The All Progressives Congress (APC) may be heading to a serious internal crisis as some aggrieved members of the party have alleged mutilation of its constitution.
According to the members, there are discrepancies in the copy of the party’s constitution submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the ones in circulation.
Also, they alleged plot by APC leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the party’s Interim Chairman, Bisi Akande to illegally elongate the tenure of the interim exco beyond six months. The Akande-led interim exco’s six months tenure ends by the end of January 2014.
The members who pleaded anonymity for fear of being victimized by the leadership of the party spoke to newsmen in Abuja.
They wondered how two pages allegedly got torn off from the constitution in INEC’s possession which they claimed they cited.
The members therefore, called for explanation from the leadership of the party, saying the discrepancies may be a deliberate plot to “commit democratic coup against the members”.
The aggrieved members posited that the front page design of the original APC constitution which members are familiar with carries a larger party logo with thinner border lines while the one filed with INEC carries a smaller logo, about a third of the size of the logo on the original constitution.
According to them, the fonts and point sizes used on the covers of the two versions of the constitution also vary a lot.
They spoke further, “While the original constitution which we all have contains 59pages, the one some of us have obtained from INEC contains 57pages. We asked ourselves what happened.
“We started investigating and discovered that they have cleverly detached Schedule 3 and Schedule 4 from our constitution for reasons best known to them”..
The missing Schedule 3, they noted deals with “Transitional Provision,” which states that, “there shall be an Interim National Leadership, National Convention Committee and State Congress Committees that shall manage the affairs of the APC for a period not later than six (6) months after its registration.”
Similarly the missing Schedule 4 states that, “This constitution shall be cited as the constitution of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and shall take effect from the day the INEC registered the Party or the Party is deemed to have been registered under the provisions of the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended).”
According to the APC members, “Schedule 3 could be used by the leaders of the party to perpetuate themselves in power, especially the current Bisi Akande led interim executives whose six-month tenure should expire at the end of January.
“Question we are asking is who removed those two pages from our constitution. Is it the secretary to our constitution drafting committee, Lawal Shuaibu or some INEC personnel?
While alleging that “This is a democratic coup by Tinubu, Akande and all of them up there”, the members however, called on the interim exco to put in place necessary machinery to convene a national convention to elect substantive national officers to run the affairs of the party in line with the provision of the constitution.
