Pruned or disqualified? Oyegun’s remarks cause confusion on APC final list

Were 10 presidential hopefuls of the All Progressives Congress (APC) disqualified by the screening panel — or were they omitted from the final shortlist?

Disqualification connotes that the aspirants failed to meet the criteria for scaling the screening process, while a shortlist suggests that the heavyweight contenders were separated from the pack.

The accurate interpretation has been a bone of contention following the remarks of John Oyegun, chairman of the screening panel, when he submitted the report to Abdullahi Adamu, the APC national chairman.

At the presentation of the report on Friday, Oyegun said the APC panel came up with a shortlist of 13 contenders, adding that the party gave special consideration to “younger elements”, hence its decision not to cut the list “a little shorter”.

“First, we have 23 aspirants that we interacted with and my first comment is that we are indeed a lucky party. The point I want to make is the quality of the people that want to govern this country,” Oyegun had said.

“We are a governing party and so the ability to lead, the background, experience… it is on the basis that we made a shortlist. I won’t want to read the names, I’d leave that to you, but we brought the number down to 13.

“We could have cut it a little shorter but we wanted the younger elements to surface.”

Given the former APC chairman’s remarks, it was widely believed that 10 presidential hopefuls had been disqualified from taking part in the primary billed for June 6-8.

‘LIST PRUNED, NO ONE DISQUALIFIED’

However, in an interview with Premium Times, a screening panel member was quoted as saying no presidential hopeful was disqualified.

The panel member maintained that all the contenders were cleared and found to be “qualified” for the primary, noting that the party cut the list to avoid going “into the primary with an unwieldy number of aspirants”.

“We have cleared all of them because they are all qualified and the party will issue them all with clearance certificates,” the unnamed panel member was quoted as saying.

“Go and read what the chairman said again and you would see that he did not mention the world disqualification.

“What the panel did was to recommend to the party leadership that at least 10 of the candidates should be persuaded to withdraw because they do not appear to stand a chance of winning election for our party.”

The panel member added that the presidential hopefuls who failed to make the cut “can ignore our recommendation and go ahead to participate in the primary”.