By Najem Francis, Sokoto
Former Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) gubernatorial candidate for Sokoto State, Professor Muhammad Lawal Bashar, has appealed to the Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu reconciliation committee to address alleged injustices by the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state against the former members of the defunct CPC.
He told a press conference at weekend that despite their “painstaking sacrifices in the electoral process that brought APC to victory” the former CPC members have been marginalised in terms of appointments and have been completely shut out of any party activities.
“After the victory at the polls the PDP decampees under the leadership of Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal formed a government without any one of us, thereby extricating themselves from all merger agreements and responsibilities”, they said.
To buttress his allegations, he said that the PDP defectors are occupying all the sixty-nine elective positions including the governor and deputy governor, the three senators, eleven House of Representatives members, thirty members of the State House of Assembly and the twenty-three local government chairmen.
According to him, all but one out of eighty-eighty political appointees including commissioners, special advisers, and board members are also ex-PDP members.
He stated that even the position of one of Special Adviser was given to “a former PDP member who decamped to CPC after losing relevance in the PDP as at that time”.
He commended President Buhari “for recognising the exigency to appoint a mediator in the person of our national leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to assist salvage our great party, the APC, from imminent disintegration and ultimate collapse”.
Professor Bashar stated that the former CPC members had decided to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the Presidential reconciliation panel to seek redress to their grievances
He said that the strength of the CPC made it a party to be reckoned with in the state because before the merger it scored more than one million votes in the presidential election.
He however, regretted that after the APC victory, “we. are never consulted nor admitted in any party matters and we have no representation at the national level. Therefore, we are effectively excommunicated from the party affairs”.
He also alleged that apart from being subjected to victimisation and marginalisation, the former CPC members have in some cases suffered criminal abuses, adding that there was an instance when the legal counsel to the APC in a suit committed perjury against him by presenting someone else as himself.
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