Ahead of the 2023 general elections, the director-general of the Progressive Governors’ Forum (PGF), Dr Salihu Lukman, has alleged plots by a section of the leaders of the All Progressive Congress (APC) to hijack the party structure.
Lukman claimed that some party leaders are keen on manipulating the process on installing their stooges to run the affairs of the APC ahead of the 2023 general elections with rented delegates.
“In which case, the new leadership of the party to emerge out of such a process can only be surrogate leaders whose mission may simply be to ‘crown’ candidates for future elections,” Lukman said in a statement.
The PGF boss maintained that the development has been the bane of democracy and it is responsible for why internal democracy has eluded virtually all political parties in the country.
He called for the immediate convocation of the APC national executive committee (NEC) to ratify the nationwide membership registration exercise of the party.
Lukman argued that the consideration of the membership registration by NEC would bring succour to the brewing crisis among the ranks of the party.
The PGF boss’s position is coming against the backdrop of threats by a section of the party to take legal actions aimed at stopping the Governor Mai Mala of Yobe State who leads the APC Caretaker Committee from organising the membership registration exercise.
He maintained that the best route to addressing the leadership challenges in the party at all levels relies on the production of a credible and verifiable membership register as enshrined in Article 9.4 of the APC constitution
Listing the benefits inherent in the exercise, he noted that “This is so fundamental and is in fact what should distinguish our party from all the other parties in the country. Any leader who is not comfortable means that such a leader doesn’t have respect for members and is unwilling to subordinate himself or herself to members.
“If a leader is unwilling to subordinate himself or herself to party members, why should anyone risk investing any superior elective political power to such a person?
“Therefore, one will expect any leader of the party with any claim of being a progressive or even democratic politician to welcome the need to have membership registration/verification ahead of the APC National Convention. In fact, even after membership registration/verification, before we can satisfy that there are legal delegates for any National Convention, APC would require Ward, Local Government and State Congresses.
“These Congresses need to hold ahead of the National Convention to affirm that the delegates to attend the National Convention have the authority of party members. With such reality, the debate should be about how to conduct both the membership registration and congresses in ways that assist in resolving the lingering leadership crisis in the party.”
