About 20 governorship aspirants of the All Progressives Congress (APC) vying for the ticket of the party and some leaders in Kogi state, have rejected plan by governor Yahaya Bello’s faction to force indirect primary system on the party, saying they stand with direct primary.
The governor’s faction of the APC in Kogi state had at weekend adopted indirect primary for the conduct of forthcoming governorship election.
But addressing a press conference on Monday after a closed door meeting with 20 out of 21 APC governorship aspirants vying for the party’s ticket, one of the founding leaders of the party in the state, Sen. Alex Kadiri, who spoke on behalf of others confirmed the party is divided in Kogi state.
Sen. Kadiri warned that unless the national executive of the party do something urgently opposition People Democratic Party (PDP) May take over the state.
“APC will have to be extremely careful so that we don’t lose kogi state to the PDP. We want to reiterate for the third time that APC kogi state is divided and because of that division we went to court, the case is still in court and we have not been able to fast track that judgement the way Zamfara state was fast tracked.
“Nobody should blame us for going to court because we believe we have the right. All the things Yahaya Bello and his people are doing now are all illegal because the committee with which he is working has no legal standing any where in law.
“But as we preparing for the gubernatorial primaries, we want it known that we the leaders of the APC as well as the 20 aspirants of our party are opposed to the Yahaya Bello contrived method of doing primary because we are told that he gathered his appointees at Lokoja over the weekend and they endorsed indirect primary.
“He cannot be a judge of himself, this is irresponsible. We are saying that the primary for Kogi state must be direct primaries where all the members of the party from all the local government will choose who they want to be their candidate. We don’t want it to be thrown to the executive in a way that Yahaya Bello will corner all the people to Lokoja and they will nominate him as the sole candidate.
“We believe that our faction and Yahaya Bello’s faction cannot conduct a free and fair primary, therefore we are appealing to the national secretariat of our party to do the needful, to set up an independent caretaker committee to go and run the party in kogi state until after the elections.”
While describing governor Bello as a failure, the former senator revealed that nearly all the unemployed youths in Kogi state now go about with AK-47 rifle and a pump action gun.
“There is a big issue of insecurity in the state, almost every young unemployed kogi boy has an AK 47 rifle and a pump action gun. We have cried and shouted but nobody is doing anything about it. The people being shot, the people being killed are Kogi boys. If there is a way to retrieve all these guns that the government has distributed across the entire state, they are taking us back to the period of cow boys in the US, its sad.”
