Maku: PDP losing weight to gain strength

Africtv - Mail Summary...

• The Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, said on Wednesday that the defection of some Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members to All Progressives Congress (APC) was a blessing in disguise.
• Maku, who spokes to State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council meeting at the Presidential Villa, said that the defection would strengthen the PDP in the long run.

Africtv - Mail News Reports....

"No party would be happy to lose its members to any other party, but I have always made a point that sometimes, you need to lose weight to gain strength.

"This is exactly what has happened in PDP because when a number of these people are leaving, the party will be healthier in the long run.

"If you look at all those who had left the party, some of them are those that have caused all the headaches in PDP.

"They have been the ones that have attacked the party, they are very quarrelsome, they have oversized ego, some of them cannot stay under the same roof with anybody for one week without the top blowing off.

"A number of them who left if you take a look at the history of our party and look at their antecedent, you will see that they are migrants, they keep migrating from one place to another," he said.

According to him, PDP need members who are stable and believe strongly in the ideology of the party and not those seeking political power at all cost.

"For a number of people that are leaving, they see the party as a market for an election.

"A number of them will come in because they want to stand for an election and if they lose they will run out.

"Political party after 15 years of democracy must begin to settle down to know those who believe in the party.

"Those who believe in the policies and programmes of the party and not because of electoral ambition," he said.

Maku said after the defection of some of the members, the PDP have began to gain stability, saying that the opposition parties were the members defected to had no ideological focus.

The minister alleged that within the period the members left PDP, they had caused a number of problems in the new party they joined.

"There is already an explosion in the APC in Kano because Gov. Rabiu Kwankwaso just went straight and took over a party he was not part of its formation.

"He insisted he must be leader and sacked those who originally formed the party.

"Also in Sokoto, the Gov. Aliyu Wamakko, left and immediately hijacked the party from those who form APC in the state.

"The same problem is also going on in Adamawa, where the APC has two structures, that of the founders and that of those who just join the party.

"From the point of view of justice, they were looking for democracy in PDP, but saw nothing wrong in going to another party to forcefully hijack the structure.

"You can see that they are not democrats, but serious desperadoes who believe that they are in charge, nobody should be," he said.

Maku alleged that it was possible for the new entrants into the APC to hijack the party because it had no structure and ideology.

The minister claimed that PDP remained the only "solid multinational, multi-religious and multiethnic party in the country today".

He called on the journalists to continue to monitor the movement of the party decampees to confirm his claim.

According to him, some of them have been moving for years without stopping like the Fulani nomads moving without shame.

On the 2014 budget, Maku reiterated that the directive by the APC to its members in the National Assembly to block its passage is not nationalistic.

The minister contended that an elected member of the National Assembly should see the country as his or her constituency and seek its interest rather than a parochial interest.

Maku said that in a period when the country was making economic gains and recording high local and foreign investments, it was un-nationalistic for an opposition party to issue such directive.

"I am shocked that anybody will go to the National Assembly and urged people to do partisan politics on an issue that touches every Nigerians.

"When you block the budget of a country, you are stopping the work of a market woman; you are stopping the work of the farmer and threatening the survival of the teachers on the street and patients in the hospitals.

"These are people that depend on the budget and we must therefore, separate negative partisan politics from the survival of our people," he said.

Maku noted that Nigerians should take cognisance of such directive and see APC as a party that could not be trust with power.

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