APC Crisis Getting Worse: Obasanjo’s Peace Move Stalled

Efforts by the Senate President, Senator Bukola Saraki, to nip in the bud the crisis set off by the controversial election of the principal officers of the National Assembly may have hit a brick wall.

The crisis of confidence which has pitted party leaders of the All Progressives Congress against the new head of the National Assembly, Senate and House of Reps, is set to take a turn for the worse.

Contrary to what some people have been saying, President Muhammadu Buhari, is very angry with Saraki and his agents in APC for their acts of gross indiscipline.

Sources close to the two camps told Punch that President Buhari and senior party officials were still peeved that Saraki and other party members defied the party and formed an alliance with the PDP.

The APC senators loyal to Saraki had on June 9 boycotted a peace meeting convened by Buhari and the party leadership. The meeting, which was attended by senators loyal to Senator Ahmad Lawan, the APC’s official candidate for the position of the Senate President, was going on when Saraki, with the support of his loyalists in the APC and all the PDP senators, emerged as the senate president unopposed.

Since then, the party has been in crisis.

During the week, Saraki, paid a well publicised visit to former President Olusegun Obasanjo. His aim, reports say, was to seek Baba’s intervention in the crisis. Saraki wanted Obasanjo to pacify the APC leaders on his behalf. But Baba’s intervention has failed to yield the results desired by Saraki.

It was gathered that shortly after Saraki’s visit to the former president, Obasanjo made a telephone call to Buhari advising him to make up with Saraki. The former president had reportedly told the president to work with Saraki and let the party deal with all the disciplinary issues that the former governor of Kwara State had been accused of. However, the President was said to have been non-committal.

Sources privy to these happenings disclosed that the telephone call initiated by Obasanjo was not the first time the former president would intervene in the matter. PUNCH reliably gathered that Obasanjo had met with Buhari in South Africa, last Sunday, and sought his help in resolving the crisis in the ruling party. Sources said that the former president, who was in Zambia for the 22nd annual general meeting of the African Export-Import Bank, had travelled from there to South Africa to meet with Buhari.

Speaking on the matter, some senior party leaders expressed doubts about the viability of Obasanjo’s peace move. They told Punch that Saraki is an ally of Atiku Abubakar whom Obasanjo is not very fond of.

One of them said, “It is not a secret that Atiku is solidly behind Saraki. How the senate president thinks Obasanjo will back any move by Atiku is what we don’t understand. Atiku was the first person that Saraki visited when he emerged as senate president. The ex-president will definitely not turn Saraki back but deep in his heart, he knows which camp he belongs to.”

But a source in the corridors of power told Punch on the condition of anonymity that the President’s response to pleas for his intervention had remained the same.

Sources said while President Buhari was careful not to make his disappointment with Saraki public, he was very angry that the senate president led a rebellion against his own party and also teamed up with the PDP to undermine it. One other reason the crisis has remained intractable, the source added, was the emergence of Senator Ike Ekweremadu as the Deputy Senate President.

“The President believes that Saraki earned the support of the PDP because of the deputy senate presidency he conceded to the opposition party. It is a treacherous thing to do to one’s party,” he said.

Buhari had shunned all moves by Saraki to meet him before the senate president’s visit to Obasanjo.