President Abubakar Atiku and others who defected from the ruling
Peoples Democratic Party left the party because they had "oversized
egos" and could not stay in one party for long.
The Federal Government's spokesman also said the defectors were
the people creating problem in the PDP and described their exit as a
necessary weight-shedding for the party in order to gain strength.
"If you look at all the people that have left PDP, some of them are
the people that have caused all the headaches in the party. They have
been the ones attacking their party, they are very quarrelsome, and
they have oversized egos. Some of them cannot stay under the same roof
with anybody for one week without the top blowing up," Maku said.
The minister, who spoke after the weekly Federal Executive Council
meeting in Abuja on Wednesday, added that the defectors were
"migrants" in desperate search for political benefits and that they
were not worth losing sleep over.
He said, "A number of these people who left, if you take a look at the
history of our party and look at their antecedent, you will see that
they are migrants, they keep migrating from one place to another.
"Generally, as I have always said, no party would be happy to lose its
members to the other party because every political party would wish
that it is able to retain all its members because number itself is
good. No organisation would want to lose its member, so it is not
something you will beat your chest and say you are happy when your
members leave.
"But I have always made a point that sometimes you need to lose weight
to gain strength and that is exactly what has happened in PDP. When a
number of these people were leaving PDP I said the party would be
healthier in the long run."
Atiku; governors of Rivers, Kano, Kwara, Sokoto and Adamawa states; 37
members of the House of Representatives; Senator Bukola Saraki; and
other PDP members in some states recently abandoned the party and
defected to the All Progressives Congress.
Maku said the defectors were already causing trouble in their new party.
He said, "Even within this short period since some of these elements
left the PDP, they have caused significant problem in the new party
they ran to. They are already causing a huge problem there. There is
already an explosion in APC in Kano, because (Governor Rabiu)
Kwankwaso went straight and took over a party he was not part of, and
insisted that he must be the leader. He sacked those who formed the
party.
"You go to Sokoto, (Governor Aliyu) Wamakko went immediately and
hijacked the party from those who formed APC in the place; those who
dissolved their own parties in order to form a political party that
would compete with the PDP."
"So you can see they are not democrats, these are serious desperadoes
who believe that unless they are in charge nobody should be."
He said the APC lacked focus and ideology.
But the APC Interim National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed,in
response to the minister's assertions, said Nigerians were currently
not interested in the politics of abuse or character assassination.
He said it was left for the PDP to convince Nigerians about what the
party have left to offer after more than 14 years at the helm of
affairs with nothing to show for it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment