What happened last Saturday at Eagle Square was but a clever ambushing of democracy. Going by how the members of the oncoming National Working Committee (NWC) members were produced, it is no longer hard to find why voter apathy would continue to define Nigeria’s democratic system.
Although APC leaders disappointed naysayers by holding a successful and peaceful national convention, it was a victory snatched from the jaw of defeat and facilitated by soft force.
The governing party showed in great detail its detest for openness and fair competition, thereby sustaining that lack of inclusion that has continued to haunt the amalgam of political parties since 2013.
By the time the new NWC takes over, conducts the Presidential primary, and particularly after President Buhari completes his second term in office, APC faithful would be free, to tell the truth of what happened.
Above all, they would be able to convince Nigerians that consensus, which they adopted during the national convention, has nothing in common with the coercion that hovered in the background.
The faulty steps that preceded the national convention started with the creation of a Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC) headed by Governor Mai Mala Buni. Even without being told, the idea of having an incumbent governor heads the party’s interim management body was contrary to the provisions of the APC Constitution.
Despite the pungent observations made by the Supreme Court on the position of Governor Buni, while ruling on the Ondo State governorship election appeal, the governing party has continued to carry on with impunity merely on account of the combined effects of federal might and power of incumbency.
The establishment and composition of the CECPC were not the only acts of constitutional infringements by APC, especially against the background that some members of the dissolved elected NWC led by Comrade Adams Oshiomhole faulted the convocation of the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting that sacked them.
Former Deputy National Vice Chairman, (South/South) of the party, Chief Hillard Ntufam Ettah, contended that the APC constitution did not contemplate that in the absence of the national chairman or a resolution of two-thirds of the members of the NWC that a deputy national secretary could summon the