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From Ndubuisi Orji, Abuja
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has cautioned aspirants intending to contest the 2023 general election on the platform of All Progressives Congress (APC) against wasting their resources.
The PDP, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, said the ruling party is not a “valid vehicle to field candidates for elections under our extant laws.”
The opposition party stated that the replacement of Yobe State Governor, Mai Mala Buni, with his Niger State counterpart, Abubakar Sani Bello, as chairman of the APC Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC), allegedly by President Muhammadu Buhari, speaks volume about the party.
“Mr. President’s action confirms that the APC is not a political party under our laws but a special purpose vehicle (SPV) which became legally non-operational when in December 8, 2020, it dissolved its national, state as well as local government structures and handed its affairs over to a team of ‘political undertakers’, known as the CECPC.
“With the absence of a National Working Committee (NWC), National Executive Committee (NEC), a Board of Trustees (BoT) or legitimate structures in the states, the APC is plagued by confusion and fierce infighting by its various warlords with two national chairmen, multiple factions in the states and a national secretariat now taken over by security agencies.
“This further validates PDP’s sustained position that the APC is just a bunch of strange bedfellows and inchoate sailors clobbered together for remote personal gains and not for governance and public good,” the PDP said.
It added “moreover, by virtue of Section 183 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) which bars a sitting governor from holding ‘any other executive office in any capacity whatsoever’, while serving as a state governor, the APC’s CECPC whether headed by Governor Buni or Governor Bello remains constitutionally invalid.
“The PDP draws the attention of intending aspirants on the platform of the APC to the fact that the CECPC has no statutory authority under the law and that any state congress or national convention conducted by it to produce any party leadership, at any level, remains invalid and unrecognised by law.
“Consequently, any governorship, state Assembly, National Assembly as well as presidential primary conducted by any leadership produced by the illegal CECPC can only produce invalid candidates just like in the case of Zamfara and Rivers states in the 2019 general election where the APC had invalid candidates due to defective primary.”
