Shehu Sani to Oyegun: APC may go the way of PDP, says ‘el-Rufai’s thugs creating mayhem in Kaduna’

National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, has been told to urgently check the excesses of Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State and his loyalists or else, the party may go the way of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Senator Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna Central), who survived an attack on Sunday at the Press Centre of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) in Kaduna, said activities of the state government may lead to the destruction of APC in the North-Central state.
Sani spoke after a closed-door meeting with Odigie-Oyegun at the headquarters of the party in Abuja.
He was accompanied to the meeting by Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi (APC, Kaduna North) and some leaders of the party from Kaduna.
While condemning Saturday’s congress in the state, he said delegates list for the election was doctored and did not follow due process.
´´They sat down in the palace of their gods to write names and send it down here for us to accept; that can never happen”, he said.
He said that such practice contributed to the problems of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and warned that the APC could go the same way if its leadership failed to address the problem.
´´This was the seed of the destruction of the PDP, where individuals considered themselves as gods and any other person a slave; that will never happen in Kaduna State.
´´We are here to present our case and to appeal to the instrument of leadership of this party to intervene in the Kaduna issue before it becomes too late. We are here to also state it to the party´s national leadership that we are under siege in Kaduna. The use of thugs and violence by agents and close associates of the state government is one thing we cannot tolerate,´´ Sani said.
He decried Sunday’s raiding of NUJ secretariat in Kaduna by thugs during a press briefing after the election, during which journalists were injured.
He said that such was the trait of the APC leadership in the state, and urged the national leadership to set up an investigation panel to bring the perpetrators of the disturbances to justice.
The lawmaker alleged that the thugs were acting in concert with the police in the state.
´´If we continue on this part, where one person feels he is a god, I think we are simply repeating the very problem that destroyed the party we ejected out of power,´´ he said.
He maintained that there was a need for APC to provide the vehicle for real change for the country to change and tasked members to change the manner they played politics.
Sani stressed that those who resolved to the use of violence or thugs to liquidate perceived political opponent were on the wrong side of history.
He said that members of his faction of the party in the state were not agents of violence but were loyal and peaceful.
He insisted that if the APC must win the 2019 election, it must apart from fulfilling its campaign promises, set an example for discipline, comradeship and a sense of belonging to all members.
Sani said that what was happening in the party´s leadership in the state was unbecoming and should be addressed before it became late.
He appealed to those in authority to ´´know that the God that brought the APC to power was still alive and will always listen to the cries of the oppressed and marginalised.
´´ We are here in the spirit of that, and we hope that we will get the cooperation of the national party´s leadership to come to the rescue of the party in Kaduna before it is too late,´´ he said.