BY BENEDICT NWACHUKWU, ABUJA
The All Progressives Congress has enmeshed in yet another crisis as the Abdullahi Adamu-led National Working Committee has accused the party’s standard bearer, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, of dumping the party’s manifesto and opting for personal achievements as his manifesto.
Inside sources at the Buhari House National Secretariat of the party in Abuja told The Point that the NWC is not happy with Tinubu who they accused of dumping the APC manifesto in his build up for the campaign.
Our sources further disclosed that those around the presidential candidate are behind the squabbles between him and the NWC because they have continued to encourage the dumping of the party manifesto and continue to play up activities of many years ago in Lagos State.
Meanwhile, the spokesman of the Tinubu/Shettima Campaign Organisation and Minister of State, Labour, Festus Keyamo maintained that all is well as the party is going into the election a united force.
Fielding questions from the media at the end of the meeting of the NWC, PCC and the Presidential candidate and his running mate, Keyamo said, “What you have seen here today are different layers of the party. We have the Progressives Governors, the NWC and of course the PCC. So these are the different layers, these are the major stakeholders of the party and reason for the meeting, like we said before, we are very united and all the organs of the party are working in unison towards achieving one purpose and so what we did today was to review the draft of our manifesto. Our candidate is not a candidate that operates on his own. He tries to carry everybody along. And so he presented the draft to all the stakeholders today to look at it, and guess what almost all the stakeholders gave that draft more than 90 per cent pass mark.”
Speaking on the manifesto, he said “We are not going to take away the thunder from our candidate. He is going to present it before Nigerians before a particular day and at a particular occasion. Now after that a small committee will be formed and the committee is just to reduce the documents into a highlight. We want to sell the messages in that manifesto to even the market women, to the street traders in the simple language they will be able to understand. We don’t want to present a complicated document to Nigerians that cannot explain or understand in simple language what we want to do
“Part of the structure of our campaign involves a presidential diary. I said it before that our campaign is not like those who have done kick and start. Our campaign is like manoeuvering a fifty ton trailer to the highway and once we get to the highway we head the highway. So the President is the Chairman of the campaign council.
“We are going to take his diary into consideration in picking and choosing the date for the campaign. But we have virtually agreed that we are going to hit the streets very soon. We have agreed on the region we are going to begin. We have agreed basically on the campaign but we must carry the President who is the Chairman Campaign council along
Keyamo was not certain of the inauguration date for the PCC but noted, “Very soon. We have not announced the date but very soon is strictly very soon. We have accommodated everyone there is no exemption, all interest. There was absolutely no disagreement.”
