For more than two hours yesterday, the Minister of Women Aff airs and Social Development, Hajiya Aisha Alhassan, was placed on the hot seat by the national leadership of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) over her recent comments considered as anti-President Muhammadu Buhari. Confi rming the closed door meeting, the party’s spokesman,Malam Bolaji Abdullahi, who saw the embattled minister to her car, told newsmen that the party “invited her for a meeting.
” Th e Taraba-born politician had recently declared her political allegiance ahead of the 2019 presidential elections to the former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, a move considered in some quarters as disloyalty to the president. Th e minister, who arrived at the APC national secretariat in Abuja at about 1:50pm, did not leave until 4:05pm. When asked for her comment on reason for the meeting, ‘Mama Taraba’ as fondly called, simply said: “I can’t talk when the APC spokesman is here with me.
I am not the party’s spokesperson.” Our correspondent, however, gathered from sources close to the venue of the meeting that the party “was shocked and bitter against the minister and simply asked her to do the needful because the cabinet members can no longer trust her.” But speaking with newsmen after the meeting, Abdullahi debunked the insinuation that the party asked her to resign her position.
He said: “No, that did not come up. What we just said was that we understand the context in which she said what she said, but it was an act of indiscretion for someone occupying the position she is occupying in the party to make that kind of statement. “If this was 2018 and the people have fi led their applications to say they are contesting and she now comes out and says she is supporting this person, how can that be an issue? But we are still in 2017. We are still far away. Atiku has not said he is contesting. He has not collected any form. He has not announced to anybody that he is contesting. So, that is what we mean by the timing. It is not that she had no right to say what she had said.”
