A former APC national chairmanship aspirant, Mr Ibrahim Emokpaire, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to ignore calls for the removal of the party national chairman, Adams Oshiomhole.
Emokpaire said the chairman was working hard to nurture the party, adding that Oshiomhole work for the party was “a labour of love”, that should be allowed to yield needed dividends.
He noted that many patriotic Nigerians, both at home and in the Diaspora, laboured to build the APC to what it is today. Emokpaire alleged that the same people who championed the removal of the party’s former national chairman (Chief John Oyegun), on account of his age, were back to throw out Oyegun’s successor.
He said that it was time for APC leadership turned the spotlight on them in the interest of the party.
“My advice to those who are bent on sabotaging our party chairman is that we should not join the opposition in bringing our party and government down,’’ he said. He said that Oshiomhole had been able to stabilise the APC since he assumed office as national chairman.
“Oshiomhole worked assiduously to increase the number of APC legislators in the two chambers of the National Assembly alongside ensuring victory for President Buhari during the 2019 general elections.
“It is pertinent to point out that prior to Oshiomhole being elected as APC national chairman, party congresses had already been conducted in all the 36 states plus Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
“It is also on record that all the current disagreements in the party were not only inherent but also apparent as records would show,” Emokpaire said noting protests against Oshiomhole were organised just to give a dog a bad name.
He exonerated the national chairman from blame for the crisis being experienced in some state chapters of the party as they predated his tenure.
“You do not remove the national chairman of a party through protest by `urchins’, especially the embarrassing type we witnessed recently, where young children were seen carrying placards.
“Majority of these children neither understood the purpose of their protest nor the message on the placard; you must go through an established process to remove a party’s national chairman if at all there is need for it.
“We must not forget that what brought APC to power is the desire for change in our country but paradoxically, what many people are seeing is hostility to the very change that we had promised,” he said.
He warned that if the party’s leadership allowed Oshiomhole to be ridiculed, it would suffer the consequences. He stressed that it was important for the party to stand firm and ignore all the character assassination and campaigns of calumny, and support its national chairman and the president.
