2019: Plot to stop Buhari thickens •As Northern, Southern leaders plan grand alliance outside Obasanjo’s coalition

A broad-based political alliance involving eminent politicians across the six geopolitical zones is underway with a four-pronged agenda, one of which is to stop the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari from securing another four year in 2019, Sunday Tribune has learnt.

A former presidential candidate of one of the leading parties is among the arrowheads of the grand alliance which, according to the leaders, has no business, whatsoever with the Coalition for Nigeria Movement (CNM) initiated by former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Sunday Tribune was reliably informed that the proposed grand alliance is the brainchild of leaders of thought and other critical stakeholders in the South-West; South-East, South-South and the North-Central zone, who believe Nigerians have been consistently shortchanged by a section of the political class.

Also said to be part of the grand alliance are like-minds from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), as well as a coterie of other existing parties with similar aspirations.

With this new group, the number of groups outside the APC and PDP, showing more than passing interest in the 2019 elections has risen to three, namely Obasanjo’s CNM, the coalition led by Chief Olisa Agbakoba and others as well as the new grand coalition.

The key men working on the alliance claimed to have identified one of the oldest existing political parties to be used as the springboard to field candidates for the series of elections coming up next year.

The leaders have since been directed to embark on aggressive sensitization at each of the federal constituencies across the country as members of the think-tank of the group fine-tune the programme of action.

To place the group on a strong pedestal, the leaders have also said to be courting mass-based organisations which share similar aspirations on the way forward for the country.

Another primary aim of the alliance, which comprises political leaders from a number of the exiting parties with relative presence nationwide, is to end the era of the powerful clique usually behind anointed candidates that emerged as presidents in the past.

The other objective of the alliance is to promote and sustain core issues that have been of utmost concern to the vast majority of stakeholders in the Nigeria project for a long time, just as it planned to build a pan-Nigerian spirit based on equity and justice characteristic of the advanced democracies of the world.

The forces behind the current alliance, Sunday Tribune was told, have been involved in a “series of strategic meetings and consultations” in Lagos, Port Harcourt, and parts of the northern parts of the country in the last few weeks to work out other modalities for making the alliance catch fire once it was made public.

It was learnt that the leaders had an exhaustive debate on whether to form a new party or adopt one of the existing parties towards actualising the ultimate dream of turning the table against the APC and other opposition parties in next year’s elections.

“The leaders took pains in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of all the old set of parties before arriving at the choice of the one considered as the most widely known as the springboard or platform to be used by the alliance,” one of the leaders confided in one of our correspondents.

Another source said the leaders, especially from the North, were working assiduously with their counterparts in other zones to make the alliance a formidable force that mobilises popular support for all its candidates in any part of the country.

A fulcrum of the alliance, according to the leaders, is the need to return the country to the path of true federalism, such that each stakeholders in the Nigeria project can have an equal stake.

One of the arrowheads of the alliance, who craved for anonymity, said the identity of the exiting party to be used as platform would not be made public now, until all arrangements had been concluded on the alliance.

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