₦airaland Forum

A Paper Delivered At The Inauguration Of The South South Chapter Of “The Asiwaju Group” (TAG) In Port Harcourt, Rivers State, On August 27 2022 By Arc Ini Akpan Morgan, Head Of APC Diaspora Unit At The National Secretariat, Abuja

Protocol

Permit me to begin this presentation with thanking the organisers of this event for affording us the opportunity to gather to discuss the strategic victory we are working to deliver to a political enigma and a colossus of Nigeria’s democracy at the Presidential election coming up next February.

Permit me to also thank the leaders and members of the APC worldwide: for providing us this formidable political platform to promote our collective interests.

I say thank you to the founders and members of The Asiwaju Group, “TAG”, among whom I am a speech-giver today.

My special thanks therefore goes to Prince Ade Omole, the APC leader in the United Kingdom, whose passion for the APC Diaspora Unit has throttled our growth from a Desk to a Unit of the Party at the topmost level.

I am called out here today to answer some salient but pertinent questions:

1. How Is The APC Ready To Win The 2023 Presidential Election

I must confess that the APC is as ready to win the February 2023 Presidential election as the number of years the Party’s Flagbearer has put into preparing for his election into the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Let me remind us that the readiness of our great Party to emerge victorious in the 2023 Presidential election began from when Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu left his well-paying job at a multinational oil company, suggesting to his superiors that he must take up politics as his next life-time challenge. He has clearly nursed this challenge for a longer time than he resigned from Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited.

Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu had rejected the conspiracy of his superiors at Mobil Nigeria Producing, to keep him back at work with mouth-watering positional and financial packages, choosing rather to emerge on the map of Nigerian politics as a committed leader and a formidable financial contributor to the cause of his then political party - the SDP.

The Asiwaju has never been anybody’s boy politically. However, this cannot be said of his contemporaries going into the 2023 Presidential election with him, because they all, at one time or the other, have been boys to the Asiwaju’s political contemporaries, in their own political milestones.

As one who has no problems with making painful political sacrifices, the Asiwaju was asked to forego the Office of the Senate President when the office was his to take in 1991. And we all know the story of his sacrifice in 2015 when the Vice Presidential Ticket was his to take.

Would I have to mention how he funded the NADECO war economy against the military junta of General Sani Abacha?

Professor Wole Soyinka personally confessed to how the Asiwaju asked him to negotiate necessary international connections to help him import rice from Thailand, which he sold, ploughing back the revenue generated into the NADECO struggle between 1994 to 1998.

That was international trade in practice. He succeeded at impacting his experience as one who looked forward to nursing Nigeria’s economy to her national prosperity some day.
He was in the trenches for 4 years, spending and getting spent in the war that threw up the 4th Nigerian Democratic Republic, which we are enjoying today.

He also ensured that he developed and deepened Nigeria’s Opposition Struggle in this Republic, emerging in it as the Father of that struggle.

At the end, he led the frontlines in his Party to ensured the victory that toppled the erstwhile Nigeria’s ruling party democratically. Today, the APC, his personal dream, is Nigeria’s ruling party.

If we therefore count from 1989 when the Asiwaju cleared the path for his political ideology to prosper to date, we would have 33 years.

This is how long it has taken the APC, first as an unseen reality in 1989, to a nascent reality in 1999, and to a ruling Party in 2015. We can look at this progression either arithmetically, or geometrically.

As a political party, the APC is now going into next year’s election with over 3 decades of her ground-breaking and sub-structural development in her unseen realities, and her super structural stabilization in her seen realities from 2015. This is the divine mandate the Asiwaju shoulders.

2. How Is The APC The Party To Beat?

It would offend some thinking to say that the APC, as an institution, is synonymous with Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the institution: a two-in-one entity. However, if we categorise the APC into her vision and her mission, we would agree that though the mission of the Party is pursued by her over 40 million members, including her members in the Diaspora, the vision of the Party resides sorely with the Asiwaju. He took the first step towards the birth and propagation of the what we are all celebrating today.

Looking at it in every way, we would observe that the problems the APC seems to have today, clearly resulted from some of her leaders divorcing the Party’s mission from her vision, when some chose to conspire against the vision by their attempt to “cut Tinubu to size”, just after ensuring the victory of the Party in 2015.

If Nigerians say they are suffering today, it is because some political nomads jumped into our party, loving her mission and hating her vision. Today, the vision and the mission of the Party have been harmonised. Therefore the APC is the Party to beat as much as Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the politician to beat in Nigeria.

3. Is The Asiwaju sellable?

Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a political commodity that is in excess of demand in our political marketplace. I always say that if a politician does not want to concede his position to the Asiwaju, he refuses to dialogue with him. The following are therefore the market price tag of “Commodity Bola Ahmed Tinubu”:

a. While awaiting some leading members of his Party to dialogue with him on the best leadership recruitment strategy for the 8th National Assembly, one of them accepted to behave like a thief in night just to supplant the Asiwaju’s input at giving our party a positive direction.

Here we are today, facing a tough battle ahead, and where are those who got us here?

b. He won against the tenure elongation of the administration of Chief John Oyegun for its illegality, insisting that the Party must remain united and indivisible.

c. Though maligned and character-assassinated on many grounds, the Asiwaju has kept his focus on the goal, proving his haters theatrics and propaganda wrong.

Today, his abusers are tired of continuing with what they began. They have turned their hate on the “Golden Boy of Zenith”.

d. The Asiwaju also won against the hard pursuit of the consensus initiatives that preceded the APC Presidential Primaries in June, against hard official odds.
Need I say more on his sell-ability?

4. How Ready Are Our Members And Supporters For The Presidential Campaign?

One thing that stands the APC out as a Party with a formidable structure is the fact that those who have remained members of the Party are diehard opposition strugglers from the inception of their politics.

As at the last count, the APC Presidential Ticket has recorded over 8,000 Support Groups, one of which we are here to celebrate today.

If winning elections is by number of votes, taking membership of each Support Group across Nigeria at an average of 5,000 across the country, meaning an average of 140 members in each of Nigeria’s 36 States, multiplied by 8,000 Support Groups, we are looking at about 40 million votes from APC members only. The last membership registration of the Party recorded about 42 million members. This is the winning strength of the APC.

5. How Issues-Based Will The APC Campaign Be?

In just one sentence, while other candidates have asked Nigerians to “go and verify” their false claims, and another wants Nigerians to believe what he can do without concrete evidences, both the Asiwaju and his Running Mate have continued to insist that Nigerians should see concrete evidences of what lies ahead for them in Lagos and Borno States.

What more could be issues-based than calling for a free assessment of the capacities and the competence of the APC Ticket?

5. Does The APC Have A Good Record In Spite Of Challenges

Looking at it critical as the question suggests, Mr President may not be happy with the way politics is played in Nigeria, but his passion for good governance continues to soar.

Are we talking about the Second Niger Bridge? Are we talking about the electoral reforms? Or are we talking about the foreign image of our government internationally? The Buhari administration has done very well.

The food shortages and foreign reserve inflation suffered, is a global phenomenon. Our nation has been in existence for 62 years and of these, the APC is responsible for the last 7 years.

We cannot therefore discount the contributions of preceding administrations to where we are today by imposing 55 years of our national struggles on the APC administration.

7. Will The APC Win The 2023 Presidential Election?

The simple answer is YES! The Holy Book says “as a man in his heart, so he is”. The Asiwaju has committed himself to h thinks is victory, and we are sure he would win because, as he said of his Presidential Candidature: “Emi Lokan”. And I dare say that all the other candidates in the coming election have “lule”.

Thank you everyone for your attention. God bless you all.

If ideology is to be followed ..tinubu is the best any one can point to at this time..

We all perfectly know well that the latter is not
a gold seeker , tinubu is a well -to- do..


and also he has no need to look for cash if he is elected...


cos he is quite comfortable..

Abdul05:
If ideology is to be followed ..tinubu is the best one can point to at this time..

We all perfectly know well that the latter is not
a gold seeker , tinubu is a well to do and also tinubu has no need to look for cash cos he is quite comfortable..

Is that why you are spitting on everyone's face ?

Abdul05:
If ideology is to be followed ..tinubu is the best one can point to at this time..

We all perfectly know well that the latter is not
a gold seeker , tinubu is a well to do and also tinubu has no need to look for cash cos he is quite comfortable..

Anybody projecting Tinubu doesn't love him but wants him death....

Go through all his recent interviews and listen to the things he says ... It's either it's not coherent or he will purse and get lost while thinking then returns to say something different..

JASONjnr:
Anybody projecting Tinubu doesn't love him but wants him death....

Go through all his recent interviews and listen to the things he says ... It's either it's not coherent or he will purse and get lost while thinking then returns to say something different..

LIES! ARE YOU RELATED TO PETER OBI? ASIWAJU BOLA AHMED TINUBU IS NIGERIA'S NEXT PRESIDENT BY THE GRACE OF GOD.

Softmirror:
LIES! ARE YOU RELATED TO PETER OBI? ASIWAJU BOLA AHMED TINUBU IS NIGERIA'S NEXT PRESIDENT BY THE GRACE OF GOD.

Stop calling the name of God in vain...


God will never allow affliction to happen the second time over his people...


We've suffered for 8yrs now and we will not vote another senile old man who's almost on a vegetable stage to lead us and pave way to a known and renown Boko Haram lord to have his way to destroy and hand this country to terrorists.....

Abdul05:
If ideology is to be followed ..tinubu is the best one can point to at this time..

We all perfectly know well that the latter is not
a gold seeker , tinubu is a well to do and also tinubu has no need to look for cash cos he is quite comfortable..

Your second paragraph shows you don't understand typical afrucans. They might have wealth but still with more. They want others beneath them always. That's why you can't even point to any humanitarian foundation run by tinubu upon all the money he steals from lagos. Only sharing food occasionally.