President Muhammadu Buhari Saturday called on members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to remain united, strong and support the newly inaugurated leadership of the party.
Speaking at the Eagle Square, Abuja, venue of the National Convention of the party, the President said: “This Convention is coming at a crucial time when we prepare for another round of a general election. Therefore, the need to remain strong and united for the Party to exploit the rich and abundant potentials at its disposal cannot be overemphasized. We appreciate the right to hold different opinions and aspirations, however, such differences must not be to the detriment of the Party.”
Praising the outgone NWC members, Buhari said it was gratifying that the party recorded massive and unprecedented defections under the Governor Buni-led Caretaker Committee administration.
He said: “APC received three sitting governors, a deputy governor, senators, members of the House of Representatives and state assemblies, and other key officials from opposition parties who defected along with millions of their supporters.”
The President also said he was impressed to learn that the membership registration and revalidation exercise undertaken by the Caretaker Committee has recorded over 41 million members. “This has proved that we are, indeed, Nigeria’s leading and largest political party,” he said. “It also exhibits our numerical strength and the potential to win elections at all given times fairly and squarely.”
The President enjoined the new NWC members to promote internal democracy and equal opportunities and ensure that party primaries are not influenced by “highest bidders” going into the 2023 elections.
Indeed, as the President has urged, tickets of the APC must not go to “highest bidders.” Not only that, the APC, henceforth, must be seen to conduct its affairs in the open and rightly. Doing otherwise, prevented the party from conducting its convention and had to shift forward same many times without justifiable reasons.
In fact, for the APC, it has been a long road to the national convention, after 22 months of uncertainty and another long night at the historic and symbolic Eagle Square that ended the waiting game. At the end, the President and the conclave of governors triumphed.
The fundamental tenets of democracy – freedom to choose candidates, individual conscience and conviction dictating the choice of candidate, and competition among candidates to demonstrate capacity and abilities for which they will get votes for in the quest for positions in the party administration – were all sacrificed for the stability of the party, marked by political horse-trading, high wired intrigues, reign of the oligarchs and permutations. This situation is similar to what transpired at the PDP convention last year.
The situation in the two major parties, therefore, goes to show the level of imperfections in our democratic system and federalism, and highlights the importance of adhering to the principles of fairness, equity and justice in power distribution in our multi-ethnic and heterogeneous country.
It also stresses the need to tinker with the established Western-style democratic ethos to achieve a greater good. However, in doing so, APC, especially, must exercise caution because, it is said that the road that leads to hell is paved with good intentions.
Sometimes, we can quickly lose the essence and purpose in tinkering with the tenets of established democratic practice. The fundamental principle of democracy is that power belongs to the people and that periodically, in a free and transparent election, they choose whom to transfer their powers to as leaders.
Still, tinkering with democracy in our kind of environment can hardly, or never be faulted. Recently, the President had to deep his mouth in the affairs of his party and, it appeared, he had good reasons for doing so.
“Recently, l had cause to intervene in the leadership crisis which was about to cause confusion in the party,” the President said. “Such internal disputes are common in young democracies such as ours, but we must avoid overheating the polity and not allow our differences to tear and frustrate the Party. Like I said earlier, it does not do anybody or the Party any good, when we, as leaders, go down so low and resort to backstabbing and name-calling in the media. We should learn how to resolve our differences without jeopardising our personal relationships and the fate of the Party. I want to thank the Progressives Governors’ Forum for heeding to my advice and suggestions in settling the leadership dispute.”
However, in general practice, it can be said that any process that takes away the right of people to elect their leaders, either in party or general elections, is an anathema to democratic progress.
Although there may be a need to adapt democracy to fit our local circumstances and needs, we must be careful that the democratic process is transparent and engages majority of our people.
In essence, our style of democracy should allow all persons and ideas to compete freely. If there is a need for reconciliation, it should be after the people have made their choices.
For the APC, the convention has come and gone but the work needed to be done by the party to achieve victory in 2023 is enormous and distractions from fights or conflicts from primary elections will undermine the efforts made by the President and other well-meaning leaders of the party to hold the national convention.
Although, many APC key actors think that the stability of the ruling party is critical for the advancement of democracy in Nigeria, but, other than the President and few of his ilk, in their actions do not portray they know that.
What is driving many key actors is positioning themselves to realise their political ambitions. This case is even more evident in the intractable “factionalisation” existing in most state party structures.
These factional differences could, unless the President really stamps his feet in the party, linger long after the convention and cause disharmony and lack of cohesion ahead of the general elections.
Naturally, the convention was a success in some ways and had areas for improvement. The most important success is that it has voted in the “de jury” party chairperson and a national working committee to pilot the party’s affairs before and during the general elections in 2023.
Many positions were contested and filled including 21 NWC and 45 non-NWC positions. Given the drama of party disunity prior to the convention, the APC is better positioned now to focus on the forthcoming elections.
In the end, now, more than before, what Buhari does, or fail to do, as far as management of affairs of the APC is concerned, will have huge impact on the party and, particularly, on whether it succeeds in 2023 or not.
For now, the party has selected (elected) its leaders primarily through democratic consensus. But it is not known the extent to which the new NWC members will affect the party, mainly because in the past, the executives of the party tended to push through their selfish agendas to the detriment of party’s interests.
Yet, it can only be hoped that in time to come, Nigerians will look back at the just ended convention and talk about its impact on democracy in APC, in particular, and Nigeria, in general. It is hoped, too, that Nigerians will now look forward to a peaceful APC that will focus more on the issues of security, economy and education and how to resolve the industrial disputes plaguing public universities and on the forthcoming general elections, as well.
On NDLEA’s lie detectors and digital night vision goggles…
This week, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved over N1 billion for the National Drugs Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) to purchase eye scanning lie detectors and digital night vision goggles.
This was disclosed by the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr Abubakar Malami, at the end of the weekly FEC meeting chaired by President Muhammadu Buhari.
He said that the equipment would be purchased by the agency to tame the activities of drug barons.
Malami said that the agency is doing well, in terms of dealing with the scourge associated with drugs, and forces the government to employ and deploy technological equipment, skills and competencies that will assist the agency in its tasks.
Other than that, Nigerians must accept the fact that the consequences of drugs are so grievous that we cannot afford to ignore the call for all hands to be on deck in the fight against the trend.
Substance/drug abuse should not be handled with kid gloves, especially now that there is a visible paradigm shift in the age bracket of partakers in the unhealthy act.
The unhealthy act had moved from the normal adult age groups to the underage group. We are all stakeholders, starting from the individual, family, institutions and the society at large. Everybody is affected in one way or the other by the adverse effect of this great challenge.
Substance and drug abuse are becoming nightmarish, considering the activities of armed bandits, terrorists and many groups identified and unidentified who are horrendously terrifying our society.
It is, therefore, pertinent to devise means in which the society can be made to understand the dangers posed by substance use, how negatively it has impacted on our society and how to tackle the problems.
No doubt, substance use and abuse in Nigeria is on the increase and findings from the National Drug Survey (2018) conducted by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime revealed that 51-year-olds to 61-year-olds had used a psychoactive substance in the past year for a non-medical purpose.
This means that one in seven persons has used some substances other than alcohol and tobacco. More worrisome is the finding that among four drug users in Nigeria, one is a woman.
In fact, the survey undertook by the UNODC gave a troubling portrait of drug abuse in Nigeria and we can no longer live in denial that Nigeria has a thriving illicit drug culture.
