Senator Godswill Akpabio says the recent defection in the All Progressives Congress (APC) was an attempt to frustrate the efforts of the Muhammadu Buhari administration.

The lawmaker took a swipe at those who defected from the party during an interview on Channels Television’s Roadmap 2019.

“For me, I saw a situation where the ruling party was not only being distracted but the movements were capable of bringing down the government,” he said on the special political programme which aired on Monday.

“We need to have Nigeria before we can have the election. These things are as a result of continuous conspiracies against government and all sorts of things.”

Several top members of the APC, including Senate President Bukola Saraki and the governors Benue, Kwara, and Sokoto defected from the party recently.

All of them accused the APC of failing to keep its promises to the nation and attributed their defection to national interest.

But Akpabio faulted their motives, insisting they had nothing to do with national interest.

The former Senate Minority leader who had recently defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the APC recently himself, however, attributed his own decision to the national interest.

He said, “I don’t think that the movements that we saw from the APC to my then party were prompted by national interest, I think most of those things were based on the personal interest of individuals.”

“I just assessed the situation and I said I needed to contribute my quota towards stabilising the situation; towards ensuring that people realise that it wasn’t all about a conspiracy to bring down a government but to conspire to resolve the security situation.”

Ahead of the 2019 elections, Senator Akpabio urged leaders in the country to shift their attention from political interest and work for the good of the people.

He also advised the critics of President Buhari’s administration to support the government to tackle insecurity and other challenges of the nation rather than coming together to take over power at the centre.

Akpabio said, “We need to have Nigeria before we can have an election. We should conspire to provide employment opportunities.”

“We should conspire to stabilise the government, to ensure that we leave a better future for our children. We should conspire to bring food to the table of Nigerians; not to conspire to just take government for the sake of taking government.”

•Sourced from a Channels TV report