By Pius Alile
The theme of the October 27 APC Political Conference held in Benin City, was Edo 2024: A Must Win for APC. This theme was carefully chosen after due consideration of the mood of every member of the party. And given that INEC had rang the bell for the Edo State Governorship Election of which primaries take place in February 2024, the discussions at the conference aimed at sensitizing party members on the need and approaches to ensuring victory on D-Day.
The essence of the sensitization programme was to enable our party members develop a consensus of idea and collective contempt for issues or factors that may negatively affect our chances of victory. In the same breadth, it was a preparatory psychological agitation and promotion of factors of success.
A key factor, which all the speakers talked about at the Conference, is the imperative of the ideal candidate. They insisted on the need for the party to get a sellable governorship candidate. A sellable candidate in the sense of one without a negative profile which may constitute a difficulty to selling his candidacy to the general electorate.
Having highlighted the imperativeness of the ideal candidate, let us dwell on another factor, which is, enhancing the capacity of the party and supporting the various structures towards achieving victory.
To achieve optimal capacity for the APC, we must continue to explore ways and means of improving on the numerical strength of our membership. Towards this end, we must encourage active members of the party at all levels to take up the responsibility of “evangelizing” to bring new members into the party beginning from now until the September 21 Governorship Election. Pursuant to this, our leadership structures at every level must use every available opportunity to motivate and support grassroots recruitment of new members. This aspect of the process requires selflessness and commitment from the leadership and members of the party. It then implies that there must be a continuous commitment to achieving greater numerical strength of our membership.
Amongst the various ways buoying our membership, as suggested by me in our last political conference, is for the party to plan serious engagements with interest groups in the state ahead of the governorship election. I said and I maintain that we should not wait until our candidate emerges before we begin this very critical assignment.
Meanwhile, it is encouraging to see that there are big issues with our main opposition party due largely to the fact that the State Governor and leader of the PDP, Mr. Godwin Obaseki has squandered goodwill by non-performance in both the political and governance spaces. Nevertheless, it is not enough to just rest our chances of success on issues with other political parties in the state, and then fold out hands. We must take advantage by encouraging their disenchanted members and disappointed members of the public, that are keen on joining APC across the state to join us promptly.
Although, we can say that strategic thinking and implementation have started within the party, we have to sustain the momentum in order to achieve our goal of victory come 2024. In furtherance of this, we must continue to create forums for engagement with party members so that a sense of belonging and inclusion that inspires responsibility and responsiveness can be built in them.
Finally, I want to submit that personal interest can sometimes conflict with selflessness, but that selflessness is imperative to the collective success without which our personal expectation cannot be realized. Therefore, in the overall interest and victory of the party we should allow selflessness to take the driving seat. Every self encumbrance to party growth and development must be discarded, for indeed, Edo 2024 is a must win for APC.