.”
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Issa-Onilu contended that the PDP was “practically dead” following its defeat at the 2015 elections, but the opposition party bounced back not because the party had changed its “insidious way” or did anything different, but because the APC did not live up to expectations.
According to him, there were peculiar issues in Oyo, Imo, Bauchi, Adamawa, and Zamfara states that accounted for why the APC lost other than the voters preferring the PDP.
He said, “I would put the painful outcomes broadly under two reasons. One is indiscipline on the part of some members of our party in most of the states.
“The second reason is that the party leadership did not do much between 2015 and 2018 to move the party from being an amalgam of different political parties to become a truly blended progressive political party.”
Issa-Onilu added that the APC will, for the next three years, continue to strengthen compliance with the rules, build support structures for democracy, ensure discipline across board, and deliver good governance for the benefit of all Nigerians.
He added that the party expected members who had different agenda to join their kind in the PDP, while welcoming with open arms those who shared its “progressive ideals,” so that by 2022, it would be a party whose members were truly progressives.
Reacting to the call for Oshiomhole’s resignation by the party’s Deputy National Chairman, Senator Lawal Shuaib, the APC spokesmen said the call portrayed the NWC as “a bunch of cowards looking for a scapegoat to pass on the blame following undesired results in his home Zamfara State.”