APC must stop the drift  

It appears the All Progressive Congress would have been better as a party in opposition. Ever since the election of Senator Bukola Saraki and Representative Yakubu Dogara as Senate president and House of Representatives speaker on June 9, the party’s major preoccupation has been trying to discredit and unseat the duo. For once, the party’s well-oiled propaganda machinery as recognised by this column some weeks back, is caught in a quandary bluffing its way through mistakes upon mistakes. Apparently, APC is finding it difficult to manage its recent electoral success.

From non-recognition of Saraki and Dogara’s emergence to ‘a constitutional process seemed to have occurred’ a la Garba Shehu, followed by ‘the party would sanction them’ to the transmission of letters to both chambers by the party hierarchy last week on filling the remaining leadership slots, the party clearly has lost its way in governance. The discordant tunes from its leaders is also disconcerting, the latest coming from former Governor Bisi Akande and Audu Ogbeh, former PDP chairman. Akande, APC pioneer chairman, in a public letter on Sunday, claimed that some entrenched interests working with PDP members were responsible for the sordid state of affairs the party has foisted on Nigerians.

Hear him: “What began as political patronages to be shared into APC membership-spreads among ethnic zones, religious faiths and political rankings and experiences has now become so complicated that the sharing has to be done by and among PDP leadership together with cohorts of former new-PDP affiliations in the APC, by and among gangs of past anti-Buhari’s Presidency, and certain APC legislators and party members who dance round the crisis arena to pick some crumbs.

“Now that the whole conspiracy has blown open, it is doubtful if the present institutions of party leadership can muster the required capacity to arrest the drift. It is my opinion that President Buhari, and the APC governors should now see APC as a wrecking platform that may not be strong enough again to carry them to political victory in 2019 and they should quickly begin a joint damage control effort to reconstruct the party in its claim to bring about the promised change before the party’s shortcomings begin to aggravate the challenges of governance in their hands.”

Ogbeh, now an APC leader, said in an interview with Punch newspaper over the weekend: “It’s too late for APC to expel Saraki. I think dialogue is the answer and I wish to God that that dialogue had taken place much earlier.” He added that it was a ‘strategic error’ to have called a meeting on the morning of June 9 while there should have been a committee to reconcile the warring factions within the party. “The longer it (crisis) lasts, the more embarrassment we get, the more the public confidence in us shakes and the more difficulties we face in governance,” the former minister concluded.

Good enough that there are people like Ogbeh thinking clearly like this in APC, maybe all is not lost. One of the funniest things in our country is the tendency of some Nigerians pretending to know what goes on in the mind of President Buhari and making spirited attempts at defending his approach to governance. That is part of the honeymoon period, however, it cannot last forever. Sooner, the same people might turn against their hero if the current level of inertia persists. With Ogbeh’s submission, one would be lying saying the internal squabbles of APC are not affecting the party’s performance in government. As I write this, the president has not met either Saraki or Dogara, nearly a month after they assumed offices as number three and four citizens of the country he leads. Simply put, this is bad and portrays him in a not too-dignifying way especially as an apostle of change. It also does not make the job of his media handlers easy at all.

The spokespersons seemed to be busy more in responding to media attacks on the president more than explaining his agenda to the public. Fine if it was the PDP making the attacks but when such come from the office of the senate president, it belittles the office of the president. By the way, Saraki appears to be having the upper hand going by what were in the papers over the weekend, what with the cheeky attempt at exposing him as someone with dual citizenship even with a bad imitation of a passport bio data page where his name was spelt wrongly? Let the APC put its house in order so that it can face the business of governance more seriously and the onus lies on the president to arrest the drift within his party.