WARRI — DEPUTY Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Mr. Emmanuel Arigbe-Osula has asked the leadership of his party, the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) not to make the mistake of fielding a joint presidential candidate with the PDP in 2007 as that will be a death knell for the party.
Reacting to a recent statement by the Zamfara State governor, Alhaji Ahmad Sani that the ANPP was tinkering with the option, he said: “Much as Sani’s views are personal to him, I am warning the party of the mistake made by the Alliance for Democracy which went into such a costly venture with the PDP in the 2003 elections.
“Those of us who believe”, he told Vanguard in an interview in Warri “that ANPP is All Nigeria Peoples Party and not All Northerners Peoples Party know that what we want the party to have is a broad-based outlook and rather than waiting for the PDP to select a presidential candidate, we should be working on providing our party with a formidable presidential candidate to compete against the PDP candidate in 2007.”
He said the AD leaders supported Presidential Obasanjo’s re-election in 2003 because they wanted to play smart with Nigerians but the party was severely burnt in the process while the then APP/AD joint accord in 1999 that produced Chief Olu Falae as Presidential standard bearer could not be said to have performed any magic for the party.
Some leaders of the ANPP who are working for the return of former military President, General Ibrahim Babaginda in 2007 were said to have reached an understanding that if the PDP nominates him as its presidential candidate, the ANPP would adopt him. A leader of the party who preferred anonymity told Vanguard that “if the PDP nominates another person as its presidential candidate in 2007, the ANPP will gladly field IBB as its presidential candidate that is why we are waiting to see who the PDP throws up first.”
Arigbe-Osula, insisted, however, that “the ANPP will champion the cause of the Nigerian people and not do the bidding of PDP in 2007. What the governor had said was part of the problems we are currently going through in the party because some of the people in the party are deliberately slowing it down, waiting to find out what the PDP will be doing with their own candidate of choice. It does not show the ANPP as a party with vision and a sense of purpose and direction", he said.
