Fellow Party Members, I bring you fraternal love from the Grand Canyon and “Sun Shine” State of Arizona.
I want to begin by thanking every member of our administration for recognizing your daily concerns and working hard to address every concern as it arises. I am blessed to have had such a dedicated group of men and women who put personal gain aside for the common good of all. I appreciate and deeply honor them for such altruistic service to our party and nation.
As you have already been informed by the Office of the PRO, we have succeeded in opening a bank account for our branch. Some of our members raised concerns about why the branch’s money was still in my hands. The concern is legitimate, and I appreciate such probity from our membership. This tells me that we are all going to be vigilant more than ever before to make sure we put our resources in the right places and for the right reasons.
However, I want to implore you to continue to adopt civility in the manner in which we request information. We do not have to be abrasive or confrontational when we ask questions about why certain projects or certain things have not be started or completed. It is our right as members of APC NA and we must never allow anyone to take that right from us.
The majority of our membership elected me in Ohio because they believed in my leadership. I never promised that I would solve all the problems in the APC NA branch. I however did promise that I would continue to work on bringing everybody into the fold so that, together, we would pursue lasting peace. I still stand committed to that promise. The people did not elect me because they wanted me to fail but because they had trust in our capacity to go past our indifferences and work for the common good.
I therefore appeal to all of you to exercise patience and work with this administration so that we could all emerge as winners. If this administration fails, it would not be because we did not have the right people, it would be because the right people failed to do the right things and do them really right. If nothing else, we have everybody we need in the APC NA branch to succeed in whatever we set our minds to do.
Having said that, I now want to share with you some of the things that I want us to embark on from this moment as we look forward to 2012. Tearing one another apart, or creating obstacles along the path to lasting peace, are not going to do us any good. We are better than that and in fact, that is the main message that I want to share with you today.
The elections are over. What remains is our willingness to exhibit our strengths and direct our focus on making us stronger, financially and otherwise, so that we could accomplish the mission that we set out to pursue, which is to see the APC back in power in 2012 and beyond.
We have to redirect our focus on discussing how to tackle the opposition, which is bent on utilizing propaganda as a means of regaining power from us.
We have to start discussing developmental projects; campaign strategies; fundraising strategies and many more, on all the forums. Even though I strongly believe that our government has done enough in less than five years to change the face of our nation, we still must not under-estimate the opposition. They are busy at work and are not taking chances. We must not take a chance either.
Now that we have a bank account in our name, we must step up our efforts toward raising funds through petty and large contributions that will not break our pockets. We do not need to take our life savings and put it toward the APC’s win in 2012. All we need to do is work as a team so that together, and with our little contributions, we can accomplish great things for our party and our nation.
I have no doubt in my mind that every member of the APC NA is capable of contributing $20.00 a month toward our fundraising effort. I therefore call upon all of you to make such pledges today through your Chapter presidents. Your contribution of $20.00 a month, which would amount to $240.00 a year, is all we need to make $240,000 if one thousand members decide to make this pledge starting today going forward. If we pledge to do this from this point up to 2012, we would have raised $480,000 by the time we get to the elections. Imagine what would happen if APC supporters in other regions of the world should do the same. We would accumulate enough money to cover our entire campaign targets in Sierra Leone and even sponsor smaller projects after the elections.
This is the message from me, your humble servant, and I want you to consider very seriously about the good things that we can accomplish even by just doing very little. Very soon, the financial secretary will send out a comprehensive financial report on the state of our financial position to all Chapter heads and executives members.
I thank you all very much and may God continue to open your blessings so that we can all have the opportunity to contribute to the development of our beloved nation, Sierra Leone. May we all have the opportunity to meet in Freetown in 2012 and hold hands after the elections as we say – “In the struggle For APC, there is Victory”!
Once again, I thank you all!
God bless you all!
God bless the APC!
God bless the Great Nation of Sierra Leone
AL- Aziz Turay
Chairman; APN – North America
Leave a Reply