APC won’t impose candidates on Lagosians in 2015, says Solomon

LAGOSIANS were yesterday assured that the All Progressives Congress (APC) will not impose candidates on them for the 2015 elections but will only present popular and acceptable people for all elective positions, particularly that of the governor.

  Giving the assurance while interacting with journalists in Lagos yesterday, the Senate Minority Whip and one of the leaders of the party, Senator Ganiyu Olanrewaju Solomon, who is also in the race to succeed Governor Babatunde Fashola in 2015, noted that the leadership of the APC had assured of free and fair primaries in which all party members would participate to enable popular and acceptable candidates to emerge. 

  Solomon, a key player in Lagos politics since the inception of the current democratic dispensation and respected grassroots politician and mass mobiliser, is a former chairman of Mushin Local Council, elected member of the House of Representatives after which he had been twice elected a senator to represent Lagos West in the National Assembly.

  According to him, though the national leadership of the party had last week muted the idea of modified direct primaries, “but without pre-empting them, we are going to have all inclusive primaries where all stakeholders of the party would participate.”

  He said: “The statement credited to our Publicity Secretary to the effect that we are going to have modified direct primaries is strange to me. I have heard about direct and indirect primaries before. Our party said there won’t be delegates, but I urge that we wait for the party so that we can know how we are going to conduct the modified direct primaries.”

  Solomon further noted that APC had held governorship primaries in three different states of Anambra, Ekiti and Osun and “all the aspirants were made to go through direct primaries, including where there were no other aspirants other than the incumbent governors. We should not give room for speculations or read meanings to good intentions of our leaders.”

  On whether somebody has been anointed as the APC governorship candidate for 2015 in Lagos, Solomon said: “There was a pronouncement by our leaders who sounded it emphatically that nobody has been nominated. With the level of education, enlightenment and exposure of Lagosians, who want to participate in the process of picking their representative, it portends a great danger if we dare talk of imposition in this age and time. We must not take them (voters) for granted.

 “The Ekiti experience, we should consider that as an accident, and we have learnt our lessons. We want more people to come into our party and we must find a way of overcoming the challenges. We must institutionalise the democratic system and allow it evolve and become part of our political development just like in United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (UK) which have become reference points of good democracy.

  “During the merger, we have said we were going to institutionalise internal democracy and we cannot afford to jettison that now. 

If we can have all aspirants across all parties, with all sense of humility, we will be able to come up with the best candidate.”

  On his ambition, he said: “I started working to get the mandate of Lagosians to manage the affairs of the state as a governor since 2005, so all I want is for our leaders to come up with a system that members will have a say in who represents them.”