• APC won’t win 2019 elections, says Ebonyi chairman
Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
An All Progressives Congress (APC) National Executive Committee (NEC) member, Nasiru Danu, has said former president Olusegun Obasanjo as being unfair in his assessment of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Speaking with newsmen on the sidelines of his inauguration as a member of the APC Technical Committee, at the party’s national secretariat in Abuja yesterday, Danu said Obasanjo’s thoughts on the re-election ambition of Buhari were his personal opinion and not that of Nigerians.
He said although Obasanjo remains an elder statesman, his assertions on the performance of President Buhari were more political than anything else.
Obasanjo had, at the weekend, described the Buhari administration as an irredeemable failure and asked Nigerians not to “reinforce failure in the 2019 general elections.
“As I said, stop giving excuses; we met challenges. If there were no challenges, then, we wouldn’t need you to come. You came in because you knew there were challenges; and then (you are) giving us an excuse that you have many challenges and that is why you haven’t achieved results,” he said.
However, in his reaction, Danu said: “The truth is everybody can have his opinion on an issue, but, to me, this is a successful administration. Buhari never promised to be a miracle worker. In three years the success of this administration with regard to the economy and security are obvious.
“There is no nation that can progress or have meaningful development with the past level of corruption. When somebody says he is a failure, failure in what? Are we talking about the railways connecting the country, the Port Harcourt-Maiduguri or Lagos-Kano rail lines, the Mambilla project and the second Niger bridge?, etc.
“In security, compared to what we had before, there are improvements. Before Buhari assumed office, we were having attacks even in Abuja and Maiduguri, but you can see the successes clearly.
“This is an election year, people are entitled to their opinion. Obasanjo is an elder statesman and he is entitled to his opinion. That is not the opinion of Nigerians,” he said.
Meanwhile, the APC Chairman in Ebonyi State, Eze Nwachukwu Eze, has warned that changing the national and state leadership of the ruling party will spell doom and disaster for the party in the 2019 general elections.
Nwachukwu, who spoke to Daily Sun on telephone, while reacting to the controversies trailing the extension of the tenure of executives, insisted there were possibilities that the party would produce parallel executives at all levels.
He further warned that the spate of litigations that would trail the congresses and the likelihood of the party fielding two candidates for a particular position may threaten APC’s chance of winning any election in 2019.