The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has told all intending aspirants on the platform of All Progressives Congress (APC) for various positions in the 2023 general election to note that APC was legally defunct, structurally crippled and no longer a legitimate and valid vehicle to field candidates for elections under the extant laws.
The party’s National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba stated this in a statement in Abuja, yesterday.
The PDP said that the alleged unilateral dismissal and replacement of Yobe State Governor, Mai Mala Buni with his Niger State counterpart, Abubakar Sani Bello by President Muhammadu Buhari as chairman of the nebulous contraption called the APC Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC) has confirmed that the CECPC was an illegal creation that lacks statutory powers, authority and legitimacy of party leadership.
The party said that the president’s alleged action has confirmed that the APC was not a political party under the laws but a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which became legally non-operational when in December 8, 2020, it dissolved its national, state as well as local government structures and handed its affairs over to a team of “political undertakers” known as the CECPC.
The PDP equally said that with the purported absence of a National Working Committee (NWC), National Executive Committee (NEC), a Board of Trustees (BoTs) or legitimate structures in the states, the APC was plagued by confusion and fierce infighting by its various warlords with two national chairmen, multiple factions in the states and a national secretariat now taken over by security agencies.
It maintained that the development has further validated PDP’s sustained alleged position that the APC was just a bunch of strange bedfellows and inchoate sailors clobbered together for remote personal gains and not for governance and public good.
The PDP posited that by virtue of Section 183 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) which bars a sitting governor from holding “any other executive office in any capacity whatsoever” while serving as a state governor, the APC’s CECPC whether headed by Buni or Bello remained constitutionally invalid.
“It is in the light of this that the PDP urges aspirants intending to contest in the 2023 general election under the APC as well as their supporters to read the hand writing on the wall and not waste their resources, time and energy in the APC.
“The PDP also advises Nigerians not to be distracted by the alleged turmoil in the APC but remain focused on the platform of the PDP as it continues to take appropriate steps and actions in its mission to Rescue and Rebuild the nation from the alleged misrule of the fizzling APC”, the statement added.
