APC crisis: Youth protest against Tinubu

Some youth on Tuesday protested at the national secretariat of the All Progressives Congress, demanding that one of the party’s leaders, Bola Tinubu, stop harassing its national leadership.

The youth under the aegis of APC Youth Democratic Frontiers asked Mr. Tinubu to leave the National Chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, alone and concentrate his political activities in Lagos State where he (Tinubu) was governor.

Tinubu recently demanded the resignation of Mr. Odigie-Oyegun for his alleged role in the choice of Rotimi Akeredolu as the APC governorship candidate in the November governorship election in Ondo.

Alleging that Mr. Odigie-Oyegun was perpetrating injustice, the former Lagos governor said the development showed that there was an evil and regressive force within the party using the national chairman to derail the party’s democratic and progressive tenets.

While the deputy spokesperson of the APC, Timi Frank, also demanded the resignation of the national chairman thus indicating a crack within the leadership of the party, a former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, asked the leadership to live by the rules of democracy and respect democratic consensus.

During the protest, the APCYDF asked Mr. Tinubu to limit his political empire to the South-west region “because Nigeria is bigger than a region or Lagos State.”

The group’s National Coordinator, Salahudeen Lukman, who addressed journalists, said its members could no longer fold their arms and allow party feudal lords to expropriate its ethics simply on regional nomenclature aimed at usurping the national interest.

“It should be stated categorically that we are no longer comfortable with the whims and caprices of an orchestrated Jagaban resident in Bourdilion, Lagos and directed at misdirecting our progressive party simply to achieve egocentric empirical relevance,” he said.

“Let us state on a sad note that this overbearing tendency on the part of Tinubu is not limited to the federal level alone, he meddles in the affairs of even states that are not his home states.”

Lukman also accused the APC national leader of undermining the position of the president of the country by incessantly sponsoring the spurious ridicule of his anti-corruption fight.

He said each time fake stories of impropriety were written about these president’s appointees, paid critics and activists on hire were always quick to accuse President Muhammadu Buhari of fighting corruption while surrounding himself with corrupt people.

“What we learnt is that Tinubu is attacking these aides of Mr. President because he believes he should have been the one who makes appointments into those positions as opposed to what happened when Mr. President acted in national interest and cohesion to appoint tested and trusted individuals,” the coordinator alleged.

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