The Director General, All Progressives Congress (APC), Progressive Governors Forum (PGF), Salihu Moh. Lukman, has called on the leadership of the ruling party to begin now to plan on how to strengthen the party ahead of the exit of President Muhammadu Buhari in 2003
The PGF boss opined that the APC requires code of conduct for discipline, leadership and membership orientation as byelaw to facilitate internal democratic contest within the ruling party.
Lukman in a statement he issued at the weekend in Abuja, APC stakeholders that the fact that President Muhammadu Buhari is serving his last term, requires some strategic succession arrangement within the party to guarantee the retention of all the electoral advantages.
According to him, “Part of the challenges facing Nigerian politics today is the difficulty in institutionalising and mainstreaming political competition within our parties. Most of our political leaders are highly resistant to competition. For them, competition should be mainly reduced to endorsement of their leadership and their decisions, including the leadership choices they make.
“In the case of President Buhari, he has such a personal blessing that made him to attract at least 12 million votes in all the elections he contested since 2003. No leaders, whether in APC or out of APC can claim to be in control of five million votes
“The fact that President Buhari is serving his last term, require some strategic succession arrangement within the APC, especially in order to guarantee the retention of all the electoral advantages. With President Buhari clearly out of the race for the position of Presidential candidate of APC in 2023, there is clearly a potential for a big internal contest in the party.
“The question is whether any of the power blocks within the party will take step to block internal contest and therefore emerge as the conqueror. In which case, the issue is really whether the APC leadership will allow the process of democratisation to ensure that leadership emergence both within the party and at wider political levels are determined based on the choices of party members and citizens.”
