By Yusuf Shehu Usman

The APC as a ruling party appears to be torn apart by internal tendencies and high wire Political intrigues
If the Convention is attracting this much rancour, tension and controversy, it can only be imagined how the Primaries would be.

The party must put it’s house in order to avert the looming dangers ahead.

The leadership must put the interest of the party, it’s survival and stability over and above selfish, personal and parochial interests.

The gladiators who are stiring the hornets nest and throwing confusion and intrigues about the Convention, must realise the fact that the APC must survive as a party before they can use it’s platform to contest elections, which is their ultimate goal.

There is no reason why a Caretaker Committee set up ostensibly to organize a Convenient has failed to lay down any process leading to the Convention after being in place for about two years.

It’s either the Caretaker Committee is incompetent or it has been high jacked by some insidious tendencies within the party.

What is even more surprising is the fact that the so called critical stakeholders are either docile or afraid to speak up for inexplicable reasons.

The Mai Mala Buni Caretaker Committee has used up half the tenure of what would have been the elected officers of party. It has done and is doing nothing to organise the Convention; which is it’s principal mandate.

It’s strange, absurd and retrogressive that after setting up the Care taker commitee which should ordinarily only perform the functions of the disbanded National Working Committee of the party, the APC has done nothing to put in place other critical organs of the party like the Board of Trustees and the National Caucus.

The result of this aberration is to make the Care Taker Committee the only functioning Constitutional organ of the party, apart from the NEC which seems to have ceded it’s powers to the President.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that since the dissolution of the Oshiomole led NWC, the APC management structure was collapsed into essentially a.one organ party, with the now permanent caretaker Committee performing the functions and exercising the powers of other Consttitutional organs of the party.

And what is more, the Mai Mala Buni Caretaker Committee is doing an utter mess of all the powers entrusted to it for the management of the affairs of the APC.

Apart from the claim that it has lured some second term governors and a few Legislators into the party, the Committee derailed completely from it’s original mandate.

I reckon that getting the second term governors and few Legislators on board to the APC which the Caretaker Committee is making a heavy weather of as it’s outstanding achievement, is a fluke, as these Governors and legislators would have left the PDP and on their own, lobbied to be accepted into the APC because they were facing serious problems with their future ambitions in the PDP.

They had no other destination than to pitch their tents with the APC not on the strength of any lobby or pressure mounted on them by the Caretaker Committee but because they could not survive the power tussle in the PDP.

So, typical of Nigerian Politicians, the defection to the APC by key players in the PDP was a natural movement in search of a platform to contest elections.

This has been proven right by the recent declration by Umahi the second term governor of Ebonyi State to contest the Presidential election on the platform of the APC.
This is an idea he could not even have dreamt of in the PDP.

Apart from this non event which the Caretaker Committee is bandying around as achievement,. what has the Caretaker Committee done to foster unity, internal party democracy and maintaining the balance and stability in the management of the affairs of the APC.

The Caretaker Committee ventured into an arena they were least competent to operate in. They undertook to organise Congresses that only heightened tension and further polarised the membership of the party across the nation.

We are all witnesses to how the Caretaker Committee fumbled and bungled the Congresses at levels from the ward to the state levels.

They produced pararrell leadership of the party in many States and either as an afterthought or deliberate plan to delay the Convention and buy more time in office, the Committee contrived what is now known as the Abdullahi Adamu Reconciliation Committee.

To date, the Abdullahi Adamu Committee has not resolved any of the parallel Congresses in any of the States.

The Reconcilation Committee like the Caretaker Committee that instituted it has not achieved any succsess.

The APC is still divided and indeed more divided and polarized than it was prior to the dissolution of the Oshiomole (elected) National Working Committee.

In the final analysis, the question members and critical stakeholders of the APC should be asking themselves now, is, what has the Mai Mala Buni Caretaker Committee achieved to warrant any consideration for extending it’s over extended tenure at the helm of affairs of the APC?

The only reasonable, just and appropriate action left for the APC to embark on, is to end the travesty, syndrome and aberration called the caretaker system and without further delay, organise a credible, fair and transparent Convention to allow the millions of it’s members exercise their franchise to elect leaders of their choice to run their affairs.

The general elections are around the corner and the APC does not have the luxury of time to prepare for the polls.

The party in the words of Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) must heed the follow lines
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the floods, lead on to fortune
Omitted, all the voyages of their lives are bound in shallows and miseries”

On such a full sea is the APC afloat. It must take the current when it serves or lose it’s ventures.