MERGER TALKS: ACN, CPC, forge ahead despite cracks.

By JIDE AJANI.
Fresh facts emerged at the weekend that the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, and Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, may have agreed on one of two names to be used for the emerging opposition alliance between the two parties.
In fact, according to information available to Sunday Vanguard, the two parties have already put forward Action Congress for Progressive Change, ACPC, and Action Congress Alliance, ACA,as possible names that would be used to consummate the alliance.
Already, the two parties are expediting action preparatory to holding their national conventions where the alliance would be endorsed by their members – the conventions are expected to hold in the next two months.
Also, the parties’ leaders plan to go before the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, with a view to relinquishing their earlier Certificates of Registration, preparatory to the endorsement of a new name by the electoral body.
However, it was gathered, through a very highly placed CPC member, that some powerful politicians in the leadership cadre of the All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP, are not going along with the multi-party merger plan that would see the ACN, ANPP and CPC, playing major partners.
This, according to our source, is “in spite of the fact that the National Chairman of the ANPP, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, is favourably disposed to going along with a multi-party merger”.
That is not the only clog.
In the CPC too, there is perceived divisions over the merger issue as some leaders of the party are voicing concerns over the workability of the arrangement.
Sunday Vanguard has been reliably made to understand that some leaders of the CPC are “themselves looking into the finer details of the merger between their party and the ACN”.
At one of the meetings of the leaders of the CPC, it was disclosed by Alhaji Buba Galadimma and Prince Tony Momoh, National Secretary and National Chairman, respectively, that before the conclusion of merger between the two parties, it is necessary and important that grey areas on the issue are clearly defined and addressed.
Such areas, it was gathered, would include issues of who would produce the President, the Vice President, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), the Chief of Staff to the President, the sharing of Ministerial portfolios, amongst others. Sunday Vanguard learnt that it was because of the above that the leaders of CPC were yet to append their signature to the prepared MoU on the planned political merger.