APC

President Bola Tinubu’s selection of 45 ministers, according to All Progressives Congress president Aliyu Audu, is insufficient. Audu is a member of the party’s Presidential Transition Council’s Media Strategy Subcommittee.

This was said by Audu on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily on Wednesday.

While not stating a particular number of ministers to be appointed, he said, “I don’t think 45 is even enough. I don’t think 48 is enough. We have a population of over 200 million. We are in a crisis.”

According to Audu, it was widely acknowledged that more local governments needed to be established in order to bring governance closer to the people during Bola Tinubu’s term as governor of Lagos State.

“A lot of people thought he was taking it too far but look at how Lagos has moved in 24 years and how every other state has moved in 24 years.

“I’m not talking about potential. I’m not talking about what it used to be before but I’m talking about sheer growth between then and now,” he said.

Timipre Sylva, the recently-retired Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, has emerged as the APC’s candidate for the Bayelsa State governorship election on November 11.

At the party’s primary election held on Friday and Saturday, Sylva received 52,061 votes to overcome five other candidates and claim the governorship ticket.

In order to conduct the election in the state’s 105 wards and eight local government districts, the APC used the direct mode electoral system.

Joshua Macaiver, a former militant leader, received 2,078 votes, while David Lyon, a former Bayelsa governor-elect running on the APC platform, received 1,584 votes.

Moreover, Festus Daumiebi received 557 votes, Isikima Johnson received 584 votes, and Prof. Ongoebi Etebu received 1,277 votes.

At the party’s headquarters in Yenagoa on Saturday, Major General Ahmed Jibrin (retired), the chairman of the Bayelsa APC primary election committee, proclaimed the former governor the contest’s victor.

He said, “With this result, Timipre Marlin Sylva, having scored the highest number of votes cast is hereby declared as the winner.

“By the power conferred on me by the APC National Working Committee, I declare Chief Timipre Marlin Sylva as the winner of this election.”

The panel then went on to do an affirmation exercise with five ad-hoc delegates from each of the 105 wards within the party’s secretariat in the state capital to confirm the conclusion of the process after revealing the results.

In order to run in the APC’s Bayelsa governorship primary, Sylva resigned from his position in March.

Under the PDP platform, he presided over the state from 2007 to 2012, but the party refused to provide him a ticket for a second term.

The former minister later joined the APC and ran for governor as its candidate in 2015, but he lost to Seriake Dickson of the PDP, who was the incumbent governor at the time.