The National Legal Adviser of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Abdulkarim Kana, says only the party’s National Working Committee, NWC, can suspend its National Chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje.
Kana spoke on Monday while being featured on a Channels Television programme, Politics Today.
He was reacting to the recent controversial suspension of Ganduje by different factional excos of his ward.
The two factions of the ward had suspended Ganduje’s membership over alleged corruption, among other offences, during his tenure as governor of Kano State.
However, the State Working Committee of the APC in Kano swiftly nullified the suspension and took disciplinary actions against the ward executives.
Similarly, a Federal High Court in Kano issued an ex parte order temporarily halting the implementation of the suspension until the case is heard and determined.
A Kano State High Court judge who earlier upheld Ganduje’s suspension also vacated the order suspending the ex-Kano governor as the National Chairman of the APC.
On Monday, Kana said no party organ has the right to suspend any member except the NWC.
He said, according to the party’s constitution, before such action could be carried out, all procedures must have been followed.
“All those procedures must be exhausted for such penalties to be imposed, but as a penalty pending completion of an investigation, no organ of the APC has the power to suspend any member pending an investigation except the national working committee,” he said.
While labelling those who suspended Ganduje as “random individuals,” he insisted that they were not members of the ruling party.
He said: “It’s a serious claim. That an organ of the party would take such a daring decision. We conducted our investigations and it didn’t take long for us to establish that the purported individuals who were said to have suspended the national chairman are not even members of the board committee of the party in Ganduje ward and are not members of any of the ward excos as we know.
“My office decided to go beyond just receiving reports from the respective organs as to the claim’s authenticity. We asked the state working committee to come along with the ward excos members to Abuja for us to interview them, and we did, to our surprise, I insisted they should come with their identity cards and their voter’s cards.
“And when they came, we matched their faces against the ID cards and their names and we discovered that those who had appeared on television, making claims that those names belong to them were not and that is how serious this matter is.
“And that was why we did not waste time bringing in the security operatives and the agencies to investigate why those individuals would make such claims,” he said.