A Presidential aspirant under the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Kingsley Moghalu, says his party and other opposition parties are in talks on a merger over the formation of a third force to battle the dominant parties — the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Moghalu made this disclosure during an interview with AriseTV today.
The former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria further revealed the reason for his defection from the Young Progressives Party (YPP) saying the party’s mandate does not align with his values.
“I left YPP because I can’t compromise my values; I also left because the real problem is with the electoral system which means we need comprehensive electoral reform. The small parties need transparency.
“This is why I joined ADC because they aligned with my values. ADC is planning to merge with other parties to form a mega party to battle with the APC and the PDP, early next year if talks are successful. The APC and the PDP, as they are constituted today, can’t provide the needed leadership to Nigerians,” he said.
Moghalu also talked about the National Development Plan as proposed by the Federal Government.
“The authorities should do the best they can with the plan but the economic growth and plans were not realized over the years. It is better to be incremental in thinking rather than being too ambitious.
“Implementation is a big issue regarding policy-making in Nigeria and this is because we do not have a clear economic policy.
“Also, the FG is too involved in the economic policies and this creates a lot of rent-seeking and corruption. This creates a bottleneck that makes SMEs skeptical of these policies.
“Nigeria needs a developmental capitalist system whereby the FG will just be a regulatory authority because too much governance hampers development.
“If you want to be a statist economy, there must be a lot of welfarism and people policies in place but these are lacking. What we have is populism which solves nothing.”
