The All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) has faulted the purported meeting of former Speaker Yakubu Dogara with some Northern Christians on the party’s 2023 presidential ticket.
Mr Bayo Onanuga, Director, Media and Publicity of the council said this in a statement on Monday in Abuja.
He said the former speaker have apparently been bitter since he could not realise his self-imposed ambition of becoming the APC presidential candidate at the primaries.
“On account of this, Dogara has become a reprobate and has been delivering hate speeches and whipping up emotions capable of setting the country ablaze, ahead of 2023 general election.
“The Tinubu-Shettima PCC is therefore not surprised by media reports about a meeting of some so-called Northern Christian leaders, who claimed to be members of our APC that was championed by Dogara and his likes.
“The claim was totally fraudulent.
“Dogara, the peripatetic and politically unstable politician who organised the meeting left our party officially and unceremoniously weeks ago,” he said.
“And those who attended the meeting were representing themselves, their selfish agenda, not Northern Christians.
“Before the so call meeting, the former speaker had spear headed a campaign of vitriol and hate against our party, using religion as camouflage.”
This, he said, Dogara did after he lost the APC Vice-Presidential ticket to a better qualified candidate, Sen. Kashim Shettima.
Onanuga said a careful reading of the people who attended the unholy meeting with Dogara showed that they were all Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members, masquerading as APC members.
“Among the politicians at the unholy consultative meeting were Mukhar Shagari, Boni Haruna, Abdulfattah Ahmed; Damishi Sango; Sen. Idris Ahmed Umar; and two former deputy governors of Kogi, Yomi Awoniyi and Simon Achuba.
“They are all PDP members working for the presidential ambition of Atiku Abubakar,” Onanuga said.
He added that the APC PCC was not surprised by the resolutions adopted at the meeting, saying it was however, surprised that the media failed to read through their smokescreen.
He wondered how the assembly of strange bed fellows hoped to foster unity and cohesion in the country.
This, he said, was especially when their candidate represented the antithesis of the goal, having emerged the greatest divider of our polity, between the North and the South.
Onanuga said Nigerians were aware that Atiku’s emergence as PDP 2023 presidential candidate grossly violated the power rotation code between the North and the South.
“His insistence on snatching and retaining what rightly belongs to another political region has triggered a crisis within his party, making him run from Port Harcourt to London to mend fences,” Onanuga said.
He, however, assured Dogara and his co-travellers fanning hate campaign against Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the APC presidential candidate and his running mate, that they would fail spectacularly at the poll.
He added that from the engagements APC leaders had with men of all faiths, bigotry would not win 2023 presidential election.
According to him, what will prevail are the track records of APC candidates and the solution-driven and all-inclusive progressive programmes the candidates offer Nigerians.
He said that Tinubu and Shettima were going into the 2023 presidential campaigns with clear objectives to engage Nigerians across socio-economic brackets on policy actions that would make their lives better.
“Our candidates will not exploit our country’s fault lines to win election and sell religion as Kool Aid,” Onanuga said
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