By Rauf Oyewole
There is a brewing crisis in the ruling Allied Peoples Movement (APM) in Bauchi State where the Secretary and other officials of the party announced the removal of the chairman, Auwal Isah.
The Secretary of the party, Mohammed Nasir Yahaya who led other party executives to a press conference on Wednesday, said that Isah’s removal followed “loss of confidence in his leadership due to actions inconsistent with the constitution of the party.”
Yahaya said that other reasons for his removal include “lack of financial accountability, absence of proper meeting records, operating without an official party bank account and unconstitutional handling of party affairs.”
The aggrieved party members said that an emergency meeting of the executives has installed Hon. Nasiru Nuru Marafa as interim chairman.
He explained further that after the defection of governor Bala Mohammed and other state government officials to APM, “we have some little internal crisis, whereby our chairman, Auwal Isa, changed the full names of the exco, whereby he brought others who were not in the party, but they were loyalists of the government and PDP organs, who were together with the executive governor, when he returned back to APM.
“We don’t know how they collaborated with them (state government). He is the only person as the chairman of APM since 2018 to date. So after all, we have made some little complaints from the state level to the national level of the APM. We have sent some complaints, and petitions.”
He explained that there was an alleged arrangement that the government led by Bala Mohammed requested for a 70 percent control of the party officials while the original party members produced 30 percent, saying that it was only Isah who was carried along.
According to him, several complaints were written to the governor while he responded that the issue would be “resolved amicably.” “He (the Governor) told us that since we are in the APM, he knew we wanted our party to win the general elections. So he doesn’t want the internal problem to go beyond our own control. Since then, we have maintained law and order to calm everything down.
“I actually, what happened is that, after the governor came to APM, there was a team of harmonisation we made, because when he was about to come, he requested for 70 percent of the APM leader. Yes, we agreed with him. So we formed a committee for harmonisation.”
He said that the committee only sat for only four days, while the sitting was suspended until further notice. “So there was no harmonisation that took place. We just heard that they are going to have a stakeholders meeting. We even write to the national level, to the INEC, saying that we are not aware of that and that there is no any meeting that has been held.”
Yahaya added that among the 28 executive members, only Isah has been part of the APM activities in the state. He said that the party has written to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the National Leadership of APM about the suspension of Isah.
Meanwhile, a factional publicity secretary of the Party, AbdulShakur Danlami Mohammed, said that Yahaya is not the secretary of the party, although he did not deny their membership of APM. He promised that the party would appropriately later.
