A former national vice chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for North-West, Salihu Lukman, has welcomed the plan of the party’s national chairman, Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, to establish the Progressive Institute, a think tank to serve as a policy incubator in 2024.
He said establishing a Progressive Institute is as old as the APC and now that Ganduje has expressed commitment to establish it in 2024, it is a remarkable departure from the pronouncements of previous national chairmen.
Lukman who opposed the emergence of Ganduje as the APC national chairman also commended his initiative to visit President Tinubu together with all members of the National Working Committee (NWC), saying that has not happened in a long time.
The APC chieftain in a statement yesterday said the last time the NWC, as a body, met with the president was probably during the tenure of Adams Oshiomhole between 2018 and 2020 as other chairmen after him and before Ganduje visited the president alone where critical decisions could be taken and imposed on other national officers.
He said a major challenge facing the APC so far is whether it can truly become a progressive political party and that an important precondition to achieve this is that organs of the party should be compulsorily made functional such that regular meetings are enshrined in the party’s constitution.
“Beyond the APC, inability to make political parties functional such that organs of the parties are discharging all their responsibilities including examining actions of government and elected representatives, as well as promoting policies in lines with provisions of the party’s manifesto, is partly responsible for complete absence of ideological orientation by all parties,” Lukman said.
The former director-general of the Progressives Governors Forum said, the proposed National Institute of Progressive Studies should be oriented to respond to all the challenges of making APC to emerge as a functionally progressive party.
“Such an institute should develop the needed programmatic framework of undertaking the requisite broader operational training to develop the aptitude of party leaders at all levels to discharge all their responsibilities to party organs. In addition, the institute should have the responsibility of organising political education courses for all party leaders at all levels.
“Such an institute can only succeed in meeting the expectations of Nigerians if it is part of a wider strategy of reforming Nigerian political parties to ensure that their structures are functional in line with extant provisions of their constitution.
“Therefore, the proposed National Institute of Progressive Studies to be setup by APC should be part of a wider strategic reform initiative by the party to ensure that structures of the party at all levels are functional and elected party leaders at all levels are oriented to deliver on their respective mandates as enshrined in the APC constitution,” he said.
Lukman however said for such an institute to succeed, there are fundamental issues which must be resolved, the first one of which is the question of funding.
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