John Alechenu and Olusola Fabiyi
The All Progressives Congress has said it has not seen any reason to fret over unsubstantiated claims by the opposition that there is a growing coalition against the ruling party ahead of the 2019 election.
The party said its major preoccupation now was to build and strengthen itself ahead of the polls.
The National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Malam Bolaji Abdullahi, said this in a telephone interview with Saturday PUNCH in Abuja, on Friday.
He said, “We have not seen the people in this coalition you are talking about. Yes, democracy is about the number. It is also about the calibre of people joining the coalition. What are we losing as a party?
“These millions that they claim have joined the coalition, are they members of the APC? If they are not members of the APC, we have no reason to worry but to continue to work on building our party.
“It is the people that make a movement and a party, one individual can be as significant as a hundred people. We will like to see the calibre of people that are in this movement; if we know then we may have reason to begin to say, oh, we are in trouble.
“But as far as we are concerned, we have not seen any member of our great party that has said he is a member of the coalition. Our concern now is to continue to build and strengthen our party and withstand whatever they are doing. We are not fretting, there is no need for us to panic over a non-existent threat.”
Saturday PUNCH gathered that the APC was relying heavily on the outcome of the fence-mending efforts of the Asiwaju Bola Tinubu-led presidential panel to prevent other high profile members of the party from defecting.
To complement efforts being made by the panel, the Chief John Odigie-Oyegun-led National Working Committee of the APC, held a series of meetings with the party caucus in both chambers of the National Assembly last week.
In a related development, the National Chairman of the National Conscience Party, Yunusa Tanko, said while the doors of the NCP remained open to Nigerians interested in building a new nation, it would not be a party to the arrangement that would undermine democracy.
He said, “First, let me state clearly that I was not at the meeting which was said to have been held with former President Olusegun Obasanjo in Lagos.
“The National Conscience Party is a political party built on democratic principles; we will not be a party to any unconstitutional or undemocratic process of selection of candidates. Whosoever will emerge as our Presidential candidate will emerge through primaries. The process must be transparent enough to inspire confidence among the populace.”
Speaking in a similar vein, the National Chairman of the Labour Party, Alhaji Abdulsalam Abdulkadir, said the LP was preparing for the 2019 elections noting that the party had no provisions for zoning. He said, “The Labour Party is preparing for the 2015 elections. We are preparing to field candidates for all offices from the local government level up to the Presidency, the issue of a consensus candidate does not arise.
“We don’t have zoning in our party. If a northern candidate emerges, his running mate will come from any state in southern Nigeria, if a southerner emerges as our Presidential candidate, his running mate will emerge from any state in the north, and we are working towards having a Nigerian President.
“We can only talk about supporting a candidate of another party if we don’t have a candidate.”
SDP not part of coalition, says Adeniran
In his reaction, Prof. Tunde Adeniran said the SDP as a political party was not part of Obasanjo’s coalition movement.
However, he said some members of the party were members and that the party would not stop them from being members.
Adediran, a former minster, said that the SDP had yet to take a decision on where its presidential candidate would come from and whether the party would also work with the coalition to pick a consensus presidential candidate.
He said, “The SDP is not a member of the coalition, but some of our members belong to it. We have no problem with that.
“We have yet to decide on where our presidential candidate will come from or whether we will choose a common candidate. When the time comes, a decision will be taken on those things.”
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