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Succession and 2023 APC Presidential Candidate: Open Letter to Buhari

During the consultative meeting with Progressive Governors, on Tuesday, May 31, 2022, Your Excellency unambiguously conveyed the resolve to provide every needed leadership for our great party, APC, to remain strong and united to improve our electoral fortunes.

 

Highlighting some of the internal policies, which allowed ‘first term governors who have served credibly well

… to stand for re-election’ and ‘second term governors

…accorded the privilege of promoting successors that are capable of driving their visions’, Your Excellency solicited for ‘reciprocity and support of governors and other stakeholders in picking’ your successor, ‘who would fly the flag of our party for election into the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2023.’

This simply means that you want to exercise the same privilege, which is being exercised by governors in determining who succeeds you as the standard bearer of our party, APC, for the 2023 presidential election.

 

Ordinarily, this should not be a problem. Both party members and leaders will always trust Your Excellency’s judgement.

 

However, the big worry is whether loyal party leaders and members should just reduce themselves to being ordinary observers when very sensitive issues with  very high potential to diminish and damage Your Excellency’s revered status in the country is being considered.

 

Noting that the current phenomena of poor relations between predecessors and successor governors are largely a product of poorly instituted political succession arrangement in the country, which is impulsive and imposing, it will be highly risky to adopt the same succession framework as it can erode all your lifelong achievements as someone who contribute a lot to strengthen Nigerian democracy.

Perhaps, it is important to emphasise that your contribution towards strengthening Nigerian democracy should not be reduced to your emergence as the elected President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2015.

Your most important contribution has to do with the leadership role you played in facilitating the merger negotiations of opposition parties, which produced the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2013 and eventually also providing the highly inspirationally measured leadership, which defeated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2015.

As President of the Federal Republic and leader of APC, you have continued to provide that measured leadership, which has been largely responsible for our electoral victories since 2015. More than anytime, at this point, when you will not be on the ballot in 2023, your measured leadership will be much more required to guarantee us sustained electoral victory.

Recalling the unfortunate third term agenda of the former President Olusegun Obasanjo and how that eventually eroded all his achievements as a leader, it is necessary to caution against any transition initiative that risked being unpopular.

Any initiative that potentially took away the rights of party members to elect candidates would potentially mobilise Nigerians against the party and rubbish Mr. President.

This was the case in 2007, which eventually pushed the PDP into whole scale rigging mode such that elections results were announced even before counting processes were concluded.

It was so bad that even late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who was the main beneficiary had to acknowledge that it was a bad case. Noting that today the PDP is more desperate now to return to power, our party must do everything possible to take the upper moral standing. Already, the PDP has oriented its 2023 campaigns based on lies and deceits.

For instance, although it is very convenient for them to complain about the sharp divisions that exist in the country today and heap the blame on APC, by the way they went about nominating their Presidential candidate, they took Nigerians for granted and ignored every reality facing the country.

Outside weeping every sentiment against the APC, they completely fail to outline any proposal in terms of how they want to unite Nigerians.

 

As a party, APC must be able to demonstrate much more sensitivity to the challenges of national unity by ensuring that the eventual standard bearer for the 2023 Presidential election embodies commitment to equity and justice as the underlying principles sustaining the corporate existence of Nigeria as a united country.

This is not just about representation in terms of where the candidate comes from but mainly about the negotiation framework leading to the eventual selection of the candidate.

In the case of the PDP, negotiation was limited to monetary transactions with the less than 1000 delegates who eventually elected Alhaji Atiku Abubakar as the Presidential candidate of the PDP

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