Benue Crisis: Report To Abuja, APC Orders Ortom, Akume
BY VICTOR BUORO, ABUJA – Worried by recent developments within the All Progressives Congress (APC) family in Benue State, the Party’s national leadership has moved to resolve the crisis that saw Governor Samuel Ortom calling it quit from the ruling Party.
Accordingly, the APC Deputy National Chairman (North), Senator Lawal Shu’aibu says both Governor Ortom and Senator George Akume as the top APC leaders in Benue State are requested to report in Abuja for a fact-finding and peace meeting.
Ortom and Akume are fingered as key actors in the current leadership crisis rocking the Benue chapter of APC. The two chieftains have been at loggerheads over who controls the party’s structure in the State.
Sources inside the APC National Secretariat said the meeting that will have Senator Shu’aibu mediating was arranged against the backdrop of Gov Ortom’s announcement on Monday that having been given a ‘Red card’, he is effectively out of the governing party.
Shortly after swearing in his new Special Adviser on Bureau for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Mr Jerome Shimbe in Makurdi, Governor Ortom said that his membership of APC has expired.
Ortom, who acknowledged the strained relationship between him and the party that he rode to power in 2015, stated that with the ‘red card’ from APC, the coast was clear for him to pick any political party whose ideology suits his administration. – With agency reports
