A former national vice chairman, North-West of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Salihu Lukman, has said President Bola Tinubu can only be defeated by an opposition political platform with strong relationship with Nigerians.
Lukman, in a statement yesterday, admitted that the feat will not be easy to achieve because Nigerians will find it difficult to trust any politician who will make similar promises of producing a better future for them after the APC which promised change before 2015 but ended up producing the current disappointment.
He said the campaign to rescue Nigeria must not be founded on the cheap sentiment of defeating the APC and President Tinubu in 2027, but on a clearly well thought out vision of moving the country forward.
The former APC chieftain said the first vision should be about the kind of political platform the opposition wants to create, querying whether Nigerians were going to have another party whose business will only be about producing candidates for elections.
Lukman said once that was the focus, the country will end up with a new opposition party that is weak and unable to be different from APC, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party (LP), New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP) and all the current parties.
He harped on the need to challenge opposition political leaders to demonstrate stronger commitment to break away from these destructive practices that reduces political parties to only serving as an election platform for an electoral contest, which is at the root of the crisis of Nigerian democracy opposition, not surrogates.
Lukman said to achieve this, will require that some of the frontline opposition political leaders notably, Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rabiu Musa Kwankwasau, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal should be among the leaders of the new party serving as National Chairman, Deputy National Chairman, National Secretary, so on and so forth.
He said the frontline leaders should also include the alienated leaders of APC who will commit themselves to building the new political opposition party, such as Prof. Yomi Osinbajo, Rotimi Amaechi, Dr Kayode Fayemi, Nasir El-Rufai, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and the old CPC tendencies, amongst others.
“If at all opposition leaders are seriously committed to rescuing Nigeria, resolving the challenge of party funding must be prioritised. Associated with issues of funding is about ensuring proper budgeting that should cover remunerations and conditions of service for party leaders at all levels.
“There is also the urgent need for the new opposition political platform to be strongly commitment to engendering new inclusive and people friendly orientation, which can open Nigerian elections to broader participation by citizens across all sections of the country,” he said.
Lukman also said Nigerians will want to see opposition political leaders honestly committing themselves towards developing a new marshal plan for the country around these issues.
He said based on the envisioned marshal plan, the opposition political leaders should demonstrate commitment to raise annual national budget of the country to least N150 trillion from the current unambitiously less than N40 trillion.
The former progressive governors’ forum director general also said the new reorganised political opposition in the country should commit itself to raising the annual budgets of all states’ governments in the country to not less than N1 trillion, as only Lagos state currently operate an annual budget of more than N1 trillion.
“In other words, is the new opposition political party going to be limited to being an election platform or will it serve as a broad political platform capable of expanding the recruitment base for competent political leaders in the country?
“Will Alh. Atiku Abubakar, Mr. Peter Obi, Sen. Rabiu Musa Kwankwasau and all the prospective opposition leaders submit themselves and serve as the agents that will midwife the emergence of the envisioned broad opposition political platform in Nigeria?
“Or will they remain only fixated with their narrow ambitions of emerging as candidates for 2027 elections? Based on all the ongoing consultations among opposition leaders in the country, although all these leaders have ambitions to contest elections, in varying degrees, they all are commitment to the progress of Nigeria.
“The big challenge is whether negotiations among opposition leaders will be broadened to the level of inviting wider participation of Nigerians, which can challenge Nigerian politicians to prioritise taking up the responsibility of party leadership.
“The alternative will be whether opposition leaders will reduce the current initiative to organise a new political platform to imposing themselves and emerge as candidates for 2027 elections with all the high probability that they may become worse than current leaders,” he added.
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