No difference between APC, PDP –APC Ex-vice chair

A former National Vice Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Salihu Lukman, has said there is no difference between the ruling party and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

While speaking on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Lukman said the APC was now becoming worse than the PDP it came to replace.

He said the PDP was becoming a one-man show where internal democracy had been dumped and candidates imposed on the electorates, stressing that it was the reason they came up with the establishment of the APC.

He said they came up with the idea of the opposition parties merging to defeat the PDP and correct some of the anomalies noticed at that time.

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“We were clear on the kind of party APC should be. We saw the weaknesses of the PDP, apart from the imposition of candidates, part of the problem was that elected candidates were not accountable to the party or anybody and we thought building the APC would depart from that and that was where the slogan ‘change’ came.

“When the debate about the manifesto of the party was going on, the conception was that the party was going to be social democratic with a priority on the issues of health, education and social services but the party has deviated,” Lukman said.

The APC chieftain said part of the party’s problems started from Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, adding that the president was like an emperor because he was the singular electoral asset of the party.

“We were hoping with Asiwaju (President Bola Ahmed Tinubu), things will start changing,” he said, lamenting that things had rather got worse.

“We are having a party where some of its organs have not been convened since its formation. We are having a party which for one year no meeting has taken place and that party is controlling the government,” the APC chieftain lamented.

He said the outlook of the current administration is extreme right-wing government, saying rather than tackling insecurity, 10 million out-of-school children and hunger in the land, the APC administration was busy constructing the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway.

The former National Vice Chairman of the APC said Tinubu who ran the government in Lagos is different from the Tinubu currently running the country, saying he needed to change the people around him in order to get things back on track.