G100
For God and Country
OPENING REMARKS BY MALLAM SALIHU MOH. LUKMAN, DELIVERED ON BEHALF OF THE G100 AT THE SUMMIT OF NIGERIA'S OPPOSITION POLITICAL PARTIES, MONDAY, 31 AUGUST 2026, SHEHU MUSA YAR'ADUA CENTRE, ABUJA
1. National Chairmen of our parties – African Democratic Congress (ADC), Allied Peoples Movement (APM), Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) and Social Democratic Party (SDP); our presidential and vice-presidential candidates; the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives and members of the Minority Caucus; national officers and leaders of our parties; my colleagues in the G100; distinguished ladies and gentlemen.
2. Good morning.
3. Let me begin with gratitude to every one of you who are here with some expectations. Permit me to remind you that our Fourth Republic is twenty-seven years old. In that time, the opposition in this country has contested the presidency again and again, and for the most part, it has contested it in pieces. In 2003, 2007 and 2011, we went in divided. Each time, the arithmetic was known in advance. Each time, we did the arithmetic afterwards.
4. Then, for a brief period between 2013 and 2015, something different happened. Parties that had every reason to distrust one another sat in rooms like this one and did the unglamorous work. They negotiated. They wrote things down. They agreed on how the candidate would emerge before they knew who the candidate would be. And in 2015, for the first time in the history of this country, a sitting President was defeated at the polls and handed over power peacefully.
5. We want to be careful about how we describe that, because it is often described sentimentally, and it was not a sentimental thing. Those men and women were not friends. Several of them did not particularly like each other, and some of them have spent the years since proving it. What they had was not affection. What they had was sequence. They agreed on the rules before they knew the outcome. That is the entire secret, and it is not a secret at all.
6. And then, in 2023, we unlearned it.
7. You know the figures better than we do. The winner took just under nine million votes. One opposition candidate took close to seven million. Another took just over six million. Thirteen million votes on one side of the argument, under nine million on the other. And the side with fewer votes formed the government, lawfully, constitutionally, and entirely predictably.
8. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, that is not a conspiracy. Nobody stole thirteen million votes. We divided them ourselves, in public and we did it knowing exactly what the consequence would be.
9. This is not only a Nigerian lesson. In Kenya in 2002, a party that had governed for thirty-nine years was removed, not by a new idea, but by an opposition that finally agreed to be one opposition. In Malaysia in 2018, a coalition that had governed for sixty-one years was removed in much the same way, by people who had been each other's prosecutors and each other's prisoners. In neither case did the opposition win because it had become more virtuous. It won because it had become one.
10. So, the lesson is not a moral lesson. It is an arithmetical one. And arithmetic, unlike sentiment, does not improve on its own.
11. Let us say something now that may be less comfortable, and we say it as members of this family, not as visitors to it.
12. We are in the habit of explaining our defeats by pointing outwards, at the ruling party, at the umpire, at the courts. Some of those complaints are legitimate, and this Summit is not the place to re-litigate them. But if we are honest this morning, we will admit that the opposition in Nigeria has not only been defeated by its opponents. It has, more than once, been defeated by itself. By parties that could not keep agreements. By individuals, who could not stay the course. And by frameworks that were not spelt out explicitly.
13. We raise this for one reason only. If we cannot keep faith with one another, no framework we design today will save us. And if we can, we may not need much of a framework at all.
14. Now let us come to today, and to why the G100 believes this particular morning is worth your time.
15. Over the past weeks, we have sat privately with the leadership of each of the six parties in this room. Those conversations were separate, and they were confidential. What you told us was consistent: nobody in this hall disputes the arithmetic. Every leader we met understands what division cost in 2023, and what it will cost again in 2027.
16. What has been missing is not analysis. It is a table.
17. That is what is different about this morning. This is the first time in this cycle that these six parties are not being consulted separately, but are sitting together, hearing each other's conditions directly rather than through intermediaries or newspapers. Whatever else is achieved today, that will have been achieved, and it cannot be undone.
18. So let us say very plainly what this Summit is not asking of you, because we would rather say it ourselvesthan have it whispered in the corridors.
19. It is not asking any party to dissolve. It is not asking any party to disappear into another party. It is not asking any candidate to stand down this morning. It is not asking anyone to sign away a nomination that his party's members gave him. And it is not asking you to decide today who leads any ticket. That question is not on the agenda of this Summit, and any report that says otherwise will be wrong.
20. What we are asking is narrower, and in some ways harder. We are asking you to agree that the table should be built before the seats around it are negotiated. We are asking you to authorise the machinery that will build it. That is all that is before you today.
21. And when the table is built, let us be clear about what is on it, because it is larger than the office everyone assumes we are discussing.
22. Government in this country is not the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency alone. It is the Federal Executive Council, the ministries and agencies, the leadership of the National Assembly, every institution through which a recovery programme either lives or dies. Any conversation about cooperation that begins and ends with one office is too small a conversation for the state this country is in.
23. We are proposing that the process should produce two complementary outcomes: institutions for cooperation and negotiated documents defining the substance of that cooperation.
24. First, three standing coalition structures are being proposed to be established. These are:
25. G100 would participate principally with your approval as facilitators and observers, rather than as a substitute for the authority of the political parties.
26. Second, five Working Groups, each comprising one representative from every participating party and facilitated by G100, are being proposed to be mandated to produce Working Papers in the following areas within four weeks for consideration:
27. These documents should be completed within four weeks and presented to a Second Summit for consideration and adoption subject to approval of the Central Leadership Committee.
28. The immediate objective is not to compel any party to surrender its identity, candidate or legitimate interests. It is to create a credible table around which those interests can be negotiated.
29. Party leaders must therefore determine how far they are prepared to cooperate, what concessions they can make, what their non-negotiable positions are, what safeguards they require, and whether they are prepared to support another candidate if that candidate emerges through a process they regard as fair and transparent.
30. The success of the process will ultimately depend less on declarations of unity than on the quality of the architecture created to sustain it. The parties must build the table before negotiating the seats, agree the rules before determining the outcome, and recognise throughout that the country is larger than every party, every ambition and every office within it.
31. That is why the Framework before you proposesomething more demanding than a merger of ambitions: a Government of National Competence, built on competence, integrity, national inclusion, and fair representation of every party that contributes to the effort. It proposes that such a government be bound to a disciplined, time-bound Four-Year National Reset Programme, and that it be secured by a political commitment to a single four-year term, written into an enforceable Transition Charter.
32. We want to underline the word "enforceable."This gathering does not need more sincerity. Nigerian politics has never suffered from a shortage of sincere promises. What it has suffered from is promises that nobody could enforce when the person who made them changed his/her mind. If the parties in this room want an agreement that holds, it must be written, it must be witnessed, and it must have consequences. That is not distrust. That is how serious people do serious business.
33. Distinguished leaders, permit us three requests as you go into your sessions.
34. First, candour. We are conscious of what we areasking, because this hall is open. There are cameras here, and they will be here all day. The parties took that decision deliberately, and we believe they took it rightly. A commitment made in front of the country is much harder to abandon in October than one made quietly in August. But it does make candour more expensive. You will be asked today what your hard lines are, what would make you walk away, and you will be asked in public.
35. We would ask you to answer honestly anyway. A hard line declared this morning is a problem that can be solved between now and the Second Summit. A hard line concealed this morning is a coalition that collapses in October, and that one will collapse in public too, only later, and at far greater cost to everybody in this room.
36. Second, sequence. There will be a temptation in both sessions to jump straight to the last question: what will the final collaborative framework look like? Please resist it. Every failed coalition in our history began with that question, and every successful one arrived at it last. Rules before outcomes. Table before seats.
37. Third, sacrifice. We use the word deliberately. There is no version of this that costs nobody anything. Someone in this hall will have to accept an outcome he/she did not want. That is what unity is. It is not a communiqué. It is somebody's disappointment, borne well.
38. And one word about my colleagues and myself. The G100 together with the Minority Caucus of the House of Representatives convened this Summit. We will facilitate it and observe it. We will not determine its outcome. We are not promoting any candidate, no preference among the six parties in this hall, and nothing to gain from one of you rather than another. Our only interest is the one stated in the Doctrine we published on August 2: that a democracy is sustained not merely by holding elections, but by the credible possibility of an alternative government. Today, that possibility is in this room. It is in nobody else's hands.
39. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, let me end where I think we should begin.
40. Outside this hall there is a country that is not following our arithmetic. There is a woman in Kaduna who has taken a child out of school because the fees increased and her income did not. There is a farmer in Benue who has not slept on his own land in three years. There is a graduate in Aba who has stopped applying for jobs, and a family in Sokoto that has quietly decided which meal of the day to give up. They are not waiting for a coalition. They are not interested in our committees, and they will not read our communiqué.
41. But they are entitled to something, and it is this: a real choice, presented by serious people, capable of governing. That is all a democratic opposition owes its country, and it is not a small debt.
42. If we do our work well today, nobody will remember this morning. They will remember what it made possible. And if we do it badly, we will be back in this same spot in 2031, doing the same arithmetic, with the same regret, and with a country less able to bear it.
43. The table is here. The chairs are here. Let us build it properly.
44. Thank you, and God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
No comments:
Post a Comment