A chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and immediate-past National Vice Chairman (North-west), Salihu Moh Lukman, has said the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) has no power to determine the mode of primary election as has done Edo state.
The party had settled for direct primary and ruled out zoning of the governorship seat in Edo state.
But reacting to the development through a statement released Sunday in Abuja, Lukman described the decision of the NWC to produce the governorship candidate of APC for the Edo 2024 election based on direct primary as “a clear usurpation of the powers of the National Executive Committee (NEC), which is illegal.”
According to Lukman, “these are troublesome realities. Troublesome because the decision of the NWC to organise direct primary contradicts provisions of Article 13.4(iv) of the APC constitution, which only empowers the NWC to ‘propose electoral guidelines and regulations governing the conduct of elections to Party offices at all levels, and procedure for selecting Party candidates for elective offices …to the National Executive Committee’.”
He said: “The recent decision by the APC National Working Committee (NWC) regarding the 2024 Edo election, whereby the NWC announced that the party’s candidate will emerge through direct primary may be informed by the strong desire of party leaders to manipulate the process. Already, there are media reports alleging that APC Stakeholders in Edo State have decided to limit the number of aspirants for the primary.
“Combinations of illegality, clear disposition by APC leaders to manipulate the process of producing candidates could only mean that APC leaders are weakly committed to win the support of electorates. Once that is the case, it makes APC leaders more disposed to acts of rigging and manipulating electoral results with the attendant consequences of producing elected representatives on the platform of the party who are anything but representative or responsive to the interest of citizens. As loyal APC members, we will continue to appeal to our leaders to moderate their conduct and return to the founding vision of AP
