The former acting National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Chief Bisi Akande, has said that the party will not use zoning to choose the next senate president because zoning is not in the constitution of the party.
Akande while speaking to journalists in Lagos said “Zoning is very, very strange to the APC. There is no zoning in our constitution. We don’t want to copy the PDP in whatever we are doing. We have the best of brains and culture among our leadership. We want the best for Nigeria. Because of this, we don’t want to entertain zoning
“It is true that sometime after the general election, the (party’s) national chairman wanted to toy with the idea of zoning and unanimously we said no, we don’t want to zone.”
Akande also described the Peoples Democratic Party as a prodigal party, he said “We are taking over from a delinquent (PDP) administration and one of the most prodigal institutions of that administration is the National Assembly. The (former) Central Bank Governor said the recurrent expenditure of the National Assembly was N10bn and that it rose to about N150bn.
“Their personal income is prohibitive and secretive. This created the scramble for the leadership of the legislature and we don’t want our party to be involved in the prodigal nature of the National Assembly.
“In order to tone it down, we need to do a lot of compromises and sacrifices and we need to select from among the leaders who are in the Senate that would be able to control the culture of the Assembly according to the policy of our party.”
On selection of the senate president, he said “We are talking about Senate President. Once we pick the Senate President, others would follow suit and they will now say, since the Senate President is from so and so zone, then the deputy senate president can’t be from there; that he should be from elsewhere. But we must choose the best person first.
“This can happen. We don’t want to say Christian, Muslim or Ibo or Yoruba. We want to be careful, otherwise, we won’t be able to produce the best. We are trying to select the best man. We don’t want what brought the PDP down (to bring us down).”