Leading contender for the All Progressives Congress (APC) Senator Mohammed Sani Musa has declared that he is in the race to return power to the Nigerian youths and return internal democracy to the party.
Speaking in Abuja on Saturday the Chairman Senate Committee on Services stated that he has the antidote on transforming the APC into a corporate entity that is self sustaining and very democratic.
According to him “I want to make the Nigerian youths to own Nigerian politics, the time has come for a total overhaul of the political system. What I would do differently is to initiate a kind of new order in the APC, the first thing I would do as National Chairman is to bring the party to constitutionality.
“All the things happening today are due to the fact that people are not following the rules and due process. If today I am the leader of APC I should be looking at faces, I should be able to look you in the eye and tell you the truth. Equity, justice and fairness should be the watchword” he added.
Senator Musa maintained that “political parties are supposed to groom leaders but are we grooming leaders in our various parties? Most of the political parties today instead of grooming leaders will wait until the election periods and then they would groom thugs and thereby making our youths irrelevant.
“I want to make the Nigerian youths to own the Nigerian politics. The time has come, if countries that are more Democratic can give their political space to everyone why can’t we do the same thing. Why are we always putting burdens on our governors and elected officials to bring money to fund the party? That the party is broke. Political parties when you make them viable entities they should be able to stand on their own. They should be able to be self sustaining” he added.
Senator Musa pointed out that although political parties are not profit making organizations however noted that”they should be able to make members that subscribes to be financial members. Today we are in the era of technology our political parties can make their own money without putting pressure on anybody to bring money.
“The APC has over 40 million members according to our data base, we will be able to make make our demography our strength, how we can do it is up to us which I would not want to disclose now so that people will not steal our ideas.
Speaking on the crisis in some states chapters of the APC Senator Musa said that “as National Chairman of the party I will allow for internal democracy every member of the National Executive Council (NEC) would be given room to perform the functions of his office. We will go back to the drawing board and sit down with all the stakeholders and dialogue and people with superior arguments would be allowed to prevail.
“The problems we have had is because people are not following the party’s constitution, people are not following the law and due process. We will reorganize the administrative and internal workings of the party and restructure our system to change from a situation where once one is elected he takes over everything to the detriment of other stakeholders that have helped to build the party.
He stated that “We need to rebuild the party together, the governors needs us and we need the governors. So we must be able to work together to build the party. Don’t forget that the governors are a very strategic organ of the party that cannot be pushed over. Hence we must build cohesion and tolerance within all the organs of the party, where there is no cohesion it would be very difficult to reach an agreement.
