‘Convene APC National Political Retreat Now’

As the ruling party at the centre and in the majority of Nigerian states, we havetwo choices before us. To our own detriment, we can choose to bury our heads in the sand from blame like the preposterous ostrich and flaunt aimless growth and boom statistics like PDP is expert at and used to do in its hey days before its empire fell from its arrogant peak. We can choose to pretend that all is well with our once teeming but fast thinning supporters, once dedicated but now debilitated and dispersing change campaigners, and once hopeful but now embittered and hate-filled Nigerians as we glide dangerously towards the 2019 Judgment Day in the Supreme Court of Nigeria voters. Our second choice is to have the courage and soul-searching sober reflections to enable us evolve a sweeping change of fortunes for Nigerians in general, and to do so urgently, diligently and pragmatically with everything it takes in the short time remaining in our hands. The most fruitful channel to achieve the latter, which is the sensible choice, is the immediate convocation of an APC National Political & Economic Retreat as earnestly proposed above. Where we are in Nigeria today, we cannot afford to continue to wallow in the sympathy mentality that Nigerians will forever reason with us that the prolonged social-economic meltdown in our country is entirely the fault of others. Double-faced blacklegs amongst us, erroneously planted in sacred places of the President’s heart and installed in the Villa, are also guilty, make no mistake about that.

Unlike political retreats we have seen convened in the past by the anti-masses opposition PDP, which consolidate on their avaricious leaders’ wellbeing and mending party stable cracks to facilitate safe looting of our country, the proposed APC retreat should evolve through three stages. The first retreat should be conducted at the local government area levels on the same date throughout the country, where grassroots supporters’ reports on the state of each LGA and the nation, peculiar challenges, solutions and wellbeing of Nigerians and party patriots from the local government areas will be collated and aggregated at each state venue on a second day. The retreat’s third day and grand finale should comprise APC national party leadership, authentic APC delegates representing the states, foundational APC federal cabinet ministers and appointees; not opportunistic post-victory joiners and fly-by-night adoptees who found their way through back doors of corrupted appointment lists drawn by Mr. President’s Aso Villa confidants who exploited and betrayed the innocent trust of the President to get deadly agents of the opposition into government. At the second stage, reports of the state retreat should be aggregated to provide direction, executive compass and acceleration for projects, programmes and policy priorities of the Administration for intervention in areas of urgent and optimum impact on electorates in different parts of our country. Such retreat will throw up the truly most urgent needs of the people throughout Nigeria and foster the Federal Government’s sense of immediacy on electorate assuring and vote winning interventions. These should include, for instance, expeditiously fixing notoriously failed sections of major inter-regional arterial federal roads as the East-West highways south of the country, Apapa Road, West of the country, and the nightmarishly devastated Ekpoma section of federal road, South-South of the country, which has in the last few months of rain turned that section of Ekpoma community to a mud lake. This should include effectively getting the North’s children back to schools in the post-Boko Haram era by strengthening the school feeding programme which has suffered a blow from the general downturn of federal revenue earnings. The overall outcome of such retreat will accelerate decision processes from the President’s desk to the least APC administered local government council in Nigeria, and help us to put behind us the better part of the last two years during which decisions on virtually everything from budget legislation, executive actions and appointments to justice dispensation have been a nightmare of excruciating sluggard pace and beggarly delays.
Buhari support groups and APC followers are left in the cold, and life could never be worse for most of them who are now the laughing-stock of the opposition. Contractors and contractual engagements which command a vast population of direct and indirect dependents across the country are locked down by endless bureaucracies of approval and MDAs corruption in short-changing mobilization of contractors, while budget-year after budget-year since our Administration’s inception in 2015 flees past without impact especially on APC followers and the masses who voted for us. We maintain without apology or equivocation that running a political economy such as that of Nigeria on which 200,000 million citizens depend and plug into for their survival cannot be attended to with the same leisurely pace we have known in the last two years. That kind of pace belongs to smaller populations and economies such as the Gambia, Botswana, Ghana, Seychelles and Guinea. Even so, evidence abound that those much smaller countries of the earth are not enamored of such pace.

Who is Ruling Nigeria? Certainly Not APC…

To the world APC is ruling Nigeria. But this is only in ceremony and not in practice. APC merely reigns as a matter of alphabets while, thanks to the President’s two-faced men, PDP firmly rules Nigeria. Daily, with the help of our President’s sly confidants, they are consolidating their grip as born-again architects of development while they are actually vicious prophets of perfidy zeroing to corner Nigeria again in 2019 and to recover their traction for looting to the doom whatever may be left of Nigeria after the present order.
PDP is virtually in commanding charge of the three arms of government. Its omnipresent whore spirit cuddles to and controls in its firm grip the three statutory arms of government: the Executive represented by the highly infiltrated and perforated Buhari Presidency, the National Assembly laden with perfidious lawmakers who work with opposition members to ensure that all stellar proposals of President Buhari are shot down and that the President’s capacity to achieve great infrastructure feats for the nation never see the light of day, and the Judiciary locked down by a school of bench determined to buck the President’s anti-corruption fight and ensure it ends in frustration and ridicule. This paradox makes governance twice more uphill and nearly impossible for our APC Administration in all fronts, obstructing the President from achieving governance landmarks that would speak to history and obtain a positive verdict of Nigerian electorates in the two remaining short years. Unless something drastic is done to arrest all of the above phenomena. The simplest measurement of this fact is to ask a basic question: who gets his way in critical issues before the three constitutional arms of government? In the Presidency (the executive arm) PDP has supreme attention for appointments and presidential memos through the President’s deliberately misleading, double-faced confidants who have since inception guided the president’s heart and signatures, unbeknownst to him, in favour of the PDP strategy cabal and their appointment candidates. In the National Assembly, PDP rules tall and impregnable, killing with ease any projection of the Presidency that would make Buhari’s administration stand out and which PDP did not want to see happen. An instance is President Buhari’s request of approval for a $30billion infrastructure turn-around funding loan for development of the Niger Delta, the devastated North East zone and other regions of the country in the face of meagre national revenues resulting from the plunge of oil prices in the international market. Till date, the PDP caucus of the National Assembly has continued to stand down the confirmation of the President’s EFCC chairmanship nominee, Mr. Ibrahim Magu. In the judicial arm, except “ownerless” properties pinned to corrupt acquisition, all anti-corruption cases against PDP principals and PDP support principalities find their way into the refuse bin through a mumble-jumble of legal abracadabra by PDP betrothed judges. A cash-and-carry field day in the judicial arm, recently rated as one of the three most corruption-ridden institutions in Nigeria, is presently reminiscent of the days when 270-count corruption charges against a PDP felon in Nigeria would end up in 100% discharge and acquittal, whereas only ten counts of the same charges outside Nigeria’s borders would land a half decade of solid conviction on a former PDP governor. Poor Prof. Itse Sagay, the chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Corruption, may cry himself hoarse all he wants; it’s only a matter of time before every case of his committee and the hapless EFCC is thrown into the waste bin. So, who is ruling Nigeria? Certainly, not the true APC exponents of our 2015 change campaigns. PDP is still politically and practically in charge. The following are other tangible proofs that PDP is structurally, politically and economically in charge of Nigeria.

PDP Holds Agency Appointments & Dispenses Public Recruitments Two Years after APC’s Take-over at the Centre: Fostered by the betrayers of the President and APC’s change vision, those who have benefitted most from political appointments are PDP appointed heads of agencies throughout the country. The overwhelming majority of applicants who are benefitting from our APC administration’s N-Power programmes, CBN Anchor Borrowers agric loans, except in Kebbi state, Bank of Industry SME loans nationwide, all employments done into the Nigeria civil and public services since the inception of the Buhari administration and recruitments into blue-chip public and private oil and banking sectors are PDP wards, supporters and followers who are being consciously tutored and fostered by empowerment smart and savvy PDP politicians in virtually all states of the federation. We have done our investigation. We challenge you to do yours on this assertion state by state.
Payment of Contractor Arrears: Over 90% payments of federal contractors’ debt arrears running to nearly two trillion naira, carried over from the PDP years and some dating back to 1994, have been approved by the Buhari-APC Administration to be paid to PDP installed and PDP loyal contractors, under the mantra that government is a continuous service. A great deal of these contracts were awarded outside due process. Others were fake, inflated or round-tripped contracts. Over 90% awarded new contracts since the beginning of the Buhari Administration have been to PDP installed and PDP loyal contractors. Nearly 100% of abandoned and recycled contracts from the PDP years to date have been issued by conniving MDAs to PDP installed contractors with whom corrupt Permanent Secretaries and ministry directors have been working together during all the PDP years. This brings us back to the baseline question. Which political parties would these masses of empowered beneficiaries vote for and donate huge campaign funds to in 2019? The answer is apparent. PDP. What an irony. A trouncing irony for a party in power, thanks to the hands rocking the cradle at the Presidency, the President’s very relatives and trust abusing confidants.

Being a position paper and open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari by the APC Rebirth 2019 Support Group 

Watch out for the concluding part