Frank Agabi, Ahmed Tukur, Sarah Aboderin, February 16, 2022.
Nigeria Cannot Continue Like This (NCC-LIT), a frontline political movement, has, through an open letter to the National Consultative Front (NCFront), progressive political movements, labour and professional bodies in the country, implored all opposition political parties, aspirants and presidential hopefuls in the Nigeria to speedily come together under the proposed mega party and adopt NCC-LIT’s new democracy model called “Resident Democracy” for assured victory in the 2023 general elections.
In the seminal paper made available to the media, labour, civil society and sections of the international community, NCC-LIT identified four major challenges which must be surmounted by the proposed opposition mega party planned to be launched in early March this year under the general coordinating canopy of the Nigeria Consultative Front and vanguard leadership of Nigeria’s development economist, Prof. Pat Utomi.
The movement emphasized that one of the major challenges facing the proposed new mega party is the widespread assumption among Nigerians that the APC and PDP cannot be defeated and toppled nationwide from power by any existing party or a new one emanating from a Third Force coalition.
The NCC-LIT paper stated: “Among active voting populations and campaigners, it is a pandemic notion that no other political party – old, new or 3rd Force almalgam – can defeat and take out APC or PDP at states and presidential election in as near the future as 2023.”
The NCC-LIT paper went on, “While an overwhelming majority of suffering Nigerians, not less than 85% of her eligible voting populations, strongly desire the defeat and replacement of APC and PDP at all tiers of electoral contest and governance, yet, ironically, the same citizens generally dismiss the possibility of a new 3rd Force party defeating and replacing the APC or PDP.”
Speaking aside the paper to our reporters further on this, an NCC-LIT officer stated, “We want to assure Nigerians that this belief is strong more as a perception than reality and as a bogey rather than an impossible bastion. If in 2015 the APC merger could within a short time of its birth take out the PDP with its comparatively moderate sins at that time in spite of PDP’s boast through Vincent Ogbulafor that PDP would rule Nigeria for another 50 years, compare APC’s skyscraping tower of transgressions against Nigerians in only seven years. What this tells you is that a truly noble new mega force with a credible, holistically thought-out, altruistic political ideology and manifesto such as NCC-LIT’s Resident Democracy will pull the carpet clean from under APC in 2023. And that is exactly what is going to happen in 2023, mark my words.”
Also speaking aside the paper signed by its Global Coordinator Comrade Tony Akeni, National Publicity Secretary Mallam Aminu Mohammed, Inter-faith Women Coordinator and National Treasurer Barr. (Mrs.) Joyce Ejale and others, Comrade Tony said, “Nigerians have never in its 62 years history as a nation been more frustrated, social-economically impoverished, physically insecure and exhausted by mass misery, poverty, shame and sense of loss. The ordinary citizens and voters are therefore eager for a comprehensive change of leadership in the country’s affairs after 16 years of tormenting misrule by PDP and seven years of APC’s decapitating corruption and blood soaked hell.”
The NCC-LIT team further asserted that what over 90% of Nigeria’s population and her ordinary electorates needed for a dramatic and stunning sack of both the APC and PDP in the 2023 elections was a clear-cut, believable, house-cleaning new political ideology, which the movement’s novel Resident Democracy concept entailed.
Among other features, NCC-LIT’s Resident Democracy proposal to the forthcoming mega party compels a 60% slash of salaries and allowances by legislation from Day One in office of all political office holders from the President to councillors and their aides, beginning with the new mega party Administration in 2023. This, according to NCC-LIT, is in order to save gigantic public funds for development nationawide and reform politics from a treasury draining career to strictly a sacrificial public service, as well as drastically cut down on the necessity for foreign and local borrowings most of which go into recurrent expenditure and rogue political office holders and their conniving civil servants, as Nigerians have seen in more than a decade to date.
On this feature the movement’s global coordinator, Tony Akeni, elaborated, “If you asked me I would say unequivocally that the Judiciary, teachers and the police should earn far more salaries and allowances than all shades of politicians, including me, if I were to be President.
A second feature of Resident Democracy is that it is the citizens who directly reside in each political constituency, under the overhead oversight of the highest traditional ruler or representative of the domain’s traditional ruler, religious and civil society activists who reside in each constituency that would conduct open mock elections to chose the best character of aspirants who directly reside among them. Winners in open, transparent elections are presented to the new mega party as the people’s chosen candidates. Such winners automatically become the new mega party’s candidate in the official INEC conducted election. This would give Nigerian voters in all parts of the country for the first time the opportunity of truly choosing their own representatives, thereby eliminating completely the negative consequences of imposed candidates by external godfathers and puppet candidates who are loyal in service to coven tyrants instead of Nigeria’s electorates.
Also under the doctrine of Resident Democracy or Wa Kruga Manifesto, in every budget year it is also the residents of each political constituency, under the overhead oversight of the highest traditional ruler or representative of the domain’s traditional ruler, religious and civil society activists who directly reside in each constituency, who shall debate in a local “Citizen Public Finance Parliament” and decide upon their constituency’s priority choices of development projects at local government council, state constituency, federal constituency and senatorial district levels. The constituents shall pass their project decisions to the council, state and federal government through their elected representatives. When constituency funds are released at the various tiers of government, arrival of such funds, to the exact penny, shall land simultaneously on the phones of the constituents through bulk SMS messaging, as well as be published within 12hrs in the Resdem Public Notice Boards of each local government, state and federal secretariat, as well as their respective websites. This thereby effectively eliminates from Nigeria the development sinking syndrome of diverted and abandoned projects.
A fourth feature of Resident Democracy is that the cost of obtaining election forms by aspirants and candidates shall be totally free, and successful candidates must campaign from their personal houses or rented living homes. This, according to NCC-LIT, is in order to encourage good citizens without means to come into government to serve their people sacrificially, cut the cost of attaining public office to the lowest minimum and keep moneybag crooks from hijacking Nigeria’s public governance space as has been prevalent for over half century.
The NCC-LIT statement said that its novel Wa Kruga Manifesto democracy blueprint is designed to throw up a fresh mint of political leaders like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew; genuine patriots who would unsentimentally fix corruption for good, put the economy of the 36 states on a simultaneous escalator of rapid progress through a massive interconnected industrial Marshal Plan with an unprecedented banking support base for plural mult-sector industrialization and mass youth employment.
According to NCC-LIT, the movement’s brand new democracy architecture and public finance administration with unparalleled public transparency and probity was precisely the master plan Nigerians were waiting for to make a sudden and shocking about-turn, at the polls in 2023. According to Tony Akeni, the movement’s global coordinator, Nigerians would make a light-speed switch at the 2023 elections and topple with a sucker punch the two ruling and reigning giants with such clean, ocean-wide margins everywhere and put the oncoming new merger party comfortably and squarely in power without a squirm of post-election tribunals from the exited parties.
NOTE: The full statement of NCC-LIT follows this report, to be published later.