By Abbanobi – Eku Onyeka
A group popularly known as the Advocate for Better Leadership and Sustainable Rural Development Initiative (ABLE) has called on stakeholders in the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) to ensure that the current National Chairman, Alhaji Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje is returned unopposed in their next annual convention.
This is coming on the heels of rumours making the round that some party stalwarts are scheming to return to the zoning arrangement, which favours the North Central zone, as against the North West, where the incumbent National Chairman, Alhaji Ganduje, hails from.
The group in a press conference held on Thursday in Abuja, posited that few months after the former governor of Kano state assumed office as the National Chairman, Alhaji Ganduje has out-performed past National Chairmen in all aspects of the party’s administration.
ABLE Director-General, Destiny Madu, noted that “since Alhaji Ganduje assumed office few months ago, there is evident stability in the party. It’s national image has strengthened above its pre-Ganduje era. Indeed, the party has attained such a splendid status it may never have imagined it would attain in a couple of strakes through thick and thin.
“He has manifestly united all the warring factions around a common course for consensus building, which is necessarily for the APC to retain initiative. He has tactfully united all previously aggrieved members of the party into the party fold for a formidable front against opposition parties. The party under him, has suddenly regained its calm and is foreword looking now.
“Our sentiment came following a rumour some certain anti-progressive elements are planning to hijack the party leadership in the name of the so called zoning and that those at the forefront of zoning campaign are some past governors looking for relevance, yet whose political antecedents are no match to that of Ganduje.
Hon. Madu who dragged the 36 state governors to court few years ago, over the practice of making local government areas an extension of financial empire for their states, made it clear that it would be a disservice u to the ruling party in particular and the Nigerian state in general, any attempt to change Alhaji Ganduje, in keeping with the leadership zoning formula.
“Besides, for us, such a change would have been premature since he has not stayed long up to a year in office. However, he has proven himself a competent leader from when he was a two term governor of Kano state, till now as a ruling party National Chairman.
“We found those agitating for a change of leadership as anti-progressive elements that are after their own selfish ends and whose record of misrule as governors still haunts the people’s spirits.
“Thank God we are speaking the minds of most Nigerians, both politicians and apolitical, who considered such clamour for a change of leadership as ill-advised not when Ganduje, under the short period of six months in the saddle, has outperformed any known past chairman of our great party since its creation,” he said.
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