Some governors want to kill APC over inordinate ambition – El-Rufai

Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has accused some of his colleagues of trying to use their inordinate ambition to kill the All Progressives Congress.

El-Rufai was speaking while featuring on Channels TV programme Politics Today which was monitored by our correspondent.

He said while it was normal for politicians to have ambitions, some leaders of the APC including some of his colleagues were doing so at the detriment of the party.

El-Rufai said, “Even with the unilateral announcement of March 26 as the date for the national convention without consulting us as governors, we began to get signals that there some elements in the party leadership as well as some governors that are working together to ensure that that March 26 date is missed.

“If it is missed, the following Saturday is the beginning of Ramadan which means that we are not going to have the convention until May after Salah, and if we are having convention in May, based on the INEC timetable, we have already lost one month that we should be conducting primaries. This really made us to be concerned and we demanded to see Mr President as Progressives Governors Forum along with the leadership of the party and we met the president on the 22nd of February and laid out to him what we think are the steps needed to be taken if we are to have our convention by the 26th of March.

“Politicians always have ambitions, but ambitions should not be destructive. When your ambition has the likelihood of destroying an entire party that many of us laboured for years to build, that ambition is not realistic nor reasonable.”

The Kaduna governor who narrated how Mai Mala Buni was removed as the National Chairman of the Caretaker/Extra-ordinary Convention Planning Committee  (CECPC) of the party, said the Yobe Governor had been hiding a court injunction which was meant to stop the national convention.

According to him, it took the intervention of President Buhari who stepped in and directed that Niger State Governor, Abubakar Sani Bello step in as the acting CECPC chairman.

“Governor Sani Bello now said let’s implement the president’s directives, lets issue a notice for NEC, let’s do this and let’s do that and the national secretary just refused. When we heard about this, we converged again to Abuja and on Sunday, before the president left, we had an early morning meeting with him and we told him there was no movement on his directives and we are hearing that there was a court order and we have now found out that there was a court order.

“This court order was obtained in November, a member of the party went to court to say that there must be no convention until his case against the party is disposed of which can take months or years, and the lawyers of the party and the lawyer of Mai Mala Buni went to court and agreed with the petitioner and got this order. Nobody knew about this order, it was never brought to the caretaker committee, it was sort of hidden as a hidden nuclear weapon to destroy the convention, which further made us believe that there are fifth columnists in the party that want to bring this party down. Because if we don’t have an elected executive committee and go ahead to our primaries, we are likely to have our candidates lose all their seats as we saw in Zamfara State.

“It took us a lot of efforts to go through all the enrolled orders in FCT High Court, Federal High Court before we found it. When we reported to the president and said no action has been taken, he said Governor Abu Sani Bello must take over on Monday and we should use whatever legal means necessary to make sure that this convention is delivered. He told us as governors that ‘I am relying on you to do whatever is legally necessary, vacate this order, Abu Sani Bello take over the leadership of the party, reconstitute all the committees of the convention and ensure that March 26 date is sacrosanct.

“Governor Bello has President Buhari’s full backing and the backing of at least 19 of the 23 APC governors and deputy governors,” El Rufai added.

On the zoning formula adopted by the CECPC, he said the president had already endorsed a candidate to become the party’s national chairman, which will emerge by consensus at the national convention.

“One of the first steps was to know where the national chairman of the party would be coming from because that would now determine the zoning of the rest of the five other zones. The president gave us a decision on that, he said, ‘I am reluctant to get involved in who is the national chairman, but look at North Central, all the candidates I am looking at are in the North Central.’

“The president was reluctant to nominate who would become the chairman of the party because he said ‘I am not contesting, I want to hand over this party to a strong leadership that will that it continues, so, I am not interested in who becomes the national chairman unlike in 2019 when I was contesting.’ But we said ‘Mr President, all of us are state governors, we have an influence on who is the state chairman of the party, so it is only sensible and logically for you to guides us on who to support as national chairman.’ We forced him literarily to do that, he didn’t want to do it.

“The president has told us who he prefers as chairman of the party, but I am not allowed to reveal it because the tradition of the APC is that the president decides on who he is most comfortable with as the chairman of the party and we try to achieve consensus around that person. It was the case in Oyegun, it was also the case in Oshiomhole and we are doing the same in this case.

“The reason why I cannot tell you who the president prefers is because we are still doing the work of reconciling and getting all the aspirants in the North Central to step down for the president’s candidate.

“We normally adopt consensus for national chairmanship of the party. Other positions may be contested, but usually national chairmanship and some times national secretary, we do that by consensus, that’s is how it has always been if you look at the past conventions we have had,” he said.

He also added that the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the party holding next week will ratify all the party’s decisions including the removal of Buni and the National Secretary James Akpanudoedehe.

“I don’t think it is necessary to remove any member of the CECPC, Mai Mana has more or less stepped aside by handing over to Governor Abu Sani Bello. I can assure you that even when he returns to the country, he is assuming no position expect his substantive position as the governor of Yobe state. For the national secretary, I believe the CECPC has taken action against him already, so there is nothing to tinker with.

“We have our NEC meeting in the next few days and any such unresolved legal issues will be dealt with by the NEC. We now have 36 state chairmen and 22 state governors, we have senators and house of representatives members that are statutory members of NEC, so, we have a quorum to call a fell NEC meeting and take all decision on behalf of the national convention and those decisions will be ratified,” the Kaduna governor further said.