Barely a few months to next year’s general elections, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has run into a legal jam which may adversely affect its plans for the presidential primaries.
THISDAY gathered Friday that whereas the party was contemplating adopting a middle course to both direct and indirect methods of primaries, it found out that such would be contrary to the existing APC constitution.
A party source told THISDAY that the aim of convening the convention was to enable the party leadership to amend the constitution and to make elaborate provisions that would accommodate the new initiative for presidential primaries.
It was learnt that the opposition party was battling to stave off brewing crisis over disagreements on the method of presidential primaries to be adopted for which one of the aspirants has threatened court action.
According to the APC constitution, nomination for elective positions for local government council, State House of Assembly, House of Representatives, Senate, Governor and President shall be through direct or indirect primary election.
However, APC’s National Executive Council (NEC) had at one of its meetings, approved the adoption of modified direct primaries, by which it hopes to allow room for flexibility to trim down the number of members that would participate in the primaries.
While explaining the party’s choice of modified direct primaries, the APC spokesman, Alhaji Lai Muhammed said what the party initially wanted was a direct primary which would enable every card-carrying member to exercise his right to decide who represents the party during elections.
He said the party’s attention was later drawn to a condition set by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that presidential primaries and conventions must be held under one roof rendered direct primaries almost impracticable.
Addressing Journalists at the end of APC NEC meeting held yesterday in Abuja, Lai Muhammed said the party had scheduled an extraordinary convention to hold on October 29 where it would propose certain amendments to their constitution.
“Principally we proposed certain amendment to the constitution of the party that would allow the party to function much more differently and to that extent we proposed also extraordinary convention of the party on 29 of this month in Abuja to submit the amendment to the National convention of the party.
“It is part of the reason why we need to amend our constitution because the Electoral Act 2010 as amended says that one can conduct a primary by direct or indirect method but if you are going to so then you must be explicit on how you are going to conduct it and that is why we need to amend our constitution”, he said.
Speaking on the allegation of involvement of key members of the party in Bring-Back-Our-ChibokGirls campaign, Muhammed said nothing in the law prevented any party member from associating or canvassing opinion on issue he felt strongly about.
