The national leaders of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) converged on Lafia, the Nasarawa State capital, yesterday to seek the support of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) in a bid to realise their drive for a mega merger of all opposition political parties in the country towards wresting power from the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which they accused of compounding Nigeria’s problems.
Making known their mission in the state, the leader of the delegation and former governor of Kano State and presidential flag bearer of the ANPP in the last general elections, Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, stressed the need for all opposition political parties to come together and agree on common grounds early enough, rather than hurriedly tailored electoral alliances on the eve of polls.
Mallam Shekarau lamented, that in the past, challenges bordering? on voter education and clashes of personal interests had hampered the success of those alliances even as he said that, in the current arrangement, the merger involved the total surrendering of each party’s identity and picking up a common name with a common ideology, goal and logo.
The former presidential aspirant noted that they are embarking on the merger talks early to give them enough time to finetune all the likely grey areas, saying the highest organs of all the major opposition parties in the country? were committed to ensuring the success of this political union.
He said the PDP always had its way because the opposition parties had always fought from small units, pointing out that “if the fight is total and from a larger platform, the negative tendencies in the electoral process would be subdued.”