It seems that the battle line drawn between members of the Opposition parties –Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and the PDP is set to worsen as the opposition yesterday chided the Presidency for its role in the crisis rocking the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF).
Both parties said the involvement of the Presidency in the election of the Forum’s leadership portends serious danger for the 2015 elections.
In a statement in Lagos yesterday by its National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, the ACN said “The message that the Presidency, through the puppet governors (Dr. Reuben Abati that the President had no hand in the NGF crisis), is sending to the nation is that the outcome of the 2015 elections will only be valid if a certain candidate emerges the winner.
‘’If an election involving only 35 governors can generate so much controversy and threaten to overheat the polity, what will happen when millions of Nigerians vote in 2015? Is this how President Goodluck Jonathan, who is the Godfather of the losing governors, has been sanitising the electoral process as he has been enthusing?
‘’The show of shame by the bad losers supporting Governor Jonah Jang, of course at the behest of the Presidency, is an extension of the threat that has been issued by some rabblerousers that it is either Jonathan for 2015 or there will be no Nigeria as we know it. This is the Gbagbo Option that plunged Cote d’Ivoire into a crisis in which it is yet to fully emerge. This is what the puppet governors are pushing for, hence they must be called to order urgently!
‘’Governors who participated willingly and fully in the NGF election have suddenly turned around and called the election a fraud after their candidate has lost. What were they thinking when they voted? Could it be that they were so sure that their arm-twisting tactics had worked and hence were sure of victory, only to be drubbed? Did they deviate from the Presidency’s script that they should only use the consensus they extracted from unwilling governors instead of an election to determine the NGF chairmanship?
‘’If they realised the ballot papers were not serialised, as the bad losers later claimed, why did they participate in the election? Couldn’t they have raised an objection and refused to participate? Were they dragged to the venue of the polls, screaming and kicking? If so where is the evidence that they were forced to act against their will?’’
The ACN described the denial by the Presidency of any role in the NGF election as a “tepid denial”.
According to the party, Akwa Ibom State Governor Godswill Akpabio is acting out a script written by the Presidency. “What President Jonathan did by his meddlesomeness is to stake his presidency on the NGF election, thereby making the elections a referendum on his leadership of his party and country. In both instances, he got the outcome he deserved: A leader who cannot hold his party together cannot hold a nation together,” the ACN said.
The ACN Added that “here are some of the lessons that the Presidency should learn, if it so wishes, from the outcome of the NGF elections – There is always a limit to hubris and the use of naked power against perceived opponents. Needless to say that latent power is more potent than naked power. A leader should never do things just because he can.
The presidency and the ruling party have lost control of themselves. They are bound to also lose control of the nation – democratically – in 2015. Make no mistake about it!” the party added.
The ACN has called for a probe of the apparently forged document being circulated by the losing governors to show they had harvested the signatures of 18 governors pushing for a consensus candidate just before the elections.
The party said the fact that the signature of a governor, who neither attended the meeting of the PDP chapter of the NGF nor sent a representative, was included in the consensus list is an indication that the signatures were harvested long before the meeting and the day of the election. Of course, it is also clear that the dates on the typed document were cancelled and new dates handwritten.
‘’If the losing governors are insisting that the list is genuine and that the signatures were obtained at the NGF-PDP meeting shortly before the voting, then they owe Nigerians an explanation on how a man who did not attend the meeting or send a representative could have signed the document in question,’’ it said.
The ACN advised Akpabio and his group to accept the result of the NGF elections instead of threatening to break the NGF – and overheat the polity – just to satisfy their masters, saying “national interest should supersede parochial interest.”
ANPP National Publicity Secretary Mr. Emma Eneukwu expressed sadness that “the election just mirrored the resolve of the Presidency to create confusion and anarchy whereever it fails to actualise its aims”.
“It is a common knowledge that the Presidency brought out all jokers in its purse to stop Ameachi but couldn’t and, instead of submitting to the will of the majority, it decided to destroy the forum by introducing faction.”