By Kolawole Ojebisi
A former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, has said proponents of a merger party, particularly those in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), do not need the approval of former President Muhammadu Buhari, to pursue their goals because they are all adults who are matured enough to take decisions.
The former SGF, who was also a chieftain of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which merged with other parties to form APC, said this in an interview published in Punch Newspaper on Wednesday.
Asked whether he and his coalition proponents had sought the blessing of Buhari, Lawal said, “First of all, we don’t need his blessing. We only need to tell him what we want to do because we are adults. It is also not likely that we will go and tell Buhari to follow us.
“I mean, we are mature and intelligent people. Even if Buhari says, ‘Hey, gentlemen, I will join you’. It is our responsibility to say, ‘No. You’ve got to keep off. You are too big for us. We don’t want to involve you. You are part of this government. You remain there until you get fed up.”
He continued, “Now, we are moving out of the other parties to form a mega-party, quite a number of us in the CPC are people who have known General Buhari right from our adolescent ages. So we know him. Some knew him because of the politics, and some because he was the president. So we can read him. He is like an open book to us. For example, if we, as former CPC members, decide to form a party or join a group that is forming a political party, it is only incumbent on us, out of respect, to tell our former leader, who was like a father to us, that we are tired of where we are. It is our right to say ‘these people’ are doing this and that to us; we, therefore, feel that we go and try our hands somewhere. But in a democracy, it is not likely that we will be completely subservient. After all, we are driven by what our people tell us. So we’ll ask Buhari, and he will advise us. Peradventure, he might say, don’t do it. And we will tell him why we must do it. In a democracy, we can agree and disagree. I mean, there’s no dictatorship. There’s nothing like ‘do it by force.’ ”
There has been a growing campaign for the formation of a coalition party ahead of the 2027 general elections to wrest the reins of power from the ruling APC and President Bola Tinubu.
At the vanguard of the campaign are former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, Babachir Lawal, Nasir El-Rufai, Aminu Tambuwal, Achike Udenwa former governors of Kaduna Sokoto, and Imo respectively, among others.
While Lawal still claims to be a member of the APC despite his current stance, El-Rufai dumped the ruling party for the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in March.
Recall that advocates of merger party visited Buhari in Kaduna during Sallah break.Meanwhile, hours after their meeting, a delegation of APC’s National Working Committee (NWC) led by the party’s National Chairman, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, also visited the former president.
Buhari would later come out a day after the visits from both parties to reaffirm his allegiance to the APC.
