By Chidiebere Onyemaizu
There are feelers that barring a last minute trade offs and appeasements by the national leadership of the All Progressives Congress, APC and President Muhammadu Buhari, the party will formally split in two at its national convention of the party slated for this Saturday, June 23, 2018 in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja with the President himself as the biggest casualty of the impending implosion. It has been learnt that a faction of the party that claim it represents the real APC will pronounce Buhari suspended from the party and barred from flying the APC flag at next year’s presidential election.
Multiple party sources last night confirmed that several aggrieved factions in APC, including a group of PDP renegades known as New PDP (nPDP) who in 2013 ditched the then ruling party, Peoples Party, PDP and pitched tent with the newly born APC and some members of the outgoing National Working Committee, NWC will at the convention stage the biggest walk out ever witnessed in a party gathering and moved to a location within Abuja to conduct its own convention.
Unlike the splinter PDP which staged a walk at the 2013 PDP national convention and adopted the acronym, “nPDP” , The Source has been informed that the APC factions coming together to allegedly stage a parallel convention will stick with the party’s name but insist they are the mainstream APC.
It is on the basis of this, it was learnt, that the splinter group in their convention will slam a number of party bigwigs, including President Buhari, APC national leader and Lagos state governor, Bola Tinubu, with suspension and the President’s disqualification as the APC presidential candidate as the clincher.
Some of the outgoing NWC members who will be joining forces with the rebel APC to split the party are piqued by Buhari’s volt-face on the issue of tenure elongation for them after initially throwing his weight behind the idea. According to sources, they are pained that their enormous sacrifices for the President and APC, including staking their integrity to defend his unpopular policies, including non implementation of his campaign promises have gone unappreciated.
However, sources at the national secretariat of the party who spoke to The Source say party members planning a parallel convention are those who have already made up their minds to defect to the PDP and are only looking for alibi and legal backing to do so. “They simply want to simulate crisis in the APC so that they will claim their defection was as a result of division in our party”, one of the sources told the magazine.
