HOW BUHARI, APC NEC AGREED WITH OSINBAJO’S COUNSEL TO ADOPT STATE PARTY EXCOS AS CARETAKERS*
It was the intervention of the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo at yesterday’s APC National Executive Committee meeting that saved the day and produced the consensus upon which the ongoing reorganization of the party is resting, according to inside sources at the meeting.
The plan of the group of a few APC Governors working through the Buni-led National Caretaker Committee was to dismiss the State, Zonal and LGA organs and handpick their replacements. This was what they brought to the President and to NEC.
Details of the meeting shared by members of the APC NEC disclosed that just before the proposal to dissolve all the States, Zonal and local government level organs of the party, the Vice President, who is a legal luminary himself cautioned that arbitrarily dissolving those party organs would be open to legal challenges which could have a good chance of succeeding and hurting the party down the line.
According to a notable source present at the meeting “just before the proposal was tabled for final affirmation, the President yielded the floor and asked his deputy to comment, and it was then the VP, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria said that what should be done is not just to dissolve the State and LG party organs but to make the existing executives holding the reigns of those organs the new members of the caretaker committees.”
The source said the wisdom of that proposal is that it effectively neutralizes those who may have legal and legitimate grounds to challenge the dissolution since they would still be the ones effectively in charge of running the party at their different States, Zonal and other levels.
“Not only did the President saw the wisdom in the Vice President’s suggestions, the proposal became the resolution of yesterday’s NEC meeting.”
Even though members of the NEC debated the whole idea of dissolution back and forth, it was agreed by all that a more careful approach as put forward by Prof. Osinbajo would save the party from potential litigations in the near future. And the source added “this was why the VP’S suggestion was embraced and the proviso recommended by him added to the motion to dissolve the party organs.”
In fact this morning on the AIT Kakaaki Morning News Show, one of the presenters who is also the Bureau Chief of Thisday in Abuja disclosed that “it was the Vice President, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria,” that provided the suggestion that saved the day.
Eventually when the Kaduna Governor who was asked to brief the press spoke at the Aso Villa press gallery he disclosed that “NEC approved the immediate dissolution of the party’s organs at the polling unit, ward, local government, state and zonal level….as well as their immediate reconstitution and composition of the dissolved excos to serve in their respective offices in a caretaker committee capacity….”
