From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The All Progressives Congress (APC) has revealed that it has started perfecting arrangements to pacify Christian members aggrieved over the party’s Muslim-Muslim joint presidential ticket to go into next year’s elections as a united family.
APC National Vice Chairman (North West), Salihu Moh Lukman, made the disclosure while addressing newsmen after the North West APC zonal stakeholders meeting in Abuja.
Asked what APC is doing about reconciling the Christian constituents aggrieved over Muslim-Muslim ticket, he said that the party has no intention to exclude anybody based on religion and tribe.
“When you take a decision, certainly some people will be at the receiving end of the outcome. Our party, the APC, is not working to exclude any category, whether in terms of religion, ethnicity or any group. We have taken decision to produce candidates and they are the ones we saw at the unveiling.
“First, politics is all about contest. Disagreement is part of politics. You can’t have political contest without disagreement. As a party, what we are trying to do is to ensure the business of reconciliation is permanent,” he said.
On the thrust of the meeting, Lukman said: “We met to review the situation in the party at the zonal level. The main issue is to really step forward the business of reconciling aggrieved members in each state.
“What we agreed to do, moving forward, is to have state level committees that will meet with all party leaders and aggrieved party members with a view to reconcile all stakeholders. That will be done before the commencement of the campaign for 2023 general elections.”
He also responded to the threat by members of the party from the North West, explaining: “as you can see, some members that are part of the consultative meeting are from Kaduna State like myself. We will go back and look at it.Good enough, one of the decisions we took during the Kaduna and Katsina are the only outstanding states that we are yet to visit in the ongoing fact-finding tour we are conducting. We have agreed that we will visit them early next week. This can be one of the issues we will look at, to find out what really transpired and what steps we need to take,” he promised.