PDP to APC: Violent congress huge embarrassment

The Peoples Democratic Party has described the just-concluded ward congress of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as a “huge embarrassment.”
It urged Nigerians to disregard the APC in all elections, adding that it was ready to offer free technical assistance to the opposition on how to organise itself in a democratic setting including the conduct of transparent and credible congress.
PDP, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, further said the APC’s weekend congress was a show of shame, adding that “it is an irony that a party that daily claims it is on a mission to rescue Nigeria could not even conduct its own congress.”

The statement said: “The savagery witnessed in the exercise which came eight months after the registration of the party, offers a glimpse into the confusion and brutality that will be the order of the day if the APC is allowed to hold power in 2015.
“A passerby would have thought the so called APC congress was a meeting of thugs as detailed hooligans took over the process on the directives of their party overlords and dealt harshly with members who dared to contest for positions already appropriated to handpicked stooges of the owners of the party. From Lagos to Borno, Rivers to Zamfara, the story is consistently the same; a tale of cronyism, thuggery, violence and general disregard for the principles of democracy.”

The party said it was “now very clear to other members of the so-called Legacy Parties that ganged up with the now defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) to form the APC that ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’
“In states where the owners of the party felt they could not have their way, the process was manipulated to create confusion resulting in the shelving of the exercise. For instance, while the National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, was announcing that the congress would go on nationwide as planned, the APC chairmen in Rivers, Plateau, Bauchi and the FCT announced the postponement of the exercise in their states.”