₦airaland Forum

Party leaders disagree over NEC meeting Oshiomhole is gone — Obaseki camp Amid an apparent division within the top echelon of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), there are reports of high level consultations to determine the fate of the embattled National Chairman, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, at the party’s National Executive Council (NEC) meeting slated for Tuesday, March 17, Daily Trust gathered yesterday. While our correspondents gathered from reliable chieftains of the party that a notification for the meeting had been passed, the party’s National Legal Adviser and National Publicity Secretary, Babatunde Ogala and Malam Lanre Issa-Onilu respectively, in a statement jointly signed late yesterday, said the National Working Committee was dissociating itself from the said notification.

It was gathered while a faction within the NWC supports the proposed meeting, another faction is averse to it. They argued that NEC would meet every quarter and or at any time decided by the national chairman or on a request made in writing by at least two-thirds of members of the NEC, provided that no fewer than a 14-day notice is given for the meeting to be summoned.

The statement added that the Deputy National Secretary of the party, Victor Giadom, who signed the notification, lacked the power to convey a NEC meeting, arguing that he was not directed by the national chairman to do so as stipulated by the party’s constitution. But pro and anti Oshiomhole camps are said to be all out to ensure the actualisation of their plots on March 17, even as another faction with the party leadership presumably sympathetic to Oshiomhole, dismissed the notification for an emergency NEC meeting.

Daily Trust earlier gathered that members of the two camps are seriously recruiting and wooing members of NEC with mouth watering offers ahead of the emergency meeting.

Oshiomhole’s latest nightmare started on Wednesday when an Abuja High Court ordered the party to stop recognising him pending the determination of a substantive suit seeking his perpetual removal. The national chairman who had previously survived numerous onslaughts rushed to a Federal High Court in Kano where he secured an order restraining the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from recognising any other person aside him as the national chairman of the party.

It was the pressure from the anti-Oshiomhole camp among governors of the APC that forced the party to convene the emergency NEC meeting which is expected to be attended by President Muhammadu Buhari. But a member of the NEC who is pro-Oshiomhole said the plot to oust the former labour leader would be “fruitless”.

Validated:
Once Oshiomhole is ousted, EFCC will swoop on him to silence him permanently.