Former Vice President
Atiku Abubakar and chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has resigned from the party.
Read Mr. Abubakar’s full statement
below.
On the 19th of December, 2013, I
received members of the All Progressives Congress at my house in Abuja. They
had come to appeal to me to join their party after my party, the Peoples
Democratic Party, had become factionalized as a result of the special
convention of August 31, 2013.
The fractionalization of the Peoples
Democratic Party on August 31, 2013 had left me in a situation where I was,
with several other loyal party members, in limbo, not knowing which of the
parallel executives of the party was the legitimate leadership.
It was under this cloud that members
of the APC made the appeal to me to join their party, with the promise that the
injustices and failure to abide by its own constitution which had dogged the
then PDP, would not be replicated in the APC and with the assurance that the
vision other founding fathers and I had for the PDP could be actualized through
the All Progressives Congress.
It was on the basis of this
invitation and the assurances made to me that I, being party-less at that time,
due to the fractionalization of my party, accepted on February 2, 2014, the
hand of fellowship given to me by the All Progressives Congress.
On that day, I said “it is the
struggle for democracy and constitutionalism and service to my country and my
people that are driving my choice and my decision” to accept the invitation to
join the All Progressives Congress.
Like you, I said that because I
believed that we had finally seen the beginnings of the rebirth of the new
Nigeria of our dreams which would work for all of us, old and young.
However, events of the intervening
years have shown that like any other human and like many other Nigerians, I was
fallible.
While other parties have purged
themselves of the arbitrariness and unconstitutionality that led to
fractionalization, the All Progressives Congress has adopted those same
practices and even gone beyond them to institute a regime of a draconian
clampdown on all forms of democracy within the party and the government it
produced.
Only last year, a governor produced
by the party wrote a secret memorandum to the president which ended up being
leaked. In that memo, he admitted that the All Progressives Congress had “not
only failed to manage expectations of a populace that expected overnight
‘change’ but has failed to deliver even mundane matters of governance”.
Of the party itself, that same
governor said “Mr. President, Sir Your relationship with the national leadership
of the party, both the formal (NWC) and informal (Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Atiku
Abubakar, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso), and former Governors of ANPP, PDP (that joined
us) and ACN, is perceived by most observers to be at best frosty. Many of them
are aggrieved due to what they consider total absence of consultations with
them on your part and those you have assigned such duties.”
Since that memorandum was written up
until today, nothing has been done to reverse the treatment meted out to those
of us invited to join the All Progressives Congress on the strength of a
promise that has proven to be false. If anything, those behaviours have
actually worsened.
But more importantly, the party we
put in place has failed and continues to fail our people, especially our young
people. How can we have a federal cabinet without even one single youth.
A party that does not take the youth
into account is a dying party. The future belongs to young people.
I admit that I and others who
accepted the invitation to join the APC were eager to make positive changes for
our country that we fell for a mirage. Can you blame us for wanting to put a
speedy end to the sufferings of the masses of our people?
SOURCE
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