About two third of the 70 All Progressives Congress (APC) National Assembly aspirants across the federation are set to defect from the party in batches, according to an impeccable source.
Blueprint reliably learnt yesterday that the aggrieved members resolved to leave the party in protest against the highhandedness, injustice and imposition of candidates by some governors in conjunction with the national leadership of the party in some cases and the outright usurpation of the mandates of the people by the leadership of the National Working Committee in Abuja.
Accordingly, at a meeting held on Tuesday, the aggrieved members decided that as members of the national assembly they would take turns to defect and communicate same to the leaderships of both the Red and Green Chambers.
Though they would not be decamping to a particular political party, but the aggrieved have decided to move into various political parties and use same to actualize their political ambitions, notwithstanding that most may have lost their chances of returning to the national assembly.
It would be recall that a fortnight ago, some 70 members of the House of Representatives and states assembly members who were allegedly schemed out of the primaries by their respective state governors and the leadership the NWC had met with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Villa where they reportedly related their sad experiences to the president.
The meeting, which was at the instance of the President, did not yield any tangible result as the aggrieved emerged from the meeting still fuming and threatening to either dump the party or stay put to rock the boat.
“We have decided to leave the party in batches. At the meeting we held on Tuesday, members decided to pay the APC back in its own ugly coin. We intended to use different platforms to sabotage the party because of injustice and imposition of candidates against popular choice of the electorate.
“Also, we hope fight the party to a standstill in much the same way the APC used some of us to sabotage the PDP in 2015. So, some of us will remain in the APC while a good number will join other parties where we will collectively plot the downfall of the APC in the 2019 general elections”, an aspirant from one of the North West states and current member of the House of Representatives said.
On Wednesday in what seems like the initial take off of the plan, two aggrieved members of the House of Representatives decamped from the APC.
Honourable Mohammed Soba representing Soba federal constituency in Kaduna State defected from the APC and accused the party of deceiving and defrauding him.
In the letter to the Assembly and read by the Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, the decampee said:“The APC is yet to recover from the self-inflicted injury occasioned by double standard, indiscipline and sheer impunity in the conduct of its affairs.
“It is regrettable that the APC is now in disarray due to a complex mixture of ineptitude and inability to understand the dynamics of power in a democratic system of government.
“I have been personally short-changed by a system I so much trusted and believed in. I have also been serially deceived and defrauded by a political party I helped to nurture and sustain.
“However, it is the sharp division within the APC members and the mutual antagonism between the membership and the leadership of the APC more than any other factor that propelled me to take my exit.
“Since the political horizon is wide enough to accommodate my ideology and aspirations, I shall announce the name of my new political party in the next few days”, he said noting that he ceases to be a member of the APC effective October 24th.
