From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
An arrowhead of the opposition coalition African Democratic Congress (ADC), Mallam Salihu Lukman, has cautioned the David Mark-led national leadership against godfatherism and imposition at all levels.
The former national vice chairman (North) of the All Progressives Congress (APC) said this is premised on the posturing of many ADC leaders, who are already behaving as if the 2027 elections is a walkover.
In a statement, titled, ‘ADC and the prospect of internal democracy,’ the former director general of the Progressive Governors’ Forum (PGF) complained that when the national leadership positions of the ADC were shared to zones, coalition leaders who were only nominees into the Committee that negotiated the sharing arrangement promoted themselves into becoming leaders of their zones.
He challenged the Mark leadership to rise to its calling and give the party and Nigerians a new template in political party management in the country, adding that the prospect of achieving it should be evidentially established within the next six months.
He, however, acknowledged Mark’s leadership which enabled the party to seal the agreement that produced the result of the emergence of new leadership of the ADC.
He said: “The truth is that the negative side of almost all our opposition political leaders is already at play. Many are taking steps to manipulate the process of leadership reformation of the ADC. Loyalists are being promoted in a manner that suggests that the 2027 elections are already won. “The struggle to ensure that loyalists of leaders emerged as the leaders of the reformed ADC to some extent disregard the consideration for intellectual capacity, integrity, performance track records, name recognition across all demographics, respect in community and political circles, independent mindedness and general acceptability to all or majority of stakeholders, which we agreed to.
“We must caution our leaders, Nigerians will not be deceived by any cosmetic design of presenting another party, which is only a duplicate of our old parties. With the way things are going, coalition leaders will emerge as godfathers, and the next thing is that they will impose their surrogates at all levels as leaders of the ADC.
“This will naturally be followed by anointing preferred candidates for the 2027 elections. Therefore, the first test of Sen. Mark’s leadership of the party is the extent to which he can mitigate all these and ensure that the ADC is not a party that will be controlled by godfathers,” he noted in the statement.
The Kaduna-born politician noted that another very important challenge is the question of steps to be taken by the Mark’s leadership to provide new orientation to party administration at all levels.
“For instance, will the reformed ADC take steps to develop a competent bureaucracy in the party secretariat with established rules? Or will the party leaders recruit their loyalists as staff in the party secretariat? Will the ADC develop the needed capacity to mobilise all the financial resources required for the operations of the party, including election financing? Or will the party operate based on the old tradition of relegating its funding to depend on the generosity of leaders?
“The other critical question is that Nigerians anxiously await initiatives of the Sen. Mark leadership is the issue of the direction the party intends to take towards addressing the challenges facing the country. With the painful experience under the APC whereby ahead of the 2015 elections, it presented a delightful manifesto with all the promises, but ended up disregarding it once elections were won, what will be different with the ADC? What is even the manifesto of the ADC? When we negotiated with the former leadership of the ADC under Ralph Nwosu, one of the agreements we reached was to have a new manifesto. What steps will the Sen. Mark leadership take to produce a new ADC manifesto? Or will the new leadership allow the tradition whereby candidates for elections produce their individual manifestos, with hardly any bearing with the party’s manifesto?”
The statement added that the Mark’s leadership is beyond producing candidates and winning the 2027 elections.
“For those of us who spearheaded the process of negotiating the coalition and producing the ADC as the party for the envisioned internally democratic party, whether we are part of the national leadership or not, we must remain united within the coalition to continue to engage Mark’s leadership to ensure it succeeds.
“If, for any reason, we allow them to fail, we have equally failed. The prospect of succeeding is much stronger. However, it all depends on the extent to which we are ready to continue to make the required sacrifices.
“Maybe we should also remind ourselves that politics is local. This requires that we all move back to our states and ensure that ADC at that level is run democratically based on collective leadership.
“In many states, this is already being threatened. Many high profile political leaders, especially former governors are taking steps to serve as godfathers in the party and leaders at these levels are reduced to acting as members of cabinet or members of board of parastatals of the government in which powerful politicians and former governors are the Chief Executive Officers.
“Although faced with a lot of disadvantages, those of us who suffer the disadvantage of not being godsons of these high-profile politicians must take every necessary step to win the confidence of citizens at that level.
“Coming from Kaduna State, we must take every necessary step to discontinue the political culture of divisive politics of religion and ethnicity. Any political leader, who is associated with past divisive politics in the state must commit to reforming himself as the basis for working with us in the effort to reform the ADC and make it a party that promotes a new united Kaduna State. Based on the transitional operational guidelines provided by the ADC national leadership, the process of instituting an all-inclusive leadership at state level and all the 23 local governments and 255 wards in state should commence.
“We appeal to all political leaders to relate with everyone who qualifies to be part of the transitional leadership of ADC at all levels in the state with respect and high measure of tolerance. We must commit ourselves to making ADC an equal opportunity platform at all levels. Anything short of this should be resisted,” he noted in the statement.
He further expressed confidence that ADC could become the envisioned internally democratic party.
“The Mark leadership must rise to its calling and give the party and Nigerians a new template in political party management in the country. The prospect of achieving that should be evidentially established within the next six months.
“Anything to the contrary should mean that the ADC and the coalition has failed and we should abstain from participating in the 2027 elections. May God strengthen the capacity of Sen. Mark and his team to provide the needed leadership for us to succeed in my party.”
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