Former
Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has dumped Nigeria’s ruling All Progressives
Congress, APC.
Atiku in a statement narrated
his reasons for leaving the party.
The former vice president who
challenged President Muhammadu Buhari for the APC ticket in the build up to the
2015 elections did not indicate the new party he would join.
Many members of the main opposition
PDP, a party Mr. Abubakar helped form, have, however been asking him to rejoin
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?
Be
that as it may be, after due consultation with my God, my family, my supporters
and the Nigerian people whom I meet in all walks of life, I, Atiku Abubakar, Waziri
Adamawa, hereby tender my resignation from the All Progressives Congress while
I take time to ponder my future.
May God bless you and may God bless
Nigeria.
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