The ruling All Progressive Congress has said that aspirants hoping to contest electoral positions on the platform of the party will have to earn the party’s ticket as the national chairman, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, yesterday declared that there would be no automatic tickets for any of them.
Oshiomhole, stated this when he met with APC members in the House of Representatives at the party’s national secretariat in Abuja.
He said the tickets would be given on merit. According to him “I am excited that even in moments like this, we still have men and women of honour in the House of Representatives who recognise that there are values more important than dangling automatic ticket, dangling dollars without asking questions about the source of those dollars.
“But I can assure you that if people have not learnt from the recent past, then they will go the way of the recent past.
“We must remain focused and I am grateful that we still have men and women of honour who have refused to be tempted. Somebody asked if we are going to counter the PDP by offering automatic tickets and I asked: did we serve anybody a departure ticket? If we did not give you a departure ticket, how did the issue of return ticket arise? For me, we are clear that every legislator who has value and is at home with his people and not with the godfathers in their communities, that legislator is an asset to our party and this party will do everything possible to retain him.”
Oshiomole further disclosed that the party was working towards entrenching a durable political system which would produce legislators whose experience will add value to the country over a long period.
“Only yesterday, I said to the caucus of the Senate that my hope is that once we clean up the system and we are able to distinguish our left from the right and can now see clearly as people who believe in a particular set of ideas, our party must consciously work to achieve a situation where Nigeria will produce seasoned legislators and congressmen like we have in the US where a Senator McCain will speak and even a mad president listens. We must get there. But if it takes them 100 years to get there, we don’t have to wait that long. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel because we will copy what is attractive and discard what is not.
“It can’t be argued that experience should be discarded because in the real world, nobody can give what he does not have, and experience is not learnt from the book, but acquired on the job where honest mistakes are made and intelligent and honest people can identify those mistakes, overcome them and move on.”
Oshiomhole further spoke on some of the underlying reasons for the gale of defections that have hit the party recently. “I understand now, after we have carried out some investigations, that certain persons played on the fears of people who were completely innocent. They tried to portray their own frustration – which is personal to them – as if it is a shared frustration by all those who have issues.
“My own finding arising from interactions is that it is true that there are a number of legislators who have some issues with their local forces in their respective states, not arising from the federal executives. Those issues are local and because every politics is local, every solution to a political problem should necessarily be local. The important thing is to identify the sources of those problems, the parties involved in it, bring them to the table and remind them of what binds the house together,” he said. According to him, he party is working towards settling disputes at the local chapters in order to reconcile disputing members and forge a common front going forward.
“So, if there are issues between anyone of our members and leaders with local forces across the 36 states, we have a duty to make ensure that, that spark is properly extinguished. The good news is that no single person that I have spoken to, who shares our core value of progressive politics, has said no, let the fire burn. As a matter of fact, just with a phone call, a number of issues have been addressed and people are at peace and we will do more of that.
“What we are saying now is that we need to do the right thing to ensure that wherever there is a problem, we address it before it blossoms. I have continued to say that we will not pursue a policy that will produce winners and losers. I believe that we have to intervene and have a situation that will produce winners all.
“In order to send clear signals out so that no one person or group can hold the system to ransom, we have tried to revisit our constitution and activate all the clauses that will help us to maintain unity and harmony within the house. I have said that for us to have peace and unity, we must fight for justice and fairness because peace and unity is an outcome of justice and fairness. If you do not address justice, we cannot preach peace because peace cannot be decreed, but is the outcome of a process,” he stated.
Leadership Ng
