APC is not afraid of democracy, says Osita Okechukwu
Mr. Osita Okechukwu, the Director General of Voice of Nigeria (VON) and chieftain of All Progressives Congress (APC), enumerates the constraints to direct primary, saying that the party was not divided.
Lme start by correcting one wrong impression being bandied about, that we are afraid of democracy or election. We are democrats, don’t believe the propaganda of other sister political parties. One even said that President Buhari, an apostle of card reader is against card reader. Fake news, as in all the submissions and anomalies he pointed, there’s no objection to card reader.
On the whole, our great party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is not divided, but differs especially on the issue of mode of primary. That we are divided is far from the truth; one because what we have is normal contestation for advantage, over mode of primary, which is clearly spelt out in the APCS Constitution. Two, all the factions are all behind our presumptive consensus presidential candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari.
One can imagine that APC could have been said to be divided if there was horizontal rift bordering on who is to fly the party’s presidential flag. Our luck was when top gladiators like His Excellences Atiku Abubakar, Bukola Saraki, Tambuwal and others ported.
Please, let’s set the records straight, direct, indirect or consensus methods are all options clearly spelt out in our constitution, upon which each state can nominate candidates for election. You need to read the letter from the APC headquarters to all the chapters on September 4, 2018, mandating the State Working Committees to meet with stakeholders and choose which mode is peculiar to them. It recognised the huge logistic challenges and local peculiarities. This is the contestation not division, especially by those who lost the last congresses.
From Southwest to Northwest, Southeast to Northeast, the contestation is going on horizontally and not vertically and most importantly none of the contesting tendencies is against the candidature of the president. For instance, Governors Ibikunle Amosu of Ogun State and Obaseki of Edo State favour consensus, while el Rufai of Kaduna and Okorocha of Imo favour indirect primary and all contesting tendencies support President Buhari. Therefore there is no division per se, but struggle for space, which is normal in a liberal democracy.
Without being immodest, there are two or three major dangerous constraints in adopting direct primary mode of electing our candidates. One is the truism that we have no valid database for credible party primary. And there is no time to package one now. It is pertinent to cast our mind back to 2013/14, when our national leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu initiated the biometric data register for APC.
The project was aborted by the former President Goodluck Jonathan’s regime that used the Department of State Services (DSS) to raid the Data Centre in Lagos. They raised dust and accused Asiwaju of all manner of criminality short of treason and shut down the facility. If not for that misadventure, one could have supported direct primary, as we the founders of the party could have been ranked.
I will come back to ranking as those who came newly to the party and have little or no regard for those of us who erected the platform on which they want to display their wares. Before then, let me state my second reason for opposing direct primary. It is very exorbitant and cumbersome.
Take Enugu State for instance, we have 260 wards and to conduct direct primary for gubernatorial election, you need minimum of three electoral officials per ward, two for the collation centres, you need ballot boxes and what they call sensitive materials and then security.
When you add transportation, accommodation and training of the electoral officials, you end up causing more confusion. Do you know that Enugu State APC has no one branded or rickety bus and staffers had not been paid for more than nine months and some elements because they lost congress elections and the appeals hitherto adopted the proverbial King Solomon approach by splitting the child into two?
It is not a hurdle or constraint per se, but my worry is the possibility of the emergence of the theatre of the absurd from the direct primary already adopted for the presidential primary, being promoted by some of our leaders.