The campaign council of the African Democratic Congress (ADC-PCC) has described the inauguration of an expanded All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign council as a planned attempt to foist a one-party dictatorship on Nigeria.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, Kola Ologbondiyan, ADC-PCC director of media and publicity, alleged that the APC was weighing down Nigeria’s multiparty democracy by “coercing opposition governors into its fold or incorporating them into its presidential campaign council despite their refusal to defect from their respective political parties”.
“What we are witnessing is not politics but political abduction,” he said.
“You cannot claim to be a democrat while using state power to force opposition governors into your party and then drafting them into your campaign council. This is political banditry.”
Ologbondiyan noted that the ruling party was forging a political agenda that could aggregate power in the hands of one person.
He said major national institutions, security agencies and the judiciary were being deployed to weaken opposition forces.
He accused the ruling party of showing little concern for the economic hardship, hunger and insecurity confronting ordinary Nigerians.
“These particular sets of leaders don’t care about the current conditions of the people but how best to remain in power at a time when average Nigerians find it difficult to eat and be secure,” he said.
“Never in our democratic journey have we witnessed this level of intolerance and desperation. The APC government has weaponised poverty, hunger and insecurity to subjugate Nigerians and cripple the opposition. This is not the democracy for which Chief M.K.O. Abiola and other martyrs paid the supreme price,” he said.
Describing Atiku as a committed democrat, Ologbondiyan said the former vice-president had the national reach and political experience to address Nigeria’s challenges and rebuild public confidence in democratic institutions.
“Atiku Abubakar is a democrat to the core. He has the national spread, the capacity and the will to reunite Nigeria and restore our battered democracy, which the APC has destroyed,” he said.
“The fate of Nigeria’s democracy rests on him to save it from total collapse.”
