From Mustapha Adamu, Kano
Governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje has admitted that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) committed a lot of mistakes in the last election and the party had paid the price.
Speaking at the Town Hall event for APC’s constitution review for Northwest region, held at the Kano state government house yesterday, Ganduje said the party is still a “mixture” and yet to form “compound”.
According to him, APC is a mixture of political parties, who merged to for the ruling party, but that lack of strong cohesion is still affecting it.
He said there is no better time for the constitution review than now because the party has committed a lot of mistakes and paid for it, adding that “ It is time to look back and address the problems.”
“There is no better time than now for the review of this constitution. APC as a political party has won many states in the federation since its inception. It has been controlling the federal government in the past four years.
“Now in the second term, we lost some governors during the last election. We gain some governors during the last election. We committed a lot of mistakes as a party and we have paid for it. So it is time now to look back and reassess the situation, that is reviewing the Constitution of our great party.
“ I believe at the end of it, we will come up with a document that will govern the conduct of the party members and even the conduct of the leaders of the party,” said Ganduje.
He lamented that the ruling APC is still grappling to graduate from being a mixture to compound, noting that “ APC is a mixture of various elements trying to form a compound. But unfortunately, uptil now, APC is still a mixture. It has not graduated to the next level of becoming a compound.”
“So, we believe this review of constitution will look into that. It will remove all those appendages that came together to form the party should be proscribed to form a single, solid APC,” said Ganduje.
The governor disclosed that there is a strong party structure in Kano state as the APC had formed party caucus at state, Local government and ward levels, adding that the caucuses meet every month to interface on the party activities, look into problems and take steps to resolve them.
In his remarks, the Chairman of the APC constitution review committee, Dr Tahir Mamman said the idea behind the review was to form a more solid and stronger document that would guide the affairs of the party and become a model to other political parties.
He explained that the exercise was to further strengthen the manifesto of the party and make the document easier to read by all party members.
He added that the committee had gone round the six geopolitical zones of the country to have town hall meetings with the party stakeholders, adding that there would be a retreat where resolutions would be made to come up with final review.
The meeting received the attendance of Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Kaduna, Zamfara, Keebi and Sokoto Party Chairmen, who submitted their recommendations to the committee, as most of them calling for the translation of the constitution into different Nigerian languages to accommodate everybody.
