By Bode Olagoke
Abuja
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, has concluded plans to dump the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Also, a member of the newly constituted Board of Trustees of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Tom Ikimi, will within this week switch his allegiance to the ruling PDP.
Blueprint gathered last night that the opposition party will soon receive Tambuwal as a member following his plans to leave the PDP for the opposition party.
A competent source told our reporter that the decision was taken after a series of consultations with and advice from prominent Nigerians from across the six geo-political zones
It will be recalled that the speaker had embarked on consultation ahead the move.
Tambuwal recently had a closed door meeting with former President Olusegun Obasanjo in furtherance of his perceived ambition to fly the APC presidential flag or succeed Governor Aliyu Wammako in Sokoto state.
Blueprint has also learnt that following the congress of the APC that saw Ikimi schemed out of his ambition to be the party chairman, he had decided to leave the party.
The APC chieftain who responded to a text message sent to him said: “Did you see me at the meeting or the caucus (BoT) meeting?
“I received their invitation for the meetings, but I did not attend. I did not attend because I saw no reason why they should even invite me for their meetings when they did not address all the fundamental issues that I raised after the convention.
“I remain in my house. I cannot be running after anybody. I’m in my house.”
The former foreign affairs minister has been at loggerheads with the leadership of the party, particularly a national leader of the party, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who he had openly accused of turning the party into his private empire.
Ikimi is among the 74 newly-appointed members of the party’s BoT; but he did not attend the inaugural meetings of neither the BoT nor the NEC held on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.
He was a founding member of the Action Congress in 2006, one of the legacy parties that later metamorphosed into Action Congress of Nigeria before joining other opposition parties to found the APC.
Ikimi had wanted to be national chairman of the party but the hierarchy favoured Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, a former governor of Edo state.
The opposition to the candidature of Ikimi was said to have been spearheaded by Tinubu who was reportedly not comfortable with the “antecedents” of the former national chairman of the now defunct National Republican Convention (NRC) in the aborted Third Republic.
Ikimi was so angered by the adoption of Oyegun as chairman that he wrote a letter openly accusing Tinubu of bearing a grudge against him because of his insistence on a religiously balanced APC ticket in the presidential election.
Ikimi also accused Tinubu of unilaterally picking all members of the APC national executive council at the June convention.
