APC’s Plan To Take Over Kaduna

APC’s Plan To Take Over Kaduna

Wednesday, July 9, 2014 2:27 pm


Femi Adi

As the major opposition party in Kaduna the All Progressives Congress, APC, is struggling hard to wrest the state from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, which has been the ruling party in the state since the current democratic dispensation took off,

With winning the 2015 election in Kaduna State in mind, the All Progressives Congress is already working out plans to hew down the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP’s dominance across the 23 local government areas and three senatorial zones of the state. The main opposition party’s determination is premised on its view that PDP has not done enough to improve the economic base of the state or lot of the citizens despite being in power power since 1999.

As a first step to achieving the plan, APC zoned the party’s chairmanship seat to southern Kaduna area, which is predominantly Christian. This is despite several aspirants from the northern and central zones showing interest im the seat. They include the former state chairman, All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP, Senator Lawal Mohammed Aliyu; former state CPC chairman, Alhaji Ahmadu Yaro; and the immediate past APC Interim Chairman, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed.
Though the APC decision didn’t go down well with some party members and chairmanship aspirants from the northern and central senatorial zones who felt exploring the party’s internal democratic machinery would have been the best option to produce the chairman of the party, it took the intervention of senior party members after series of meetings to make the aggrieved members accept what Alhaji Ahmed Ibn Lawal, an APC member, termed as “undemocratic arrangements”.

However, after exhaustive meetings with top officials of party within and outside the state, it was resolved that the party should, as a matter of “fairness and justice”, give a sense of belonging to the politically marginalised southern Kaduna area the state, if it would win the 2015 governorship election and other contestable positions in the state. But one of the aspirants who spoke under plea of anonymity told this medium that the zoning of the chairmanship seat to southern Kaduna was a “selfish ambition and calculation” by Suleiman Othman Hunkunyi, Deputy National Secretary of APC, to pave way for a Hausa-Fulani Muslim to emerge as the party’s governorship candidate since the incumbent governor; Alhaji Muhktar Ramalan Yero, is also a Hausa-Fulani Muslim from the northern part of the state. The general belief among those that supported Barnabas Bala Bantex’s emergence as APC state chairman is that it will aid the party’s chances of winning the governorship election if a Hausa-Fulani man contests with Governor Yero coupled with the fact he has been a member of opposition since 1999.

The Kaduna APC is also considering capitalising on the “Buhari factor” to garner support from the grassroots and others supporters, who see the former Head of State and CPC presidential flag bearer in the 2011 general election as the “Messiah” who would help to wrest power from the President Goodluck Jonathan-led PDP government.
Meanwhile, a source close to former Federal Capital Territory minister, Nasir el-Rufai, disclosed that the party will also bank on the hatred for President Jonathan in the North to canvass for votes from the masses, since the ordinary northerner currently nurses a grudge over Jonathan’s ambition to contest the 2015 election against what some northern elders claimed was a “gentleman agreement” with him to quit office in 2015 after he must have completed late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s two terms of four years.

In an interview, the state PDP Public Relations Officer, Ibrahim Mansur, a lawyer, said APC’s plan is to rubbish PDP, and that it has already embarked on a campaign of calumny to pull down the PDP government on grounds of non-performance, even when some of them in the past had had cause to commend it for promoting peace, security and development in the state.

To corroborate the Kaduna PDP PRO’s claim, it was discovered that some members of the APC have commenced rubbishing PDP. At a press conference held recently, an APC member, Ambassador Sule Buba, who is currently the Director-General of Save Kaduna Group 2015, a political pressure group, described PDP as a failed party that should be voted out.

While Buba maintained that APC is the only party for now that would bring total transformation into governance in the state, he noted, “We have observed that PDP has controlled power four over 14 years in Kaduna yet nothing is working in Kaduna.”

When asked to explain why he didn’t complain about his former party’s non-performance until after he left it, Buba, who defected to APC September 2013 along with 70 other PDP chieftains, said that his former party did well from 1999 to 2008, but after then it has been stagnant. He said they moved to APC in order to rescue the state from its deplorable condition and restore its lost glory.

Similarly, a former Chief of Naval Staff, Vice-Admiral Isaiah Iko Ibrahim (retd.), and 50 other delegates, under the aegis of the Southern Kaduna APC Stakeholders, met recently in the state capital to build a support base for APC in southern Kaduna.

In a chat, Ibrahim disclosed that the delegates, drawn from all the local governments in the southern Kaduna, resolved that a change of government was inevitable in the state in 2015 and planned to persuade the indigenes of the area to work hard toward achieving the set objective.

Ibrahim, as the convener, said in the communiqué issued after the stakeholders meeting that, “We shall work as a united cluster irrespective of our ethno-religious affiliations. We shall use our diversity as a source of strength and build bridges that we will midwife a fraternity never seen since inception of civil rule in 1999.

“We are spreading the gospel of our party, APC like evangelist waging a crusade to all the nooks and crannies of Southern Kaduna. We shall use all means acceptable by our Electoral Laws and 1999 constitution to disinfect the campaign of calumny our political foes are spreading that our party is a party of a particular religion or ethnic group. Let us play issue-based politics and be realistic.”

But PDP members who have expressed dismay over APC’s “destructive political campaign” in the state said there was no basis for PDP to join issues with a party that is yet to have a base in the state. One of them, Alhaji Bashir Ibrahim Sakadadi, the political adviser to Governor Mukhtar Ramalan Yero, in an interview with journalists recently, said APC is a toothless bull dog and would be treated as such.

Sakadadi didn’t agree with the claim that APC has a major stronghold in the state, emphasising that the PDP structure is on ground and if one or two PDP people defected to APC, it means nothing to the party. “We are talking about elections so let us wait for the election time,” he stated.

Barrister Mansur , the PDP spokesman said the party is unmoved by the what he termed the hatchet plan by APC to unseat PDP and believed that time shall tell who is superior and on ground in Kaduna.

He however said APC has never been a threat to PDP and the party has the right to talk. “They can plan but God is the one that gives power and we are praying that God gives power to PDP come 2015.”


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