Aggrieved members of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) in Lagos state have pulled out of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and joined the Peoples Democratic Part (PDP), sighting marginalisation in the APC as a reason for their action, a Thisday report reveals.
CPC, along with the defunct All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP), Action congress of Nigeria (ACN) and a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) merged to become the current APC.
The aggrieved Lagos CPC members accuse the APC of making use of their party structures and maligning them in the affairs of the party, adding that prior to their defection, they had carried out extensive consultations with the leadership of the APC to find a solution to the fate of their members but got no respite, hence their movement en-mass to the PDP, where they believe their interests would be welcome and protected.
Ashogbon Lattif, the Lagos state chairman of the APC-CPC said: “What we experienced shows their greed of uncommon proportion and why they turned a supposed formidable merger process to conquest of other merging parties in order to satisfy their uncommon greed.”
His noted that the CPC had been heavily marginalized as regards the involvement of the party in the registration process among other party issues.
Lattif pointed out that out of 171 supervisors used at the local governemt level for the registration exercise, CPC got 26 instead of 57. At the ward level CPC got 376 instead of 1,128 supervisors and for polling unit registration officers, it was allotted 346 nstead of 5,093 as the total was 16,978
He further said that the leadership of the defunct ACN had hijacked the party and sidelined others, as out of 35 executives at the state level, the ACN took 34 and left one to be shared between the CPC and ANPP and at the local government level, 19 slots were left to be shared between ANPP and CPC while a total of 1349 were taken by the ACN.
He said his party members had resolved to leave the APC and move to the PDP where democratic tenets were appreciated and practiced, adding that they are determined more than ever to rescue Lagos in the 2015 elections.
