ABUJA – The All Progressives Congress APC has explained its confusion in the face of clamour by some Nigerians for a restructuring of the country, saying it does not understand what such people mean by that.
Consequently, the party has set up a committee to come up with the party’s own definition of restructuring.
APC said the committee which is headed by the Governor of Kaduna state, Nasir el-Rufa’i is not to come up with modalities for restructuring the country but to merely define the concept as it does not understand the meaning of the concept as being bandied about by some Nigerians.
“We just finished the meeting with our governors and we considered a number of issues. They include the issue of restructuring, national convention of the party and that these regular meetings would be expanded to include principal officers of the national assembly from now on”, said the party spokesman, Bolaji Abdullahi.
The party spokesperson spoke Thursday in Abuja shortly after a meeting of its National Working Committee NWC and its 24 state governors.
Flanked by the Chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, Abubakar Yari of Zamfara state, Simon Lalong of Plateau and Yahaya Bello of Kogi, Abdullahi said; “When we talk about a committee on restructuring, what we are talking about is a committee that will articulate what APC means by restructuring because we have realised that over a couple of days now or weeks, when people use the word restructuring we don’t know if we are talking about the same thing and people have gone about saying APC promised restructuring.
“So we really need to sit down to develop a shared understanding of what we mean by restructuring in our manifesto. So this committee that is setup that will now be chaired by the governor of Kaduna is mainly to define what APC means by restructuring, so that every member will know what we exactly mean”.
Other members of the 9-member committee are governors of Osun State, Rauf Aregbesola, Kano, Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, Plateau, Simon Lalong, Ogun, Ibikunle Amosun and a former Governor of Edo State, Prof. Oserheimen Osunbor.
Others are APC National Organising Secretary, Sen. Osita Izunaso, National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi and Sen. Olubunmi Adetunmbi who would serve as secretary.
APC had on several occasions denied promising to restructure the country, explaining that it only promised ‘devolution of powers’ as well as ‘true federalism’. The party had also recently said it could not deliver on this first item on its manifesto, saying in light of the economic situation in the country, its major priority was putting food on the table of Nigerians.
