Abdulaziz Yari, the Governor of Zamfara State and Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Governors’ forum, says the illness of President Muhammadu Buhari is preventing the party’s elective convention from holding.

Yari said this while talking with journalists on the inability of the APC National Working Committee to hold a national convention to fill some vacant positions in the party’s national executive.

“We have been on this matter of convention but you know that as a party, the ruling party, the President is the leader of this party,” Yari said.

“One, before getting to the convention, there is some kind of process. The national working committee must agree on the time and at the same time we have to adopt the report submitted by the national working committee to the larger NEC members, which the President must be in attendance as a leader of the party and you know the situation of our president.

“We have been fixing time but because of his illness we are unable to hold the meeting… we have to put a kind of process in place, so that we can at least a mid-term convention, it is not an elective convention.

“This congress that is going to commence on July 29 is to come for this convention to fill some vacancies taken in the executive sides, those that died or went for other appointment.”

Yari said that the APC had agreed that the Acting President could also act in the place of the President in this case.

He said: “The Acting President should understand that that he is acting in capacity of the President of the country as well as the vice-president.

“Tomorrow he is going to perform the function of Vice-President as chairman of NEC and the entire issue of security, economy, administration lies on him.

“The committee is in place as we are talking today, we restate that we are going to create room for other issues and the issue of convention.”

Yari, however, stressed that the decision to go ahead with the convention without the President does not have anything to do with the seeming of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.

“This has nothing to do with PDP. PDP is a party on its own right and APC is a ruling party. This convention has no connection with the PDP convention,” he maintained.