Adopt Consensus To Avoid Dollar Rain, APC Chieftain Urges Party

A founding member of the All Progressives Congress and Director-General of the Voice of Nigeria, Osita Okechukwu, on Sunday, urged the governing APC to adopt the consensus route in electing its presidential candidate in its forthcoming primary election.

This, he said, would prevent what he described as the “dollar rain” allegedly witnessed at Saturday’s presidential primary of the Peoples Democratic Party and save the naira from further depreciation.

“…if that could happen in a party with about 731 (767) delegates, imagine what will happen if the APC with about 2,322 delegates is allowed to indulge in Dollar Rain,” he stated.

According to him, Atiku Abubakar’s “opportunistic victory” will have little or no impact on the APC’s election of a presidential candidate from the South-East.

Okechukwu made these known in a statement he signed on Sunday titled ‘Mr President, save Naira from obscene Dollar-monetised presidential primaries, Okechukwu pleads.’

The PUNCH reports that, ahead of the primaries of the governing party and the main opposition, aspirants engaged in a frantic dollar buy-out nationwide, leading to the further depreciation of the naira.

Citing the withdrawal speech of one of the PDP presidential aspirants, Mohammed Hayatu-Deen, who said the primaries have been “obscenely monetised,” Okechukwu said the consensus route would ensure that the forthcoming APC presidential primary does not follow the PDP’s highest-bidder dollar rain.

In his speech before withdrawing from the PDP primary, the former banker, Hayatu-Deen, said, “it is, therefore, based on personal principles and with great humility that I have decided to withdraw from this contest, which has been obscenely monetised.”

According to Okechukwu: “Albeit, our sister opposition political party has every constitutional right to elect whoever they want as their flagbearer; the dollar rain is worrisome as noted by Mohammed Hayatu-Deen, who dubbed it obscenely monetised presidential primary.

“If the naira is already bleeding because of dollar rain on 731 (767) delegates; please, better imagine the degree of depreciation of the naira if another blitz of dollar rain is allowed to be splashed on 2,322 delegates.”

He, therefore, called on the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), to consider the consensus option in the APC presidential primary.

He explained, “All the three (modes of primary) are democratic and are in our law books. Please, is it not paradoxical that the governors and ex-governors who oppose consensus had adopted the same consensus and even outright imposition to select their successors?

“To me, they have lost the moral high ground to oppose Mr President from adopting such a legal mode of primary election. One’s appeal is that a politically correct aspirant should be consensually presented.”

The party chieftain, who congratulated the newly elected PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, dismissed insinuations that with Atiku at the helm, the APC would not adhere to the rotation convention of electing a presidential candidate of the Igbo extraction or a southerner.

“Methinks His Excellency Atiku Abubakar’s opportunistic victory will have little or no impact on (the) APC’s election of a presidential candidate from among Ndigbo aspirants or by extension the southern belt aspirants. I don’t think Mr President I know even going by consensus will deny the south their turn.

“Most importantly, one, northern voters are sophisticated, having voted for Chiefs MKO Abiola and Olusegun Obasanjo, with all indicators they will vote southerner this time around so as to shame the PDP for breaching the rotation convention in their constitution.

“Second, there are a number of northern voters who are patriots, who believe sincerely in the ancient doctrine of equity, natural justice and the imperative of unity of our dear country. Going south is the best solution to smoothen the polarisation in the land.

“Thirdly, the dormant Igbo voters in Kano, Lagos and other towns plus core non-Igbo APC voters will be woken up to trounce Waziri Adamawa at the polls,” he said.