Just as the clock ticks towards the national convention of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) schedule for March 26th, issues relating to who emerges the National Chairman is generating a lot of issues with a rumoured endorsement of Senator Abdullahi Adamu by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Mustapha Audu, leader of APC Progressive Youth and Aliyu Audu, convener of APC Rebirth Group are guests at Arise Television on Thursday where they maintained that they were open to anyone who the party leaders endorse, as long as that person will allow youth inclusiveness, even though they openly voiced out their reservations about Abdullahi Adamu who they said is not youth friendly.
On the controversy trailing the alleged endorsement of Adamu and why some people are not comfortable with him as national chairman, Aliyu said, “He is not popular. He was one of the strong proponents of the third term agenda, during Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo’s era. We should reward people who do good, and not those who do badly. If that third term agenda had succeeded, we would probably have ended up with a life President today. People who did or said things that threatened our democracy shouldn’t be rewarded.
According to him, “Secondly, Senator Adamu is not a young people-friendly person. He was the reconciliation chairman and there were lots of agitations, he never invited a single young people’s groups. We account for 85 percent of the population of the party. We wrote petitions to the party leaders but he didn’t recognize us.”
Aliyu said that he didn’t believe that the President endorsed any particular candidate, stressing that the President only approved that a consensus candidate should emerge from the North Central but didn’t endorse anyone.
Mustapha said, “As young people we respect our President 100 percent. We believe that the time has come for the APC to get its acts together. We had a long standing issue with the party as young people but we have been working hand in hand with the party recently but what we would like to say is that some of these issues are usually lack of communication and carrying people along. APC has always used consensus to elect their chairmen.
“There is a difference between imposition and consensus because the new electoral act took care of that. All the people have to agree and sign for the consensus candidate to be authentic.
“We had a lot of issues with the party because there was no inclusion. We had a meeting with Mai Mala Buni and he assured us that we are in the convention planning committee, going to take up zonal positions. Our fight is for inclusion; our fight is to ensure that the party has a chairman that recognizes the young active agile APC members,” he said.
