A former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Na’Abba, joined the All Progressives Congress (APC) yesterday, even as he was offered an automatic membership into the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the party by the national chairman, Chief John Oyegun.
He had withdrawn his membership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Monday through a letter he sent to the chairman of the PDP Sharada Ward in Kano Municipal local government area and titled “Notification of Resignation from PDP, each organs and committees.”
Addressing the leadership of APC at its national secretariat yesterday, he said he believed that the country needed change now more than any other time, adding that the country had been misruled by the PDP-led administration.
He said: “My total sum of my communication was that I have decided to leave the party that I have been a member of for the last 16 years. When I and other senior members of the party left the party between 2005 and 2007, a lot of things happened that we thought were undemocratic; we had to leave the party. Eventually some of us returned after the late Umaru Yar’Adua made some promises about change in the party, which never happened.
“It is in that quest that I feel having resigned from the PDP, I must join the APC so that I can help to roll that momentum and that it is quite remarkable that since yesterday I have been receiving calls from all nooks and crannies of Nigeria; that is to show you that the APC is a national party.”
While accepting the former speaker into the APC, National Chairman of the party, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, described Na’Abba as “a man of indisputable quality” with the kind of achievements recorded on his name.
He, therefore, offered him an automatic membership into the party BoT.
Also speaking, Chief Tony Momoh said one thing that many people “forget is that APC today is bigger than PDP.”
On his own, another former National chairman of PDP, Chief Audu Ogbeh, thanked the former speaker for coming back to join them in APC, adding that he happened to be chairman of PDP when his impeachment saga was carried out.