A
former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, plans to defect from the ruling
Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, a party he helped lay the building
blocks.
On Monday, the former Vice president had
consultations with his political aides and associates on the invite by
the All Progressives Congress, APC, to join them. He met with his
supporters from the six states in the North Central and the Federal
Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja.
The states are Plateau, Benue,
Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa and Niger. Leaders of the APC had visited the
former vice president in his Abuja home late last year to formally
request him to join the APC, a product of merger talks among the ACN,
the All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP, and the Congress for Progressive
Change, CPC. In a statement recently, Mr. Abubakar said he would consult
widely before taking a decision on the invitation.
At the
Monday’s meeting, his associates, who assured him they would accompany
him to any party of his choice, however asked him to carefully consider
the APC’s invitation so that he would not encounter the problems that in
the first informed his decision to return to the PDP from the defunct
AC.
“Over time, the PDP has never known what to do with Turaki
Atiku Abubakar and yet here he is being beckoned at by other political
parties,” Yahaya Kwande, a former Nigerian ambassador to Switzerland,
who attended the meeting, was quoted as saying at the meeting by an
attendee.
“Now, we need the wisdom of Solomon to know the
direction to go. That is why we are all here: to help him in taking
decisions of how to handle this dilemma in front of him.”
Mr.
Abubakar, who was vice president on the ticket of the PDP between 1999
and 2007, was literally forced out of the ruling party by his boss,
former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was no longer comfortable
working with him. Mr. Obasanjo was believed to be angry with his deputy
for opposing his bid to extend his (Obasanjo) tenure.
He joined
some of his associates to float the AC, which later became Action
Congress of Nigeria, ACN, but left the defunct party in 2011following
his alleged disagreement with some of its chieftains, including a former
Lagos State Governor, Bola Tinubu, who incidentally is a leader of the
APC. Part of the former vice president’s grouse was allegedly that Mr.
Tinubu betrayed him when he flew the AC flag during the 2007
presidential election.
The former governor allegedly funded the
campaign of late President Umaru Yar’Adua, who was the presidential
candidate of the PDP. Mr. Abubakar subsequently secured a waiver to
return to the PDP in September 2010 and contested the presidential
primaries of the party, but was defeated by President Goodluck Jonathan.
He
had been picked by the Northern political elders as the north’s
consensus candidate in the presidential primaries of the ruling party.
However, last year, the former vice president wrote the PDP complaining
of tactical move to deprive him of his full rights as a member of the
ruling party.
In the letter addressed to the then National
Chairman of the PDP, Bamanga Tukur, Mr. Abubakar complained about the
omission of his name from PDP state delegation list, exclusion from the
meetings of the party’s National Executive Committee, NEC, and the Board
of Trustees, BOT, despite being a member of both bodies.
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