Labour leader, Comrade Issa Aremu, has lauded President Muhammadu Buhari for his ‘masterstroke’ in saving the ruling All Progressives Congress from self destruction, noting that his action has equally saved Nigeria.
The former Labour Party gubernatorial candidate in Kwara state, and Vice President of Industriall Global Union, who commended Buhari for nipping the APC crisis in the bud, said that the crisis in the ruling party was beginning to affect Nigeria by diverting the attention of its leaders and Nigerians from Covid-19 and its attendant economic challenges as well as the prevailing developmental issues facing the country.
Aremu, who was two-term former Vice President of Nigeria Labour Congress, told journalists in Kaduna that there is need for quality control in the democratic process in Nigeria through systemic and strategic inculcation of national ethics of discipline, integrity, religious tolerance, dignity of labour, patriotism, social justice, probity and self reliance among the leaders and the people.
Aremu said though Nigeria leads Africa in quantitative democracy with 80 million registered voters and 18 political parties, the country needs to shore up its democracy qualitatively. He berated politicians for not imbibing the ethics stated in the Constitution leading to the crisis.
Comrade Aremu observed that a crisis within a ruling party must be of grave concern because of it’s adverse implications for good governance, adding that, “a ruling party in crisis means actually a nation in ‘governance hemorrhage’. The internal crisis which rocked the ruling PDP in 2014 created an atmosphere for deepening security challenges, the worst expression being the kidnapping of Chibok girls by Boko Haram.”
“President Buhari has not just saved his party from self destruct but has inadvertently refocused the attention of all Nigerians to the current challenges of governance the worst manifestation being the huge spikes in Covid-19 infection and fatality rates, ongoing commendable Presidential Task force interventions and the newly announced complementary economic sustainability agenda.”
Comrade Aremu lamented that “political entrepreneurs and insular political warriors had since replaced genuine patriotic farsighted politicians of the first and second democratic republic.
“Most of today’s politicians stood for no principles making them vulnerable to everything dysfunctional inclusive of self destruction. It’s time for a quality democratic process in which values and ethics in terms of ideology must return to politics and politics must return to ethics and ideology”.
He said more than ever before, “Nigerian political class suffers insufficiency of tolerance, blind ambition without vision, much needed compromises, patience and unacceptable deficits of patriotism and cooperation needed for nation building”.
Aremu, who urged more activists, labour leaders and core professionals to get involved in active politics, said there is a need for a new political movement for a truly progressive Nigeria (MPN) with new democratic culture that serves the people before self.
