APC in a civil war with itself, it’ll be tragedy if Tinubu fails —Sen. Sani

Senator Shehu Sani has described the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as a party in a civil war with itself.

He said that it will be a tragedy if the reconciliation team led by a leader of the party, Senator Bola Tinubu, fails.

The senator representing Kaduna Central in the Senate, stated this on Sunday in Abuja in an interview with journalists, insisting that the party will be doomed should the Tinubu team fail in its assignment.

President Muhammadu Buhari had recently instituted a team of consultation, reconciliation and confidence-building and appointed Tinubu as its leader.

The group was mandated to reconcile aggrieved members of the party at all levels.

Senator Sani, who has not been in good terms with his state governor, Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State, added that Tinubu’s appointment has stopped, at the moment, the defection of most APC members to other political parties and hoped that it will achieve the purpose for setting it up.

He said, “It is left for Asiwaju to build the bridges. Lagos is known for bridges; therefore we hope that there will be Seventh Mainland Bridge to connect the divide, but we are not sure of this.

“Right now, the party is already divided in Kaduna and it is for the national secretariat to note this and we have said it in clear terms.

“The problem has defied solution for two years, but we believe that Asiwaju can do a lot of reconciliation. We hope that he will be able to achieve a lot, because if he fails, it is going to be doom for the party.

“In the process where reconciliation is taking place now, I think it is in our interest to put our ambitions in our pockets according to what Mr President said and wait for Asiwaju to address the problem.”

Calling on the Tinubu team to be unbiased, especially in Kaduna State issue, Sani expressed worries that APC “that came to power with so much goodwill and hope, has found itself in a civil war with itself.”

He added, “Right now, the APC is both the government and the opposition, because most of the criticism and opposition that is going on in the country is within the APC itself.”

READ ALSO: Six reasons Tinubu’s assignment to save APC may be dead on arrival

According to him, the situation in the APC is due to lack of party supremacy and internal democracy which he said was evident in South Africa and Ethiopia as was recently displayed.

“In Nigeria, there is no supremacy of the party because people holding position of executive power think that the party should be under them and not them being below the party.

“Political parties in the Nigerian setting, seem to be parastatals of the state governments and that is totally unacceptable. There is also the syndrome of ‘the party is our own’.

“If a clique of people believe that they founded the party and other people are strangers, then the recipe for crisis has been set,” he said.

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