2023: Apologise, stop grandstanding, Utomi advises APC

Offers reason for Obi’s delayed manifesto

All Progressives Congress (APC) should be organising rallies to apologise to Nigerians rather than grandstanding and positioning itself for another electoral contest following “its abysmal and woeful performance,” professor of political economy, Pat Utomi, has advised.

In a statement, he personally signed and made available to The Guardian, yesterday, the Delta State native, while recalling how the ruling party’s manifesto was drafted in his Lagos home, bemoaned the “shared dishonesty of APC stalwarts, who rather than adhere to the document, shamelessly jettisoned it without any form of remorse.”

The leader of Big Tenth, a political consortium pushing for the election of the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, explained that due to the “degradation of governance by APC and Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) support for transactional politics, handing over power to either of the two parties would spell disaster for Nigeria.

He 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 and then copy it. They would add some things and come out and shout this is our manifesto, but in their heads, they have no plans to implement them.”

Utomi explained that the intention of Big Tenth was to rescue Nigeria from the transactional politics of APC and PDP.

On Obi’s long-awaited manifesto, Utomi said the Presidential Campaign Council was being painstaking.

His words: “The fact that whenever we put out a document, those people will go and grab it and put one sentence there and we heard that the spokesperson for the PDP already said that the APC went and stole the Hope 93 document and called it their manifesto. They are not only doing that, but they are also adding from whatever we put out.”

“So we are not in a rush to put out for them to go and take and sell it. That is why Obi made that statement. So, after their own is out, you will formally see ours, not giving them the opportunity to still respond against it.”