The Director General of the Progressives Governors’ Forum, Dr. Salihu Lukman, has urged elected and appointed members of the All Progressives Congress to remain faithful to the commitment to service instead of the cheap resort to baseless propaganda.
He explained that a resort to propaganda in the sight of an obvious failure to respond to the demands of citizens, alienates leaders and erodes the party’s electoral viability.
Lukman said this in a paper titled, ‘Political Contestation in Nigeria: Challenges of Benchmarking Party Manifesto,’ presented at the Annual Conference of the APC Press Corps, in Abuja. The paper was made available on Sunday.
The PGF DG said, “Inability to respond to the demands of citizens alienate leaders and erode electoral viability. Most times, we imagine that resort to propaganda can resolve our societal and national challenges. This is very wrong.
“We can do all the propaganda and take over all the media spaces in our constituencies and in the country, it will not change the reality facing citizens. This is mainly because propaganda that is not founded on strategic and concrete responses to our societal and national problems, will not improve the lives of citizens.
“Thus, beyond propaganda, both as citizens and party members, we have a responsibility to get our leaders to apply themselves very effectively and honestly to resolve our societal and national challenges. Achieving this entails that our leaders should recognise they don’t have all the solutions.
“This is where as politicians, most times, we fail because we engage citizens with the false claim that we have all the answers and anyone with a contrary position is an opponent, if not enemy. Once this is the case, ab initio, political contestation is blocked.”
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