It is the primary role of political parties in a participatory democracy to collate and channels views of the voters to government they install. The party therefore becomes the channel through which the electorates speak to their government.
Abuja, Nov.28.– President Muhammadu Buhari during last Friday’s meeting of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abuja charged the leaders of his party to work hard towards ensuring the party survives beyond his administration. History, he said would be unkind to the party leaders if the party collapses at the end of his administration. He went on to admonish the leading lights of the party to respect the wishes of their constituents who he said should not be taken for granted because “they know what they are doing”.
“The messenger”, as advocate marketers will say “is the message”. The truth is that if anyone has taken his party or Nigerian voters for granted, it is President Buhari who by his body language gives an impression he was doing the party that sponsored him for an elective office and Nigerians that voted him into office, a favour.
The expression of concern for the survival of APC, the platform through which the president secured power after three failed attempts through other platforms, many will argue, is belated. It was the president, goaded on by sycophants that betrayed the party after his 2015 victory. It was the president that failed to provide effective leadership for a party he treated more as a distraction than a vehicle with which he rode to power. And it was the president’s disdain for his party and distrust for politicians that paved the way for the take-over of the party by Bukola Saraki and his like-minds senators who went on to make the country ungovernable for four years.
In fact, to many objective observers, it was President Buhari’s inability to outgrow past serial betrayals by politicians in military uniform and those in ‘agbada/babanriga’ that deprived him of the much-needed politicians’ support for effective governance of the country for the greater part of his first term. Unfortunately, he sowed the wind ...
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