Minister of Information, Mr. Labaran Maku, on Wednesday said ex-Vice President Abubakar Atiku and others who defected from the ruling Peoples Democratic Party left the party because they had “oversized egos” and could not stay in one party for long.
The Federal Government’s spokesman also said the defectors were the people creating problem in the PDP and described their exit as a necessary weight-shedding for the party in order to gain strength.
“If you look at all the people that have left PDP, some of them are the people that have caused all the headaches in the party. They have been the ones attacking their party, they are very quarrelsome, and they have oversized egos. Some of them cannot stay under the same roof with anybody for one week without the top blowing up,” Maku said.
The minister, who spoke after the weekly Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja on Wednesday, added that the defectors were “migrants” in desperate search for political benefits and that they were not worth losing sleep over.
He said, “A number of these people who left, if you take a look at the history of our party and look at their antecedent, you will see that they are migrants, they keep migrating from one place to another.
“Generally, as I have always said, no party would be happy to lose its members to the other party because every political party would wish that it is able to retain all its members because number itself is good. No organisation would want to lose its member, so it is not something you will beat your chest and say you are happy when your members leave.
“But I have always made a point that sometimes you need to lose weight to gain strength and that is exactly what has happened in PDP. When a number of these people were leaving PDP I said the party would be healthier in the long run.”
Atiku; governors of Rivers, Kano, Kwara, Sokoto and Adamawa states; 37 members of the House of Representatives; Senator Bukola Saraki; and other PDP members in some states recently abandoned the party and defected to the All Progressives Congress.
Maku said the defectors were already causing trouble in their new party.
He said, “Even within this short period since some of these elements left the PDP, they have caused significant problem in the new party they ran to. They are already causing a huge problem there. There is already an explosion in APC in Kano, because (Governor Rabiu) Kwankwaso went straight and took over a party he was not part of, and insisted that he must be the leader. He sacked those who formed the party.
“You go to Sokoto, (Governor Aliyu) Wamakko went immediately and hijacked the party from those who formed APC in the place; those who dissolved their own parties in order to form a political party that would compete with the PDP.”
“So you can see they are not democrats, these are serious desperadoes who believe that unless they are in charge nobody should be.”
He said the APC lacked focus and ideology.
But the APC Interim National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed,in response to the minister’s assertions, said Nigerians were currently not interested in the politics of abuse or character assassination.
He said it was left for the PDP to convince Nigerians about what the party have left to offer after more than 14 years at the helm of affairs with nothing to show for it.
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