Buhari has succumbed to the firepower of governors, says Shehu Sani on APC crisis

Shehu Sani, senator representing Kaduna central, says governors under the All Progressives Congress (APC) have no respect for President Muhammadu Buhari and do not share his philosophy.

In an interview with The Nation, Sani said the president is unable to curtail the powers of the governors and have succumbed to them.

Commenting on the crisis rocking the ruling party, the senator said Buhari and Adams Oshiomhole, national chairman of the APC, have become weak and helpless in the face of firepower by the state governors.

Sani said Bola Tinubu, a national leader of the ruling party, had done his best to resolve the crisis that forced him out of the party but that Tinubu did not achieve much because he is not from the north.

“I must be very frank with you, Tinubu has done his best but there is a limit to what he can do. He isn’t from the North and has a lot of issues to attend to but what was very clear, I won’t rain insults on the President or Chairman of the party, but what I would say is that their weaknesses, their vulnerability, their failures have been evident in the very sense that they were helpless in the face of firepower by the state governors.

He added that the Buhari administration is now run by invisible forces and has disconnected from the vision it started with.

“Well, if you look at his attitude to governance and his philosophy of being for everybody and nobody has led the party nowhere and it is also leading the party nowhere,” Sani said.

“If you are a leader, you cannot preside over a nation by body language or side language. You have to take decisions, you have to be decisive. You don’t also have to depend on the decisions of others but you can consult others for the decisions which you are going to take. The governors under the APC today don’t respect President Buhari; they have no respect for him and they don’t share what his philosophy is all about.

“While the chairman of the party sees the need to preserve the loyal band within the party, the governors don’t see the need for it. They want to plant their stooges. As far as I am concerned, the seat that I occupy, the Kaduna Central senatorial seat, Nasir el Rufai is putting a stooge there to keep the place for him so that after he is out of government, he can also be a senator.

“The governors see senatorial seats as places they should preserve for their future and that’s why you find some people going to the national assembly without standing up to do their work as parliamentarians, because they were there standing in for somebody.”

Last month, Sani resigned his membership of the ruling APC in protest and joined the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) due to his inability to secure the ticket of the APC for the 2019 elections despite assurances from the national working committee of the party.