28th August, 2014
Eromosele Ebhomele
National leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd), has disclosed that the party’s primaries for the election of its governorship and presidential candidates would not follow the usual convention where delegates are expected to cast their votes.
Buhari, who stated this in an interview first published by Premium Times, an online news medium, said this was aimed at further uniting the party and to discourage the buying of votes from delegates.
“I convinced our colleagues that the first thing to do is to have the party on the ground. When the party is on the ground, we can go and start from the grassroots. That’s where we are now. We are trying to kill the delegates system; we are going to do direct primaries.
“We will start from the ward and come up. The convention will just be to ratify it. So even for those who have so much money, there will be no delegates to buy. The people will have their way. And that is how our candidates, including that for the presidency, will emerge.The most important thing is to remove self if one is serious. That’s what I call stabilisation of the system,” he said.
He noted that the party remains strong in spite of the fact that some of its big weights have moved over to the PDP, adding that such people were in the party to scuttle every of its progress.
He recalled how such people, whom he refused to name, had earlier tried to scuttle the party’s registration process and that prior to their leaving, they had remained a cog in the wheel of the party’s progress.
He reiterated that the coming together of the five political parties that formed the APC was not an accident.
“I think the way forward for our country is for the opposition parties that have representations in the state legislatures and in the centre to come together and face the PDP. Unless that is done, we cannot stop the bad system,” he added.
According to him, no single opposition can successfully battle the PDP and as a result, members of the opposition must eschew the love for self and sacrifice personal interests for the opposition to be strengthened.
“Differences exist and will continue to exist, but being in the same party, we have to find a way of getting over our differences. For example, we had to establish what is called harmonization committee, especially when we were joined by five PDP governors with their structures. Naturally, they crushed my poor grassroots supporters. This is the reality on the ground. Forget about me,” he said.
While not denying his interest in 2015, he said: “whoever finds himself as the leader of this country next year, I hope he will not be overwhelmed by the nation’s problems and just sit back to watch the decay instead of doing something practical.”