Stakeholders and elders in the All Progressive Congress (APC) in Ebonyi State have called on the party’s National Caretaker Committee Chairman, Mala Buni, to restore sanity in Ebonyi state chapter.
According to them, two factions of the party are at each other’s throats for the soul.
The stakeholders and elders, who claim not to belong to any of the two contending camps, raised the alarm that what happened to the party in Rivers and Zamfara states may repeat itself in Ebonyi.
They said the leadership tussle was between a group led by Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Ogbonnaya Onu, and a member of the National Assembly Service Commission, Senator Julius Ucha.
The stakeholders noted that the “battle has left a very fragmented party open to manipulation by external forces, including opposition parties.”
The stakeholders, therefore, called on the National Caretaker Committee to set up caretaker committee for the party in Ebonyi State. The stakeholders also urged the national body to allow the proposed membership registration at the state level to be handled by the caretaker committee.
According to them, a “genuine peace meeting be convened by the party to include inviting all the aggrieved parties, including those who flouted the presidential and NEC directive on court cases.”
“Your Excellencies, the experiences of our party in Rivers and Zamfara states in the recent past are still fresh and must not be allowed to repeat itself in Ebonyi hence the need to tread cautiously in dealing with any of the factions in Ebonyi state,” they said.
Giving a brief background to the lingering crisis, the stakeholders said: “It is a fact that before the last congress, the party had two chairmen, Ben Nwobasi, the congress elected chairman who belongs to the Ucha group and Eze Nwachukwu Eze, elected deputy to Nwobasi and core loyalist to Onu, who claimed that Nwobasi was impeached by the working committee and thus mandated to act.
“This led to several litigations in the court of law alongside several mediatory efforts from the national. This was the state of the party before the last congress.
“Expectedly, two parallel congresses were conducted by the Onu and Ucha led factions respectively. While the Onu-led faction elected Eze Nwachukwu Eze as their chairman, the Ucha-led faction elected Dr. Sylvester Nwambe”.