The seven-man panel constituted by the national leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to reconcile members of the party in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) has been urged to conduct its assignment with a sense of fairness and impartiality to win the trust of party members.
The executive chairman of Abaji area council, Alhaji Abdulrahman Hassan Ajiya, made the appeal in an interview with Blueprint.
He said he was surprise that the panel, headed by the Kogi state governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, had not reached out to aggrieved members of the party “especially aspirants who lost in the last party primaries to hear their complaints.”
Ajiya said APC members expected nothing short of transparent adjudication in the disputes, adding that “this can only be possible when all the parties in the dispute are given equal opportunity to lay their complaints before the reconciliation committee.”
The chairman urged members not to lose hope or rush into unnecessary premature judgement, stressing that the panel must have some guidelines and plans on how to achieve its assignment.
“We should not lose hope so quickly. The panel that was set up has guidelines that it must follow to achieve peace. What happened is part of politics and remember that in politics, people agree to disagree. The good thing, however, is that we are still one family despite the problems.
“I am hopeful that APC will come out of this problem or challenge much stronger and more united irrespective of what happened. It might be too early to judge the panel. It has an itinerary on how go go about making peace among the members. We will however urge them to be impartial and fair to all and we are hoping the members know what they are doing,” he said.
On insecurity, Ajiya said local hunters, vigilance groups and the Department of State Services (DSS) “have now been incorporated into the area council’s security teams that patrol sensitive dark spots of Abaji in search of criminals.”
“For some months now, Abaji has been relatively peaceful in terms of kidnappings, armed robbery and other petty crimes. Kidnapping has been the major challenge, but with the effort of security agents and other collaboration of local hunters, we have brought the security situation under control.”
