APC Lacks Capacity to Bring Nigeria Together, Says SDP

Oghenevwede Ohwovoriole in Abuja

lThe National Secretary of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) Shehu Gaban, has berated the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) for lacking the capacity to bring Nigerians together and the ability to give the country a political direction after close to eight years.

Gaban accused the APC of not providing conducive political environment for democracy, investment and peace to thrive.
He made the disclosure in an interview with THISDAY in his office in Abuja, saying he was unable to rate the APC government with the current indices on ground when compared to what they met on ground in 2015.

“APC government is getting to eight years in office; I don’t know how to rate them, giving the situation of Nigeria today, giving the exchange rate when they took over. Giving the prices of food stuff, above all the insecurity is a major issue.

“Secondly, the political environment. Because in the absence of conducive political environment, there will be insecurity, there will not be investment, there will be chaos, there will be agitations all over the country “just what we are witnessing today” because they lack capacity to bring the country together, they lack capacity to bring direction to the country,” he said.

On 2023, Gaban said the party was strategising and would have smooth convention and presidential primaries that all participants would be happy with.

“We are still strengthening our system, our operations because we know that 2023 is being saturated and we are expecting seven people, who are going to run (contest presidential primaries) under the SDP. A lady is among them and more are coming.

“The mechanism for reducing possible crisis has been developed and there’s an undertaking every aspirant have to sign in case of litigations or something because that was what kept us together when we had a case up to the Supreme Court; all the aspirants signed the form that they will abide by the outcome of the convention and the primaries. All of them signed and it was cited in the court.

“We learnt a lot from experiences of other political parties and we agreed that we must create a level-playing field for everybody. We agreed that politics is all about participation; in the absence of participation, it is not democracy. So participation must be decent, must be within the guidelines of the party.

Gaban also said all aspirants must sign a code of conduct and abide by the outcome and that any aspirant who refuses to sign will not be accommodated in the contest. He believed some people were just there to cause crisis in the party. “So anybody who is coming with element of mischief or is to be used as an agent of destabilising the party will not participate unless he signs our code of conduct and if he is not ready to sign we will not have anything to do with him. In the states, any party that does not apply discipline or deterrence, that institution has to go down, because deterrence is what keeps the system going. So we developed capacity to create deterrence; anybody who deliberately abuse the party constitution or rules and regulations. We will sanction him,” he added

According to him the SDP is the most stable party that he was aware of, because the party consists of members who have their names and images to protect. “We are very stable right now more than any other party in terms of stability. The reality is that there are crises in other political parties, but we don’t have one percent of such crises right here. It is simply because we have collection of people that have name, image and ability to talk to ourselves and resolve issues amicably without going to the public domain.

That is what keeps the party going. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had the kind of cohesion to resolve and stabilise the party. Not that, it is so easy, but you also know that there is no party that is growing big that will be free of crisis. There can never be one in history.”