Nigeria sinking, APC support group tell Buhari, Tinubu

THE All Progressives Congress, APC Rebirth 2019, a support group within the party, has raised the alarm that the country was sinking, warning that the party has only two options before it to save the country.The group in a letter by national president, Prince Tony Akeni and six others, to President Muhammadu Buhari, national leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and others, said: “There is anguish of unprecedented scale and depth among the poor and lower middle class in Nigeria, which must be addressed with a sense of war-time foreboding and urgency… The ship called Nigeria is heading towards sinking grounds.”
It said: “As the ruling party at the centre and in the majority of Nigerian states, we have two choices before us. To our own detriment, we can choose to bury our heads in the sand from blame like the preposterous ostrich and flaunt aimless growth and boom statistics like PDP is expert at and used to do in its hey days before its empire fell from its arrogant peak.”
“We can choose to pretend that all is well with our once teeming but fast thinning supporters, once dedicated but now debilitated and dispersing change campaigners, and once hopeful but now embittered and hate-filled Nigerians as we glide dangerously towards the 2019 Judgment Day in the Supreme Court of Nigeria voters,” the group added.
The group also said: “Our second choice is to have the courage and soul-searching sober reflections to enable us evolve a sweeping change of fortunes for Nigerians in general, and to do so urgently, diligently and pragmatically with everything it takes in the short time remaining in our hands.”
It noted: “The most fruitful channel to achieve the latter, which is the sensible choice, is the immediate convocation of an APC National Political and Economic Retreat. Where we are in Nigeria today, we cannot afford to continue to wallow in the sympathy mentality that Nigerians will forever reason with us that the prolonged social-economic meltdown in our country is entirely the fault of others.”
“Double-faced blacklegs among us, erroneously planted in sacred places of the President’s heart and installed in the Villa, are also guilty, make no mistake about that.
“Unlike political retreats we have seen convened in the past by the anti-masses opposition PDP, which consolidate on their avaricious leaders’ well-being and mending party stable cracks to facilitate safe looting of our country, the proposed APC retreat should evolve through three stages.
“The first retreat should be conducted at the local government area levels on the same date throughout the country, where grassroots supporters’ reports on the state of each local government area and the nation, peculiar challenges, solutions and well-being of Nigerians and party patriots from the local government areas will be collated and aggregated at each state venue on a second day.
“The retreat’s third day and grand finale should comprise APC national party leadership, authentic APC delegates representing the states, foundational APC federal cabinet ministers and appointees; not opportunistic post-victory joiners and fly-by-night adoptees who found their way through back doors of corrupted appointment lists drawn by Mr. President’s Aso Villa confidants, who exploited and betrayed the innocent trust of the President to get deadly agents of the opposition into government.
“At the second stage, reports of the state retreat should be aggregated to provide direction, executive compass and acceleration for projects, programmes and policy priorities of the administration for intervention in areas of urgent and optimum impact on electorates in different parts of our country,” it said.
Such retreat, the group stated, “will throw up the truly most urgent needs of the people throughout Nigeria and foster the Federal Government’s sense of immediacy on electorate assuring and vote winning interventions.”
It suggested: “These should include, for instance, expeditiously fixing notoriously failed sections of major inter-regional arterial federal roads as the East-West highways south of the country, Apapa Road, West of the country, and the nightmarish Ekpoma section of federal road, South-South of the country, which has in the last few months of rain turned that section of Ekpoma community to a mud lake.”
“This should include effectively getting the North’s children back to schools in the post-Boko Haram era by strengthening the school feeding programme which has suffered a blow from the general downturn of federal revenue earnings.
“The overall outcome of such retreat will accelerate decision processes from the President’s desk to the least APC administered local government council in Nigeria, and help us to put behind us the better part of the last two years during which decisions on virtually everything from budget legislation, executive actions and appointments to the justice dispensation have been a nightmare of excruciating sluggard pace and beggarly delays,” the group said.