The crack within the ruling All Progressives Congress appears to be widening by the day as a group has accused the party of presiding over a failing economy.
President Muhammadu Buhari
The All Progressives Congress (APC) Rebirth 2019, a support group within the ruling party, has declared that Nigeria is fast sinking under president Muhammadu Buhari amid “unprecedented” economic woes.
In its letter to Buhari and some APC leaders, including a former governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the group called on the leaders of the party to urgently intervene to save the situation.
The group added that a retreat should be convened at various levels of government, including local, state and federal level.
The letter, signed by Tony Akeni, the group’s national president, read: “As the ruling party at the centre and in the majority of Nigerian states, we have two choices before us.
“To our own detriment, we can choose to bury our heads in the sand from blame, like the preposterous ostrich and flaunt aimless growth and boom statistics like PDP is expert at and used to do in its hey days before its empire fell from its arrogant peak.
“Our second choice is to have the courage and soul-searching sober reflections to enable us evolve a sweeping change of fortunes for Nigerians in general, and to do so urgently, diligently and pragmatically with everything it takes in the short time remaining in our hands.
“The most fruitful channel to achieve the latter, which is the sensible choice, is the immediate convocation of an APC national political and economic retreat.
“Where we are in Nigeria today, we cannot afford to continue to wallow in the sympathy mentality that Nigerians will forever reason with us that the prolonged social-economic meltdown in our country is entirely the fault of others.
“Unlike political retreats we have seen convened in the past by the anti-masses opposition PDP, which consolidate on their avaricious leaders’ well-being and mending party stable cracks to facilitate safe looting of our country, the proposed APC retreat should evolve through three stages.”
The group added that such retreat will help address Nigeria’s “most urgent needs” while also creating an enabling environment for the party’s victory in the 2019 elections.
“The overall outcome of such retreat will accelerate decision processes from the president’s desk to the least APC administered local government council in Nigeria, and help us to put behind us the better part of the last two years during which decisions on virtually everything have been a nightmare of excruciating sluggard pace and beggarly delays,” it also said.