A former national legal adviser of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Barrister Bashir Maidugu has said the All Progressives Congress (APC) should not jettison its 2015 “gentleman pact” on power shift in 2023.
Maidugu, who is now a stalwart of the APC and Special Adviser to Borno state governor on Trade and Investment, told Daily Trust in a telephone chat on Monday that altering the “pact” would breach the doctrine of inclusivity in the party.
Agitations are raging in the APC over zoning of the party’s presidential ticket ahead of the 2023 general election.
But Maidugu said APC bigwigs and power brokers entered into an agreement in 2015, that power would shift to the South when President Muhammadu Buhari’s tenure of eight years elapsed in 2023.
“The issue of APC presidential candidate coming from the North or South not on the table now. What is at hand now is that the arrangement that was reached in 2015, that led to the election of President Muhammadu Buhari, still subsists.
“Unless the caucus of the party sits down and rejig that arrangement, there is nothing anybody can do. So the machinery of zoning has not been activated.
“If we had an agreement in 2015 that the presidential candidate should come from the North, then it is incumbent on the party’s leadership to sit down and reactivate the agreement that the presidential candidate of the party for the 2023 election shall come from the South.
“The party’s leadership should sit down, analyse and come up with a new crop of NWC that will produce the party’s candidate in 2023.
“And I think the presidential candidate of the party should come from the South for inclusiveness. So my opinion is that the presidential ticked of the APC should be zoned to the South,” he said.
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