New Telegraph

DG PGF: Prospective candidates, opposition, bane of Nigeria’s politics

Director General of the Progressive Governors Forum (PGF) Salihu Lukman has situated the political crisis in Nigeria to prospective candidates and opposition parties.

 

According to him, people from day one fight those they consider prospective candidates or aspirants in their party or opposition parties.

 

Lukman also stated that people like endorsement rather than contests in Nigeria’s democratic setting, which therefore causes political crisis.

 

In a statement he issued Sunday in Abuja, the Director General, stated that both the ruling party and the opposition parties have similar democratic cultures when it comes to standing for elections.

He said: “Part of the challenge 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. This has created a situation of permanent internal rebellion within our parties.

 

“Anyone, interested in contesting or competing for leadership in any of our parties, must be ready to organise rebellion, especially, if such an aspiring contestant is not part of the inner caucus of the current leaders
“Consequently, we become highly fixated about analysing problems facing our democracy, poor leadership and lack of political accountability, corruption and lack of development, and so on and so forth. These are very valid issues worthy of every democratic attention.

 

“However, such attention must be given side by side with the need to strengthen capacity of institutional political structures to facilitate competition, especially around the emergence of political leaders.

 

“Inability to pay attention to issues of strengthening capacity of political institution to facilitate leadership contest makes citizens to recklessly dismiss and condemn leaders with hardly any clear political demand requiring any response from our political leaders. And on the other hand, our leaders continue on the political trajectory of intolerance, ignoring and blocking any demand or competition both within the party and at wider political level.

 

“Whether in APC or in other parties, including the PDP, the dominant perspective is to analyse internal dynamics in the context of so-called prospective candidates.
“Legitimate political demands, including grievances of party leaders and members are reduced to projections of advantages of prospective candidates and so-called opposition to political leaders within our parties.”

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