A former National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole as part of the national reconciliation efforts after the party’s presidential primary election a few days ago called a stakeholders meeting in Edo State and thereafter had a chat with journalists.
What is the essence of this stakeholders’ meeting
The whole idea is to have a conversation because as they say, a house divided among itself cannot stand. I believe that the irreducible precondition for winning an election is that we must be united and the only way to be united is to have an inclusive meeting. If leaders want to meet, there has to be agreed criteria to select those leaders from each local government and everybody must be present. If we are going to have women meetings, all women leaders must be present, that is the way to avoid division, which is the way to avoid suspicion, which is the way to avoid rumour mongering. And we must recognize the formal institution of the party. No matter who we think we are as individuals, we can’t be taller than the party leadership that we all elected. Every one of us has the right to have ideas, but channel those ideas in a way that the leadership takes them on board and takes ownership of it and makes decisions that each and every member of the party will readily accept.
Message
After the governorship election which unfortunately we lost, this meeting was the first meeting that we invited these number of people per local government to attend so that we have to move on because we cannot continue to cry over spilled milk but if we work together, we will win not only the next presidential election, we also win the next governorship but there is no other formula than unity. I think when you make party structures to function, then these issues will be easily addressed.
The local government chairmen are the ones that produce leadership at the local government levels and without them communicating with the people of their local governments, and through them to the ward leaders, the party will be floating in the air so local government leadership is extremely important and also very important are those our strong ward leaders across the 192 wards in Edo State which has all the offices and my appeal today is that as local government party chairmen should call a meeting of the local government executive and challenge each of the wards leaderships to go and constitute unit executive councils because everybody here comes from a unit, without units you cannot be in the ward, without the ward you cannot be in the local government and without being in the local government, you cannot be in the state and if you are not in the state you cannot be in the national level so whoever you are, myself inclusive, I must pay attention to what is going in my unit.
Let it not be that you talk about the roof and forget that there cannot be a roof without foundation so the solid foundation is the unit. If you organise ten people in a unit, encourage them to meet, if each of them brings ten people each, do you what that will amount to per unit?
Our political environment is changing, the dynamics are clear, the era of carrying ballot boxes is gone, it is one person one vote and to get that, you need to take these messages to the grassroots.
Presidential primary
Primaries are over and regardless of how you voted and who you voted for or against, that is gone. Our party recognises the need for intra-party contestation that is why the rule is provided for primaries so the fact that you voted for somebody else, when a candidate has emerged, all of us should put those behind us and work together.
We have to learn from the presidential candidate. Upon his election, he visited each of the aspirants and if you look at those speaking for the campaign, some of them are not necessarily people who were in his camp during his primaries but once primaries are over, we need all our brains to win the election.
You also heard what the president said a few days ago that primaries are over and he will only recognize and deal with the candidates elected on APC platform and he said nobody should say I am the villa candidate because the villa does not have any candidate other than the APC candidates.
Those clarifications are important so that those who say that they are moving to another party and they have the support from any quarter from Abuja that he can go to another party and later come back, President Buhari from that statement has said no, only APC. The president also said that in whatever we do, only one person will win.
The president as the overall leader of the party has also directed and I think we all should obey that all those who have cases in court should also withdraw them so that all hands will be on deck to campaign for APC to retain power in 2023. I am an example, I was national chairman, you know how I left the office, did I go to court? If I went to court, you think I wouldn’t have had a chance? But my attitude was simply this, people hardly remember when things are tough, they remember when it is good.