OpinionPolitics

Saliu Mustapha: The APC Masterstroke For 2023

By
3 Mins read
0
Share

“Rain does not fall on one roof alone”. The consequences of getting the wrong party leadership are dire as adversity does not discriminate. It comes to everyone at some point. Political parties can no longer afford to have a frail party leadership because, in reality, the consequences tell on us all, irrespective of whether you are a party official or among the masses.

By Osigwe Omo-Ikirodah

“Rain does not fall on one roof alone”

Elected party officials are not destiny, but their responsibility and sense of duty towards the electorate would play an important role in defining the landscape of Nigerian politics.

Many Nigerians are concerned about the 2023 general elections and its ability to change the fortunes of the country for the better.

Across the globe, the party leadership command is changing substantially over the last couple of years- electorates are getting more involved in who leads their various political parties and the impact it plays on the masses.

Pedigree, commitment, transparency, responsibility, pro-activeness and empathy with the general public are growing concerns the electorate has on internal party leadership.

The ruling party, the APC has kick-started its national congress and hopes to present a masterstroke that would lead the party into a resounding victory across the 36 States of the federation and Abuja inclusive.

As party officials are busy with the nitty-gritty of a rigorous process that would usher in these new party leaders so also are the electorates hoping to see genuine changes that would reflect their current expectations.

“Rain does not fall on one roof alone”. The consequences of getting the wrong party leadership are dire as adversity does not discriminate. It comes to everyone at some point. Political parties can no longer afford to have a frail party leadership because, in reality, the consequences tell on us all, irrespective of whether you are a party official or among the masses.

With less than two months before the main Congress Day to elect the national chairman, here is a look at the story behind the rising profile of Saliu Mustapha the masterstroke APC may likely present to Nigerians as their next party national chairman.

Who is Saliu Mustapha?

Mustapha was born on September 25, 1972, in Ilorin, Kwara state, a renowned philanthropist and the current Turaki of Ilorin.

Mustapha is a core Buharist and was a key member of the Buhari Presidential Campaigns from 2003 to 2019. His political career spans over two decades and has seen him held various leadership roles right from his days at the ANPP.

As deputy National Charman of CPC, he was very key in the party’s string of successes and was instrumental in the amalgamation of the CPC and other legacy parties that formed today’s APC.

With a strong network across the 36 States, APC party members have started discussing his likely emergence by even a consensus as a reality in the making.

Seen as extremely focused and a determined administrator, key stakeholders rate his sense of judgement above his other contestants for the national chairmanship seat.

Some key issues to be tabled and considered are arrogance, temperament and negotiating skills. APC party members across the 36 States of the Federation are clamouring for a stable and humble national chairman that would make sure the party goes into the general elections as one big family.

Here was how an APC stakeholder described the perfect chairman the

party seeks…

“Nigeria as a Nation needs a reset on so many issues and policies that can help shape the country better, only a committed and humble party executive can bring about these changes we seek, the ability to listen to each aggrieving party member and the capacity to marry these differences to the advantage of the party and the interest of the masses at large is what counts. Only a good party leadership can provide the right candidates for elective offices.

We must have party leaders that can listen attentively and proffer solutions instead of creating more divisiveness amongst party members, no political party can deliver the dividends of democracy if its house is not in order, you cannot give what you don’t have, and if we must be fair to ourselves only humility brings about such qualities in a leader.”

Loyalty to the party is also a strong factor to be considered and here, Saliu Mustapha towers to high heavens, his penchant to stick with the progressive forces no matter the odds stands him apart. Over the years he has offered his 100% support to the APC and his allegiance to the Kwara State chapter has been unwavering.

Saliu Mustapha has a rich story amongst APC party members and his current upswing in support is a result of his huge fan base that cuts across the major stakeholders and members of the party.

Let us keep our fingers crossed while we daily x-ray the intrigues behind the scene as the APC which happens to be the biggest political party in Africa dots the i’s and crosses the t’s.

What are the expectations and the reality? Would Saliu Mustapha just be the Masterstroke the APC plans to unveil as its next National Chairman?

Osigwe Omo-Ikirodah writes in from Abuja.

   

0
Share

About author
Time Nigeria is a general interest Magazine with its headquarters in Abuja, the nation’s Capital.
Articles
Related posts
All The NewsCover StoryNewsPolitics

Musa Tsoken Congratulates Kalu on Daily Times’ Lawmaker of the Year Award

By
1 Mins read
The National Coordinator of the Asiwaju Again Renewed Hope Support Initiative 2027 and National President of the APC Initiative for Good Governance…
Abuja FileDevelopmentEconomyEnergyFinanceInside LagosOpinionPerspective

The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

By
6 Mins read
  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
Abuja FileCover StoryOpinionPerspectivePolitics

Tinubu’s Reforms Deserve Continuity, Second Term Crucial — Onuigbo

By
4 Mins read
The President of Globe Legislators International, Rt. Hon. Sir Sam Onuigbo, has called on members and stakeholders of the All Progressives Congress…
Stay on the loop!

Subscribe to our latest news.

Leave a Reply

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com