Opinion: The APC is not the answer – It is the question

by Jude Egbas

If all the PDP stands for is endorsing corruption like we have been reminded in the last couple of days, what is the APC’s trump card in one word or sentence? What is the APC’s selling point? What is the APC’s positioning in the political brand spectrum? Is the APC to the left, right or middle of Nigeria’s political milieu?

I was one of a handful of Nigerians who got tongue-lashed, lampooned and berated by the ever critical social media populace for endorsing the All Progressive Congress (APC) during the first week of the new political party’s roll-out. My co-travelers in the ‘20 Million Youth Movement’ were labeled as turncoats and sellouts. The entire Youth Movement even suffered minimal damage to its hitherto squeaky clean reputation when one disgruntled member took to cyber-space to misconstrue what was an innocuous endorsement (or so we thought at the time) of Nigeria’s newest kid on the block.

In retrospect, our critics were right. In a bid to endorse a “political heavy weight” primed to provide the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) a run for its money, we may have papered over the real cracks inherent in our political environment to wit: Nigeria is suffering from an ideological deficit in its politics and not necessarily some stiffer challenge to a corrupt status quo. In simpler language, it would be nice to know what the new party will be bringing to the table in the months leading to the make or mar polls in 2015.

Rather than striving to appeal to our battered psyche and playing to the gallery by showing up in bomb ridden areas, the APC should delineate its ideological differences and trumpet these differences from the country-side to the urban centers. If all the PDP stands for is endorsing corruption like we have been reminded in the last couple of days, what is the APC’s trump card in one word or sentence? What is the APC’s selling point? What is the APC’s positioning in the political brand spectrum? Is the APC to the left, right or middle of Nigeria’s political milieu? In the coming months, prospective voters will like to know the APC’s take on taxation, infrastructure, monetary policies, foreign policy, poverty alleviation, education, resource control, Federal character, Power, State Policing, Health, MDG focus and all the other critical areas of Nigeria’s polity.

The PDP has waded through our sorry political minefield this far because no challenger has seriously taken it to task on the bases of ideologies and the meat of policies. Will it be asking too much from our political gladiators if we demanded that campaigns be elevated to the status of ideas? If all the APC intends to do is boot out the PDP from the centre for the sake of solely grabbing power, then it should head back to the drawing board. We can’t simply replace one set of thieves with others of their ilk or exchange some clueless President and a clutch of hare-brained Governors with their likes.

As it navigates the challenges posed by matters bordering on its nomenclature, the APC has to realize that in 2015, just simply waving a broom or an umbrella on the stomp grounds will not be good enough for an increasingly sophisticated voter population. Nigerians will vote in candidates and political parties who care to show how their ideologies will be markedly different from those of other candidates or political parties and how these policies will improve the living conditions of the man on the street. While money admittedly plays a big role in politics, it shouldn’t be the overriding factor. Nor should we advocate that it should be. For once, let’s run a political system where superior ideas become the clincher.

The APC doesn’t deserve a soft landing from us. It has to earn our trust, respect and votes in the course of time. And yes, we have become that cynical.

Read the original piece at Ekekeee

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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