Salihu Lukman, vice-chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the north-west, believes Abdullahi Adamu, the ruling party’s national chairman, should be replaced by a Christian.
Lukman based his call on the fact that both the president-elect, Bola Tinubu, and the vice-president-elect, Kashim Shettima, are Muslims, as is Adamu.
The Muslim-Muslim ticket sparked debate within the ruling party in the run-up to the elections, prompting a number of its members to defect to other parties.
Lukman, a member of the APC’s national working committee (NWC), said in a statement on Friday that the party’s structure must be inclusive.
“…the current national chairman has done an excellent job to manage a successful campaign to win the 2023 election with all the attendant challenges, there should be no difficulty in convincing Senator Adamu to resign as national chairman to create an opportunity for a new national chairman of APC to emerge who is a Christian,” he said.
“For that to happen may require an emergency national convention because if the hierarchy of the current leadership is to be followed, the successor to senator Adamu will be senator Abubakar Kyari who is a Muslim from north-east.”
Iyiola Omisore
The vice-chairman also stated that Iyiola Omisore, national secretary, should resign because his election to the position has caused problems in the APC’s Osun chapter.
“Unfortunately, rather than serving as a unifying factor for the party leadership in Osun state, Sen. Omisore is more a divisive factor, which may have been responsible for why APC lost the 2022 governorship election to a political mediocre whose only qualification in politics may appear to be comic dancing skill,” Lukman said.
“To save Osun state and bring it back to its old standard of national political reckoning, Sen. Omisore would need to resign as National Secretary of APC, and a new unifying national secretary elected.
“Beyond Sen. Omisore, similarly, any member of the National Working Committee of the party who is not a unifying leader in his/her state should be changed.
“With a Muslim president and a Muslim vice-president, it is only logical to zone the senate president who is the number three ranking leader of the government to either the south-east or south-south who would be Christian.
“Logically, the position of speaker of the house of representatives should be zoned to the north-west. This would have the advantage of acknowledging that the north-west gave Asiwaju Tinubu the highest votes of 2,950,393 representing 33.6% of the votes he won.
“All other positions in government can be assigned by taking a bearing from that.”
