Despite the worsening crisis rocking the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the Director-General of the Progressive Governors’ Forum (PGF) Salihu Lukman has assured that the tension cannot lead to the implosion of the party.
He argued that the minor disagreement being witnessed is a normal feature, especially with the convergence of people of diverse backgrounds and interests in the party.
The PGF boss stated this on Wednesday while featuring on an AIT current affairs programme – Jigsaw.
He maintained that the recent internal crisis that rocked the party does not necessarily mean it will implode.
He recalled that after the meager of 2014 that gave birth to APC, many analysts had thought that the party was going to disintegrate.
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He assured the party will handle all the current rancor without any implosion.
According to him: “It is important to return to the basic framework that every party is an organisation that has various interests. It is difficult to have a political party where people do not have diverse interests.
“But the most important is to have and build a party where the aggregation of the various interests will be able to win the mandate.
“The major issue is that even before the merger, there is the notion that parties do not have the power to win the confidence of the people as it were.
“I also do not think that while negotiating for the meager, nobody believed it was going to be a party that can appeal to everybody. Even some people in the meager had sympathy for the PDP then.”
Setting agenda ahead of the forthcoming National Convention, Lukman urged the incoming National Working Committee (NWC) to immediately embark on electronic membership registration of the party.
“I believe as a party, immediately after the Convention, the first thing the new leadership should do is to have a membership data that is computerized.
“We can’t continue to have a situation where our membership data is not electronically preserved. We must ensure that our membership data is updated electronically without the tedious process of handling it in an analog way.
“Secondly, we must have a national secretariat because membership is everything to a political party, a situation where the administrative framework of the national secretariat is so weak and loosed that it links to what is obtainable at the local government and state levels and creates its complications.
“So the first thing the new leadership must do is to reorganize the national secretariat in such a way it has that organic relation between it and all the structures of the party so that at the ward level, even if somebody leaves the party, it will be immediately known by the national leadership, and if somebody joins the party, he should be quietly be registered at the ward without the noise in the media, it should be seamless.”