The Director-General of the Progressive Governors’ Forum (PGF), Mr. Salihu Lukman, Sunday urged President Muhammadu Buhari and other leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to take urgent steps to rebuild the party.
Lukman, who made the call in a statement issued in Abuja, attributed the APC’s current crisis to the inability of the leadership to manage disagreements and resolve conflicts within the party.
He said: “There is the need for us to take steps to rebuild APC, whether with Mr. Oshiomhole as the National Chairman or with anyone else.
“As it is constituted today, APC is incapable of producing the type of leaders that can guarantee a permanent departure from the garrison-type leadership we experienced in the past.
“The reality is that as members of APC, we should expect different opinions and perspectives on how to build the party.
“Disagreements and contestations are the hallmark of politics. It is the capacity to accommodate divergent opinions that will enable our leaders to live in the present, with one eye on the future as well as with the right brain and left brain at the same time.
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“Unfortunately, many of our leaders are intolerant, which now produces all these avoidable crises currently facing us.”
The PGF director-general also claimed sycophancy had weakened the capacity of APC leaders to convene the meetings of the party’s organs.
Lukman added: “It is easier to hold general elections in Nigeria today than for APC to hold a NEC meeting.
“APC national conventions would appear to only take place when the tenure of leaders expires after four years, notwithstanding the fact that the party’s constitution also makes provision for mid-term convention after two years.
“We are supposed to have a board of trustees, but seven years after the emergence of APC, it has yet to be inaugurated.”
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