How Mala Buni Left APC in Debt – Abdullahi Adamu

By Eric Elezuo

The crises in the All Progressives Congress (APC) took a dramatic turn on Friday when the party chairman, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, accused the former Caretaker Committee chairman, and Governor of Borno State, Mai Mala Buni, of leaving the party impoverished with a huge debt running into multi-billions of naira, and running the party with no clear cut standard but rather left everyone to do as they wished.

Buni assumed the leadership of the ruling party in June 2020, when the national working committee was dissolved and in its place, a new interim committee was inaugurated with the Yobe governor as as chairman.

The committee was saddled with the responsibility of steering the activities of the party for an initial period of six months and also to prepare and conduct the party’s extraordinary national convention.

During a national executive council meeting held at the state house Abuja on 8 December 2020, the tenure of the interim committee/extraordinary convention committee was extended for another six months. It however, ended up spending 21 months in total.

Adamu made the revelation while recalling with pains the state of affairs of the party when he assumed office in March this year during a media parley in Abuja. The chairman went further to defend his decision to reorganize the party bureaucracy, saying he inherited a very disorganized and rotten workforce as well as a secretariat “where anything goes and everyone was just doing his own thing”.

Shortly on assumption of office, Adamu had on April 22 ordered all departmental directors at the ‘Buhari House’ national secretariat of the party to proceed on indefinite suspension as a result of what was understood as part of cleaning the rot that characterised the Buni-led administration.

On assumption of office on April 1, Adamu had immediately hinted of the possibility of reorganizing the national secretariat while he also embarked on remodelling the party secretariat, relocating his office from the third to the ground floor.

While stakeholders hold the opinion that Adamu’s comments could be seen as a subtle attack at the now rested Buni-led Caretaker Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC), it is imperative to note that the Committee steered the affairs of the party for close to two years before reluctantly relinquishing position during a special elective national convention in March 2022.

“When we came here, we came to reorganize and reposition the party. You don’t see the party in a state of mess and just because you want to be decent, because you don’t want to offend anybody, you allow the rot that you inherited to go on.

“We came and met the party where people were fixing all manner of things, the legal bill alone was over N7.5 billion. We came to find that here, everybody was like on his own. Everyone was just doing what they wanted to do, no control, no system, no due process and just because you don’t want to be accused of anything, you just allow that kind of thing to go on. I am not that brand. My DNA has terrible allergy for that and I am sure most, if not all of my members in the NWC share in this.

“So, we found the necessity to reorganize the whole place and only God knows the extent of appreciation of the public that we got. Of course, every situation of change has its victims and ours will not be an exception and we didn’t do anything with any bias or prejudice. The main thing is the interest of the party, to reposition it in an election year. We will be abused, we will be falsely accused. Of course, we are humans, I am not saying we couldn’t have made one or two mistakes but the fact of the matter is that there is nothing we have done deliberately just to promote our own feathers.

“Recently, we tried to introduce table payment. We know we don’t have 200 people working here but if you go to the payroll, you have over 200 people. Who are they? How did they come on our payroll? What are they doing for us? What is the nature of their jobs? Where are their letters of appointment? What qualifications do they have? You don’t because you want to avoid negative press and then not do this. We did everything in good faith and I don’t have any qualms about it”, he added.

Adamu said he inherited billions of Naira in debts from his predecessor, stressing that in addition to the legal debt of N7,5 billion, the Buni-led team also left N12.3 million advert backlog.

But the grand promise that Adamu came in with may have caved in within a short while as even the staff audit he promised to execute as regards the report of the exercise which showed an over-bloated workforce has not been implemented despite the committee concluding its assignment several weeks ago. One wonders if the rot has continued.

Adamu also spoke on the lackadaisical attitude of some of the presidential aspirants of the party, who lost to the presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, at the June 8, 2022 Presidential primary of the party at the Eagle Square, saying while they remained members of the party, he could not assess the level of their commitment to Tinubu presidential project. Ever since Tinubu won the presidential ticket, the likes of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, and former Transportation Minister, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, have however not shown public commitment to the party’s bid to retain power at the centre. Osinbajo was excluded from the APC Presidential Campaign Council, PCC, while both Lawan and Amaechi were named as advisers.

A former two-term governor of Nasarawa, Abdullahi Adamu assumed the chairmanship of the APC on April 1, 2022 after a long drawn battle to oust the former chairman, who acted in caretaker capacity for close to two years. After the end of his two-term governorship, he became Secretary, Board of Trustees (BOT) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In 2011, he contested and won the senatorial seat of the Nasarawa West Senate constituency before decamping to the APC.