2 May, 2019
His Excellency, Muhammadu Buhari
President of The Federal Republic of Nigeria and Leader of The All Progressives Congress (APC),
Aso Rock Villa, Abuja.
Your Excellency,
Petition For Your Excellency’s Decisive Intervention Against Attempts By Senator Alex Kadiri to Destabilize The All Progressives Congress Party (APC) In Kogi State And Sabotage Her In The November Kogi State Gubernatorial Elections.
We pray the Almighty God to add health, strength and wisdom to Your Excellency.
We are elders of our great party, the All Progressive Congress (APC) in Kogi State, and we write this petition on behalf of ourselves and our teeming followers in the party across the three senatorial districts of Kogi State.
Your Excellency, may we inform you that we have been active leaders and loyal foot-soldiers of the APC since 2015 when it pleased God to make you and Governor Yahaya Bello the President of our country and the Governor of our State respectively, and thus in a good position to bring you this information.
We read in the media two days ago that a group calling itself ‘Kogi State APC Stakeholders Forum’ purportedly petitioned Your Excellency and our party against the Government and Person of His Excellency, Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State.
The group which is led by Senator Alex Kadiri accused Governor Yahaya Bello and our Party of having failed in all aspects of governance and called on Your Excellency and the Party to deny the Governor a second term ticket.
It is indeed the right of any citizen or group of citizens to speak their minds on any subject but we take exception to impersonation, lies and duplicity – which is what it amounts to when people who have not identified with us since 2015 not only claim to be part of us now, but to speak for us.
While we urge Your Excellency to rate Governor Yahaya Bello’s performance as a party-man, politician and Governor yourself, permit us to remind you that he led us to a landmark victory for the party this year. In this year’s General Election, APC Kogi Chapter won an unprecedented 2 of 3 senatorial seats, 7 of 9 House of Representatives seats and 25 of 25 Kogi State House of Assembly seats.
Senator Kadiri is a known serial petition writer whom nobody takes seriously anymore. It is vital therefore to make the point at this early stage in our petition that neither he nor any of the faceless ones in his amorphous group possesses the credentials to speak on or about Kogi State APC. They are ignorant of everything APC in Kogi State.
They are not our ‘stakeholders’ even though they might well be called holders of stakes against us, or opportunistic shareholders. After all, their preoccupation any time they gather is how to impale the APC upon some stake or how to steal away some dividend from loyal party members who laboured for it.
We have between us sufficient experience over the years in Kogi Politics, across several parties and with several governors to declare that Governor Yahaya Bello is a leader who has united our party and our state more than any other in our history.
Through thick and thin we labored side by side with His Excellency, Governor Yahaya Bello to grow APC Kogi Chapter from a lowly rated challenger to the PDP hegemony in Kogi State into a formidable Governing Party and have largely succeeded.
In 2015, our Party had less than 100,000 members and laboured to win elections. Even the governorship elections we narrowly won that year had to be decided by supplementary polls. In under a year, under the leadership of the Governor our Party attracted and registered over 500,000 card carrying members. No wonder we have won all elections since His Excellency came to office with very comfortable margins.
In the last 3 and half years, with the Governor in the forefront, every loyal party member has traversed all nooks and crannies of our state building and growing our party. Conversely, people like Senator Alex Kadiri and his emergency troupe of ‘stakeholders’ were either willfully absent or busily undermining our efforts.
The last APC Kogi event at which Senator Alex Kadiri was sighted in Kogi State is arguably the party primaries in August 2015 where he scored 1 vote to the young Yahaya Bello’s 703 votes. When he left the venue that day he basically abandoned and blacklisted the party.
Since then we have had numerous party events at which any self- respecting member, especially those claiming to be leaders and stakeholders, cannot be found absent, all of which found Senator Alex Kadiri absent.
We have held door to doors, rallies, congresses and many other types of meetings, both statutory and informal, across the 2,548 Polling Units, 239 Wards, 21 Local Governments, 25 State Constituencies, 9 Federal Constituencies, 3 Senatorial Zones and at State level, yet Alex Kadiri was not only absent from all of them, but variously worked against us.
The APC in Kogi State has received no support at all – financial, material or even moral – from Senator Alex Kadiri during the period, not even by way of normal dues, yet he wishes to pass himself off as a ‘stakeholder’ who should have a say in anything. That is intolerable.
It is indisputable that by party convention and practice, Your Excellency is our foremost leader at the national level, while state governors, His Excellency, Governor Yahaya Bello included, are the overall leaders in the states controlled by our party.
It is the fact that any pretender to party membership who is unable to uphold aforesaid convention and practice is a cancer in the body which the leadership must not hesitate to excise before it festers and infests other parts.
With regards to Governance, whilst admitting there are challenges and a constant need for improvement, we insist that the APC administration in Kogi State has met head-on the demands thereof and acquitted itself well taking cognizance of current realities.
We do hope that Your Excellency will be with us in August, 2019 when we plan to celebrate 28 years of the creation of Kogi State with the commissioning of at least 28 significant projects undertaken by the APC administration of Governor Yahaya Bello in Kogi State.
On the problems associated with workers’ remuneration, HE Captain Idris Wada who preceded Governor Yahaya Bello in Office publicly admitted recently that salary problems in Kogi State were ‘historic’ and that he too
inherited the non-payments and percentage payments he passed on to his successor.
Even though Alex Kadiri would have it appear like Governor Bello pioneered these payroll problems, it is on record that former Governor Wada determined during his administration that at least N80bn was required to settle arrears and got approval for N50bn as bailouts.
It is also on record that the previous administration could not monetize the approved bailouts before leaving Office and leaving the problem untouched.
Governor Bello has accessed N20bn of this sum and used same to defray salaries. Substantial portions of other extraordinary funds coming to the state such as the Paris Club refunds have also gone into the payment of salaries.
Despite the generally difficult operating environment for governments across the country, the Yahaya Bello Administration has also recorded feats of performance which are actually unprecedented for Kogi State.
Going by data from the National Bureau of Statistics and other credible rating agencies, Kogi State has gone from the worst in most comparative national indices to the very top under the leadership of Governor Yahaya Bello.
We are second most peaceful state in Nigeria and most peaceful in the north. We have the second lowest crime rate. We are one of only 4 states invited to the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 as successes in the SDGs. Tellingly, we are one of only 9 states in the country which reduced unemployment and underemployment. Lokoja is the second cleanest capital city.
The the rewards for our efforts have been become manifest in the incredible results our people posted for the APC in the 2019 General Elections.
Our party has juggled the challenges posed by a shameless opposition desperate to hijack power again in order to return Kogi State to the days of darkness under the PDP and the sabotage of an endless array of persons who claim to be APC stakeholders but who work openly to crucify the party.
The Kadiri group is no different from the opposition. In fact, they are the opposition. They deploy both barefaced lies and godless incitement to attempt a pull-down of the state, party and its leader, and as far as we are concerned, they are one and the same.
Unfortunately for them, their efforts have only earned them more and more rejection from Kogites over the last three and a half years and this latest attempt to start pretending to be APC Kogi stakeholders is because they nurse a gubernatorial ambition which is afraid to contest openly and fairly with Governor Yahaya Bello for our ticket.
This is a last-ditch effort to find relevance, but it has also failed.
We therefore urge Your Excellency to consign their petition to the dustbin and guide our Party in ensuring that nothing but due process is followed in the way and manner in which our flagbearer for November emerges. If truly they are stakeholders, let them try to sell themselves to the people and see.
Only the rule of law and the integrity for which Your Excellency is renowned will be enough for us in this matter. Anything else will be utterly unacceptable to us in Kogi State APC.
We appreciate Your Excellency, now and always.
Signed:
Ibrahim Ocheje
Gbenga Asagu
Yahaya Karaku
