APC screening committee disqualifies female Adamawa guber aspirant

By Umar Muhammad Puma

The North-east zonal screening committee of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has disqualified a female governorship aspirant from Adamawa State from participating in the Thursday’s primary election.

The committee headed by Sen. Chris Ngige, admitted shortly after rounding off the two- day screening exercise in Abuja that the aspirant was disqualified because of her inability to provide tax clearance and required number of nominators.

He revealed that the committee has cleared 20 persons from the region who were successfully screened and has issued certificates of clearance while two other aspirants were given provisional clearance and asked to provide outstanding documents within 48 hours.

Some of those cleared include two incumbent governors of the APC, Borno State Governor, Alhaji  Kassim Shettima and Yobe State Governor, Ibrahim Gaidam.

Ngige said:”As we speak we have granted successful clearance to 20 persons, we have disqualified one person because the person could not produce the required nominators and could not provide a valid tax clearance and some of the certificates tendered to us were doubtful because the originals were not there”.

He explained why the committee did not present two others with certificates, saying “the other two persons have provisional clearance. What we mean by provisional clearance is that they have been cleared but we did not give them certificate of return, and why we will not give them is that their clearance is pending on certain factors”.

“One of them supposed to give documents like his tax clearance, the one he gave us is an internal Payee system paper to show that he pays tax in his last place of work.”

Ngige described the exercise as a success, adding that his committee had to work on Sunday because of the importance attached to the exercise.

He disclosed that his committee would use the whole of Tuesday to put it report and before submitting  its to the National Secretariat the same day.

“The exercise has gone on very well, as a you can see we have two governors from the North-east and they all want to come back, they want to do a second missionary journey.

“We had a total of 23 aspirants screened. In Borno we have only one person which is the incubent governor, Alhaji Shettima, in Yobe we also have only one aspirant which is also the incumbent governor. We have about eight aspirants from Bauchi, about six from Adamawa, we had 5 from Taraba and three from Gombe.” he said.