Oshiomhole Spoils It All!
While we were celebrating the new APC chairman for revolutionizing our leadership recruitment process through his insistence on direct primaries, he threw a spanner in the spokes of the machine, crippling it.
I speak about APC nomination forms: they are too expensive!
For instance, if you want to be a senator on the platform of APC, you will have to pay seven million naira. Presidential aspirants will pay over 40 million, gubernatorial hopefuls, over 20 million naira.
My friend (Saeed Abdullah) running for the House of Representatives was required to pay N3.8m but ended up paying N5m to clear the obstacles erected by the state APC: tax clearance, payment to LGA APC, etc.
Note that this payment does not guarantee a party ticket. You're just paying for papers.
The question is, do these people believe that a poor man or woman can be a good leader?
If yes, where do they imagine credible, competent poor people to get the money?
It's characteristic of such people, no matter how highly they worked in the past, not to have money saved up for this kind of purchase because they have given it all away - or they didn't have it, to begin with.
Or do you think Sardauna, Tafawa Balewa or Aminu Kano would have been able to afford these forms? To mention a few examples from the north.
This is very important because in our country, those who urged you to run will not contribute a dime into your campaign, instead, they will use you as their new ATM.
The weak excuse the party gave was that they want to use the money raised to organize the elections. Because unlike PDP, they don't want to use government's money to run the elections.
This, however, is an unintelligent excuse. If they had lowered the fee, many candidates would have been able to buy the forms, which means more money for the party.
If someone sells his house, his car and his farm to finance all this nonsense, what kind of a leader are you creating?
By
Ibraheem Dooba
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