APC should be apologising to Nigerians, not campaigning – Utomi

Renowned professor of political economy, Pat Utomi, has said the All Progressives Congress ought to be apologising to Nigerians and not campaigning for re-election.

He said as a result of the APC’s abysmal performance over the last seven years, Nigerians deserve an apology from the party.

According to him, the APC should be organising rallies to apologise to Nigerians, rather than grandstanding and positioning itself for another electoral contest.

Utomi who is the Leader of the Big-Tent, a political consortium pushing for the election of Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, said this in a statement in Abuja, on Thursday.

He also gave a historical account of how the APC’s manifesto was drafted in his Lagos home and bemoaned the shared dishonesty of the party’s stalwarts, who he said had “shamelessly jettisoned it without any form of remorse”.

He said because of the degradation of governance by the APC and the major opposition, Peoples Democratic Party’s support for transactional politics, handing over the reign of presidential power to any of the two political parties would definitely be a disaster for Nigeria.

Utomi said, “The Nigerian people have spoken. They have said they are tired of this old order.

“They will wait for us to release our manifesto then they will copy it, add some things and come out and shout this is our manifesto.

“But in their heads, they have no plans to implement them. They have all the monies they have taken from our treasury; they will use it to make flash of all of these things.

“I wrote the last one (manifesto) and I am saying to you that they didn’t implement the things we wrote. In fact, at a point they said ‘who said we promised that? We didn’t promise it; it is some people who wrote it and called it our manifesto’.

“All those who failed us yesterday, I say to you that if we have a sense of shame in this country, there should be many rallies about APC, but they should be rallies of apologies — ‘sorry we failed you’.

“Now they are saying for example, ‘we will get rid of insecurity in six months’. They’ve said it before. What kind of broken record is this? Is this an insult to the Nigerian people? You and I know better.”

Prof Utomi said the intention of the Big-Tent in supporting Peter Obi and Labour Party was to rescue Nigeria from the transactional politics of the APC and PDP.

He said, “The fact that they are standing in the gap for a people either to die or to live, that bond, that passion knowing that this is about the future of our children, is what holds it together.

“Not transactions of what position will you get. Because that is the traditional way, that is the way they do it in APC and PDP: ‘what will you give me, what will you not give me?’

“This is different, this is driven by the fact that if we don’t, our children die.”

 

On the long awaited manifesto of Peter Obi and the Labour Party, Utomi said the Presidential Campaign Council of Peter Obi wants to be painstaking, but not rushing.