Former National Vice Chairman, North West of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Salihu Lukman has expressed concern over the huge fund needed by aspirants to secure the ruling party ticket for elective offices.
In a statement issued to journalists in Abuja, entitled, ‘Resolving APC’s Progressive Retrogression’, the former member of the ruling party National Working Committee urged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to take more than passing interest in the fee for Expression of Interest Forms and what presidential and governorship aspirants spend to secure the support of delegates at the presidential convention and governorship primaries.
Tribune Online checks revealed that APC Presidential and Governorship Nominations Forms were sold for N100 million and N50 million in 2023 respectively.
The former Director General of the Progressives Governors Forum who claimed that President Tinubu must have spent not less than Fifty Billion Naira (N50 billion) to win the APC Presidential primary and emerge as the party’s presidential candidate, insisted that deployment of a huge financial war chest win party primaries makes a mockery of the progressives ideals that the APC professes.
He said: “After incurring such huge personal expenditure with almost zero contributions from other party leaders, President Asiwaju Tinubu had to also shoulder almost all the cost of the 2023 Presidential election with very negligible contributions from the APC and other leaders, if at all. Certainly, inclusive of the cost of winning the Presidential primary, winning the 2023 Presidential elections may have cost President Asiwaju Tinubu upward of One Hundred Billion Naira (N100 Billion). By every standard, this is very outrageous and alarming. Cascading it down to Governors, it would have cost each of the APC governorship candidates for 2023 elections not less than Ten Billion (N10 Billion) to win the elections.
“How a party envisioned to be progressive would be degraded to money politics is quite worrisome. Partly because money politics took over internal party contests during the 2023 elections, a contest for the leadership of the 10th National Assembly became driven by money politics too. It may have cost both Sen. Godswill Akpabio and Rt. Hon. Abbas Tajudeen nothing less than Fifty Billion Naira (N50 Billion) each to win the contest for Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives. What this simply means is that for any person to contemplate aspiring for President of the Federal Republic or Governor of any state, the person must have an impossible amount of money running into hundreds of billions. How many Nigerians can afford this from legitimate earning?
“How is APC going to address this disturbing reality? Or will APC simply turn a blind eye to such a troubling reality? Is this a problem, which President Asiwaju Tinubu wants to address during the tenure of his leadership? Or is he going to ignore it since he can afford it? One can deduce that such a high cost of winning elections, it is enough to weaken the bond between elected leaders and other party leaders, which may have created the present problems of accessibility. So long as elected leaders, especially President Asiwaju Tinubu, are inaccessible to other party leaders, the prospect of returning APC to its founding vision of emerging as a progressive party will continue to diminish. And problems of money politics within the APC will be further entrenched.”
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