2023 election exposed APC’s fake membership figure of 45m — Scribe

The national secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Senator Ajibola Basiru, has said the 2023 general election exposed the party’s fake membership figures being paraded.

He disclosed this on Wednesday in Abuja during the flag-off of the train-the-trainer workshop on e-registration of APC members.

Recall that the Governor Mai Mala Buni-led APC National Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee embarked on a membership registration and revalidation exercise in 2021, after which it announced that over 40 million party members were registered.

But the APC scribe, who instead quoted 45 million as the figure paraded as the party’s membership, said it was fabricated and deployed as a tool for “fighting causes” unknown to the present leadership of the party.

Bashiru disclosed that during the 2023 elections, the APC presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is now the president, struggled to secure above eight million votes to win the poll.

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He said, “If we had that membership of 45 million, how come we went to the poll and got votes of less than 10 million? In line with Amilcar Cabral’s doctrine of ‘tell no lies, claim no easy victories,’ that has exhumed the lie.

“In exposing that, it is not to ridicule anybody; it is to know that when a child falls, he will look at the front, but when an elder falls, he will look back to see where he made a mistake. We made a mistake because the register of the party was a tool for fighting, causes we don’t know. The weaponisation of the party register led to corruption.

“It was on this basis that the National Working Committee (NWC) decided that one of the cardinal programmes would be to have a digitalised and biometric-based registration system that is linked with the National Identification Number (NIN) of all members.

“This is an exercise we must take with all seriousness to ensure that we have a register conducted with integrity.”

On his part, the APC national chairman, Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, said only those on the e-register would be eligible to contest elections or secure appointments after the exercise.