Former Vice Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Salihu Lukman
APC reduced to ‘legal entity’, drifted since Buhari emerged President – Ex-Chieftain, Lukman
By Moses Adeniyi
Former Vice Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Salihu Lukman has said the ruling All Progressives Congress has ceased to function as a political party in the classical sense of reality, saying the ruling party has drifted from the principles that informed its existence.
Lukman, a former Director General of the Progressives Governors Forum, said the ruling APC drifted away from the ideals that shaped its activities during the merger that informed its formation immediately after Major General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd.) emerged as President of the Country.
Lukman said Buhari only acted as a Democrat while the negotiations for the merger to form the APC were ongoing, but ceased immediately after he became President.
Lukman who spoke while featuring on Channels’ Sunrise Daily show on Thursday, said Buhari as President made himself inaccessible, and collapsed the structure of debate and frequencies of engagement which formed the basic principle during the process of the merger that formed the party.
He added that the problem of the party not having a say on the government it produced started with Buhari, a state of affairs he said has affected the party from fulfilling its mandate.
According to Lukman, the problem of the ruling party began following the collapse of the structure of debate, and the aggregation of interests to meet the needs of the people through effective policies.
He mentioned that the party by not aggregating interests and the opinion of the people has failed from its essence as a party, and now appears as nothing but a “legal entity.”
“Coming about the point you made about the APC, it’s been the basis of my advocacy. When APC came up, the hope was that it would translate into something much qualitative better than what PDP was. Has it achieved that? No, it has not. In fact, at the moment, this is where I stand and I don’t hide it. What we have as a party is just a legal entity.
“It doesn’t serve the function of a political party in the classical sense of it. A political party is supposed to aggregate the interests and opinions of people and translate them when it has government into policies of government. This is not what we have. Unfortunately from its problem of imposition of candidates under PDP, we have graduated to a level where our democracy is producing emperors as leaders to the point that even people in the party cannot differ from the position of elected people.
“This is not what democracy is supposed to produce and I have the conviction, (that) until we move our democracy to the level where when a leader commits something wrong, you can walk up to him. We are all human, that you’re an APC leader and I’m an APC man does not mean if my leader does something wrong I should not be able to tell him,” he said.
Lukman stated that the problems of the ruling party began with the disposition of leaders sidelining debate while allowing “people to emerge as emperors after becoming elected.”
“As a party, before we came into power in 2013, I keep making reference to that, the quality of debate inside the party was so robust but once we got into power we started blocking debate because we had a situation where we allowed people to emerge as emperors after becoming elected.
“In 2013/2014 when the merger was been negotiated, leaders were meeting almost on a weekly basis and perhaps that was about the only time President Buhari was truly a Democrat. He subordinated himself, participated in those meetings and every decision was binding on everybody.
“Once President Buhari became president, everything changed. The problem of having leaders that are inaccessible started with (former) president Buhari. The problem of also the structures of the party beginning to stop meeting started under President Buhari and gradually it got to the state where for almost a year no meeting has taken place at all.
“And the problem of the party not having a say in the government it produced started under (former) president Buhari. Let’s not shy away from it because if we shy away from it, it means we are not committed to resolving the challenges of democracy, we are not ready to build a nation in which everybody would be proud to say this is the country we want.
Asked to comment on Nigeria’s experience in 25years under democratic government, he said: “I think it’s gladdening that the democracy has survived 25 years because to be fair, a number of us did not give it that much expectation, that is why we didn’t participate at the beginning and now we are playing catchup and because of our inability to participate, it also negatively affected the quality of democracy we have.
“All we have now is people positioning themselves for opportunities in government and converting public resources into personal wealth. The whole commitment to translate democracy into services that respond to national challenges is completely absent or at best weak and I think until we achieve that we cannot celebrate democracy much.
“The mere fact that under democratic dispensation condition of living has crashed to a level beyond anybody’s imagination I think should challenge us and we should start asking the question of what really has gone wrong, is this really the democracy that we fought for, is this the reason we chased the military to go back to the barrack?” he questioned.