Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) in Kwara State at the weekend said there would be  no automatic ticket for anybody in the 2015 governorship election in the newly formed All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state.
The parties said all the parties in the merger of the APC hadequal right to vie for any political positions during the period.

This was contained in a joint statement issued by the state chairman of CPC, Alhaji Suleiman Buhari and the state chairman of ANPP,  Alhaji Taiwo Eleja, a copy of which was made available to journalists in Ilorin.

The CPC and ANPP were reacting to the recent comments by some  members of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) Stakeholders’ Forum in the state led by Dr. Saad Omoiya,  allegedly rooting for the former governorship candidate of the party in the 2011 governorship election in the state, Mr. Mohammed Dele Belgore (SAN), to  emerge as the governorship candidate of the newly formed APC for the 2015 election due to the superlative outing of the ACN during the last election in the state.

They therefore vowed to reject anything other than the governorship position in the 2015 election in the state on the platform of the APC.

According to the statement, "We  wish to state categorically that the abiding principle for our coming together on the APC mega platform is that of mutual camaraderie that does not transcend the thin line of individual party’s independence or meddling in our respective internal affairs."

The statement said: "Our effort so far, in rallying the merger parties is in absolute good faith and essentially based on the prevailing circumstances."

The CPC and ANPP explained that  “Since we have mutually resolved to work together as a team without preconditions, we make bold to say that any rumour, suggestions or innuendoes that might be consciously or unconsciously promoted to mean that a particular former aspirant from any of the merging parties has a leverage over and above the rest is bound to fall flat in the faces of its initiator."

The statement stressed that, "The essence of this brand new arrangement is to bury the ugly past where ego prevailed over reason in our previous attempts to forge a joint political front. We all must therefore be ready to bury the past with all its debilitating relics. So, the idea of who becomes what does not arise now, and when it eventually does, it must be mutually agreed by all."

The statement  pointed out that,  "We hasten to add that much as we pledged to make sacrifices with a view to making the merger become fruition, we will nonetheless vehemently oppose any scheme that has the slightest element of relegating or whittling down the equal standing of any of the merging parties to the background, on the basis of any concocted ‘sharing formula’.

The statement noted further that, "The grand plot to surreptitiously conscientise the impressionable public into erroneously believing that one party is the ‘husband’ while the others are disingenuously tagged the ‘wives’ should forever remain in the imagination of its progenitor, because it is only meant but for the trash bin of the past. We have come this far in our individual struggle, and we are sure going to resist any plot to either subjugate our platform or make it play the second fiddle under the alter of a speculative yet outrightly objectionable political arrangement."

The CPC and ANPP therefore declared that,  "As long as there is yet no official communication of the scheme of re-alignment from our national leadership, any bogus assertion from any quarters now, no matter how highly placed, is of no moment."