The governors refused to speak
with State House correspondents after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari
on Tuesday.
The meeting, which held inside
the Council Chamber of the Presidential Villa to resolve the impasse, lasted
for over one hour.
At the end of the meeting, both
the chairman of APC Governors Forum, Rochas Okorocha of Imo State, and the
chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum, Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State,
declined comments.
Governors Nasir El-Rufai of
Kaduna and Simon Lalong of Plateau simply said they (governors) have agreed
“not to speak to the media.”
HEATED MEETING
A source, however, told revealed
that the governors had a heated debate over the tenure elongation of party
officials.
“I am not sure what happened
inside the Chamber could be called a real meeting, they were simply fighting,”
the source, who declined to be named because he is not authorised to speak to
the media said.
As reported by NigerianEye
earlier, the meeting discussed the decision of President Buhari who asked the
party to rescind its earlier decision to extend the tenure of party officials.
Mr Buhari said the tenure extension was undemocratic, violates the constitution
and may attract needless legal tussles.
The president on March 27 shocked
members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of his party when he called
for the cancellation of the tenure extension for party officials.
The APC had earlier at its NEC
meeting on February 28 extended the tenure of members of National Working
Committee (NWC) led by Mr Odigie-Oyegun by one year.
The decision did not go down well
with a national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu, who had been in conflict with
the national chairman of the party.
Speaking shortly before the
commencement of NEC meeting, Mr. Buhari told a packed hall at the APC national
secretariat to consider cancelling the tenure extension decision because “it is
against the party constitution and the Nigerian constitution.”
Rattled, Mr Buhari’s entreaties
led to the formation of a ten-member committee by the NEC to look at the
proposal by the president.
The committee has Mr Lalong of
Plateau State as chairman.
Mr Buhari’s position clearly
polarised APC governors which led to Tuesday’s meeting.
Going by the mood of the
governors as they filed out of the Villa, it was apparent that no common ground
has been forged on the contentious matter.
We learnt that at least four Governors
elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), did not agree with
President Muhammadu Buhari’s stance on tenure elongation for the party’s
National Working Committee (NWC) led by Chief John Odigie-Oyegun.
They are Nasir El-Rufai (Kaduna),
Rotimi Akeredolu (Ondo), Yahaya Bello (Kogi) and Simon Lalong (Plateau).
“At the session, Governors
El-Rufai, Akeredolu, Yahaya Bello and Simon Lalong were vehement on why the
tenure of the NWC should be extended by one year.
“Each of them stood up to
rationalise the tenure extension by claiming that whatever the NEC does is
legal and it won’t have consequences on the legality of APC’s electoral victory
in 2019.
“They warned that congresses and
National Convention could divide the party and lead to a split before the 2019
polls. They said it would be better to keep the party united than leaving it in
disarray.
“But other governors queried the
affront of pro-tenure elongation governors in revisiting the advisory of the
President on the need to follow the 1999 Constitution and the APC Constitution.
“Those who supported Buhari’s
position expressed disappointment that Oyegun went ahead to inaugurate a
technical committee which they considered to be an ‘affront to the President,”
a source told The Nation.
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