Ahead of the November 8 Anambra governorship poll, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is considering the call for the conduct of the party primary to select the candidate of the party through the use of the indirect mode.
APC’s National Chairman, Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, made this known Tuesday when Mr. Iyke Madu led members of the Booth 2 Booth with Bola Tinubu and paid him a courtesy visit at the National Secretariat of the party in Abuja.
Ganduje, who assured of the party’s resolve to conduct a free and fair primary, pledged that the national working committee (NWC) of the party would deliberate on the matter and come up with a final decision on whether to apply the direct or indirect mode.
Underlining the role played by Anambra State towards the sustenance of democracy in the country, he called on stakeholders of the party to set aside their differences in ensuring the success of the party.
“Anambra State should assist in providing a conducive atmosphere. As a party, if we are to have a good primary in the state, all our stakeholders are supposed to be born again. All of them have education, yet several court orders and litigations. We told them that this time around, business should not be as usual. Let us support the system,” he said.
“We know they are very rich, they have a lot of money, they will use the money to build the state, not to scatter the state. If they use the money to build APC, it will succeed. In fact, I will be highly interested if they can produce a candidate based on consensus, I will give them an award if that happens.”
Madu, who expressed gratitude to Ganduje for his desire to reintegrate the Southeast region into the mainstream of Nigerian politics, stressed that the conduct of a free, transparent primary in Anambra State would avoid the pitfalls of 2021 where results were allegedly announced in the hotel rooms in which a candidate was allocated to 300,000 votes.
He thereby called for the use of the indirect mode of primary given the security challenges in Anambra state.
“There is an issue of insecurity in Anambra state as we speak, even the state government could not conduct their own local government elections due to insecurity. They wrote to some certain communities telling them that, due to insecurity, elections cannot be conducted in those places,” he said.
“And we are thinking, if a state government cannot conduct their own local government elections due to insecurity, it’s going to be difficult for a party that does not control the state to do direct primaries.”
