The national chairman of the Reformed All Progressives Congress (R-APC), Mr. Buba Galadima has said that he has majority of members of members of the national assembly with him that could do his bidding.
He was reacting to a statement credited to the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr. Adams Oshiomhole that the party’s leadership would rather ignore members of the R-APC than be bothered by their action.
“We listened to Buba Galadima. It is as if a very hungry bird is dancing at the centre of the road and a disgruntled drummer not far away in the bush is drumming for him.
“But this is not to say that we are not aware that there are challenges here and there, but anything about APC is considered more, much more than the sum total of all the challenges we have in many of the states.
“And by the special grace of God, we shall overcome them and we are already overcoming them, I am very confident that we can afford to ignore Buba Galadima,” said Oshiomhole in Abuja when chairmen of the defunct Congress for Progressives Congress (CPC) paid him a visit at the party`s national secretariat.
He added: “There are a lot of idle people who don’t have any other thing to do and once they don’t have access to national honey pot, they begin to complain.
“For me, there is no cause for alarm; nobody should panic over one Buba Galadima, whose group, I believe, cannot define us in the next election in 2019.
“Nigerians are wiser. They know that corruption is fighting back and that President Muhammadu Buhari’s resolve to fight corruption must elicit a counter force and that force must find attraction in some people.”
But speaking in an interview on AIT, Galadima said he could ask the national assembly to impeach anybody since majority of them are in the R-APC.
“This is the beginning of what you call crisis. I should say that I am glad that Nigerians of all walks of life have shown solidarity with us.
“And for those who could not lose sleep, I wonder why they went cap in hand, kneeling down before the members of National Assembly.
“I want to say that as at today, if I give directive to the National Assembly to impeach anybody for constitutional infraction, it could be done because I have that majority in the National Assembly,” he said.
He debunked the claim that the crisis in the APC began with the election of the senate president, Dr. Bukola Saraki.
Instead, he said the crisis started when those he described as “opportunists” hijacked the party.
“The crisis in APC did not start from the election tussle of the National Assembly, because for me that was democracy in action and once legislators are appointed, they put aside their political differences and work as one unit to produce laws for the good governance of the country and also as an arm of government to provide checks and balances to the excess of the government from whatever party the president comes from.
“The real problem of the APC started because those of us who are founding members of this party, those who made life sacrifice, those of us Nigerians with impeccable patriotism that came together because of the slide then and decided to submerge and subsume our interest to form the APC, I should boldly say that I was one of the nine signatories that formed the APC and nobody can delete that history. We never see the faces of all these opportunists I am talking about. They never appended their signatures then yet they are reaping from where they did not sow.
“Because they have no history of why the APC was formed, what we suffered and what we did to protect entrenched interest, they started doing things that were not envisaged by the founding fathers of the APC.
“The crisis has been on but it took different dimensions when the tenure of the immediate national officers was expiring. Different interests started resurfacing and through to it, all the ideals for which we formed the APC were thrown to the dustbin.
“Those of us who are patriotic, who have made sacrifices to bring about the formation of this party cannot sit idly and watch them destroy our sweat.”
Meanwhile, R-APC, Kaduna State chapter, has elected a retired army officer, Col. Dauda Gora, as its state chairman.
Other members of the state executive are the former commissioner for women affairs under Governor Nasir el-Rufai, Mrs. Rabiu Abdulsalam, deputy chairman, Mr. Jafaru Abbas, secretary; Shehu Abubakar, assistant secretary; Alhaji Uba Maiwashi, zonal vice-chairman 1; Abdullahi Jafaru, zonal vice chairman 2; Hosea Buba, zonal vice chairman 3; Auta Maisamari, state legal adviser; Ayuba Imam, Treasurer; Pastor Ephraim Haruna, state financial secretary and Mock Kure, state publicity secretary.
In his acceptance speech, Gora who pledged loyalty to the Galadima-led national executive committee of R-APC said the state had not fared better under the APC government.
“You are all aware of the reasons informing the emergence of the R-APC from the APC. You are equally aware of how different political platforms collapsed to form the APC prior to the 2015 general elections.
“Sadly, the yearnings and aspirations of our people have not come to fruition both at the national level and in our dear Kaduna State in particular.
“We were made to believe that we were dealing with democrats, and so we entrusted them with our votes, little did we know that we were casting our votes to unleash the worse form of dictatorship on the hapless people of Kaduna State. Today, those ideals of democracy which include the right to vote and be voted for in free, fair and credible elections have all been stultified,” he said.
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