What is your take on President Buhari contesting the presidential election in 2019?
One thing Nigerians refused to recognise is that people have the right to decide if they want the president to re-contest or not and he also has the right to accept or reject the decision of the people. As far as I am concerned, any opinion on whether he should contest or not is simply an exercise of freedom of speech and it is left for him to decide.
However, in every consideration, he is constitutionally empowered to decide whether he wants to contest or not. But I think it is in the interest of the country and the interest of the party that President Buhari makes his position known because, right now, it has been his aides that are speaking on his behalf and whether they are doing it with his consent or not, no Nigerian, for now, knows whether President Buhari will contest in 2019 or not.
You were at the national secretariat of the All Progressives Congress (APC). What is the purpose of your visit?
I came here at the national secretariat of APC for two reasons: First was to personally express my support and solidarity to the efforts of the president in setting up a reconciliation committee headed by Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu. We are confident that his intervention could most likely address the fundamental issues that are facing the party at both the national and at the state levels.
It is no more news that the APC is faced with crises in some states where it holds sway as a party and this crises have defied solutions for over two years and efforts that were made in the past have not been able to address the problems. Nobody could have solved this problem other than President Muhammadu Buhari himself, through Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The governors cannot solve the problems of APC because they are party to the crisis; APC senators and members of the House of Representatives cannot solve the problem because they are a party of the problem. The party at the national level cannot solve the problem because there is disrespect and disregard for the leadership of the party in the last two years. The very fact that the party itself has been inhibited with lack of funds and other challenges made it impossible for the party to bring to order what is happening.
What we need to understand very clearly is that crisis within a ruling party is not new and not strange. Each time you have a group of people who organise themselves and take over political power, you are bound to have internal crisis within the party. It is so in the National Liberation Front (NFL) in Algeria; it is so with the African National Congress (ANC); it is so in any political party you can think of in history that has taken over power. The APC crisis started earlier and, hopefully, it will be healed in order to prevent it from inflicting some damages that could affect the fortunes of the party.
Why will you say the crisis in the party is self-inflicted?
It is of concern that a party that came to power with so much goodwill and hope has found itself in a civil war with itself. Right now, APC is both the government and the opposition because most of the criticisms and opposition that is going on in the country are from within the party itself.
So, one tragedy that usually becomes the symptom that extinguishes a political party is the absence of internal democracy. You can see the supremacy of the party in South Africa and in Ethiopia. But in Nigeria, there is no supremacy of the party because people holding position of executive power think that the party should be under them and not them being below the party. That is where the crisis starts. If the state chairman of a political party can go and kneel down before a state governor for money to pay the rent of his office and feed his family, political parties in the Nigeria setting seems to be parastatals of the state government and that is totally unacceptable.
There is also the syndrome of ‘the party is our own’. If a clique of people believe that they founded the party and other people are strangers, then the recipe for crisis has been set. What we need to understand is the very fact that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was not destroyed from the outside, but from the inside. It is the elements within PDP that were marginalised and oppressed that became the final nail on the coffin of the party.
If APC must learn anything, it must learn from history and I believe that some of the people who left PDP to join in this merger should not come with that bug and bacteria because those fundamental issues need to be addressed. If all party members are not treated equally and fairly, certainly, there will be problem.
Why the parallel APC executives in your state, Kaduna?
In Kaduna State today, we are having a problem and there are two APC secretariats. There is the one which Governor Nasir el-Rufai set up for himself and serves as his personal convenience where he can do whatever he wants to do and we also have our own APC secretariat. So, we have twin APC in Kaduna. Our own is the genuine one because the chairman of the party that was duly elected, certified and recognised by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was not the one the governor is dealing with.
So, as far as we are concerned, we are here to tell the national secretariat that Senator Shehu Sani, Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi and other party stalwarts in Kaduna will not accept, tolerate, endorse any form of tyranny by the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai. He has pocketed the party and wants to impose his will and is exploiting his proximity to President Muhammadu Buhari to unleash a reign of terror on the party.
Right now, APC is already divided in Kaduna and it is for the national secretariat to note this and we have said it in clear terms. The problem has defied solution for two years, but we believe that Senator Tinubu can do a lot of reconciliation. We hope that he will be able to achieve a lot because if Tinubu fails, it is going to be a doom for the party.
When you see people fighting within a party, it is because they want to remain in the party. If they don’t want to remain within the party, they will simply walk away from the party. So, we are saying in the 21st Century Nigeria, there are those of us in APC that will not accept any governor going into a room to write the list of his concubines, friends, his errand boys and guides and send them as executives of the party. We are going to remain in APC and pursue this agenda. My presence here at the APC national secretariat is to send a clear message appreciating Tinubu’s appointment and so to tell them that it is in the best interest of the party that they don’t take sides, or the most they can do is to give us equal treatment as far as Kaduna is concerned.
You said Governor el-Rufai is using his proximity to the president to do what he likes in Kaduna. Do you see that affecting the electoral chances of Mr President in 2019?
He has been constantly bombarding us, name-dropping the name of the president in everything he does. ‘The president asked me to contest’; ‘the president said it is only me that he wants’; ‘the president said this and that’, etc. But the president has come to Kaduna over 12 times and he has never said anything to us. So, we are only hearing it from el-Rufai and we are saying that we have been with the president from the outset, unlike el-Rufai that is a new convert. We cannot in any way be treated as outcasts because you have access to the president. We are equal stakeholders in this party and if the president has any message for us about Nasir el-Rufai, he should talk to us and not to hear it through Nasir el-Rufai because I knew the president before el-Rufai knew him and I have been respecting the president before el-Rufai began to respect him.
I remember when el-Rufai used to tell the president that he was an old man that was not supposed to contest any election. I never believed that.
So, as far as I am concerned, if this party will continue to be one and succeed in the next elections, then we must have a level-playing ground. Senators and governors must live in peace with each other. We must address the problems of the states and whatever resolution that is reached by this committee [Tinubu reconciliation committee] must be endorsed by all interested parties.
For now, in Kaduna, I can tell you clearly that we are having two parallel executives of the party and any attempt by anybody to recognise the faction of the governor in this place here [the APC national secretariat] is going to spell a lot of trouble because we will not agree and I am here to say that very clearly. I have said it to people in this office, any attempt to tilt towards the governor here, we will oppose it to the last.
Don’t you think what is happening in Kaduna State can replicate itself at the national level?
I don’t know anything about national level, but I can tell you that, as far as Kaduna is concerned, we have parallel APC in the state and it is left for Senator Tinubu to build the bridges. Lagos is known for bridges, therefore we hope that there will be seventh Mainland Bridge to connect the divide. But we are not sure of that.
The National Assembly recently re-ordered the 2019 elections time table and it is generating some heat. What was really wrong with the initial time table as designed by INEC in which the presidential election was to come first?
You see, there is an impression of the National Assembly which people have that there are pro and anti-Buhari senators, but I don’t think that is true. Nobody was elected to be pro or anti. We are all senators and we vote or decide what our positions should be on issues.
Having said that, the re-ordering of the sequence of the 2019 elections was informed by a number of factors. One is the fact that the hitherto position as it were, where you start from the president and end up with the state elections was one in which we had the bandwagon effect. Smaller parties felt that each time you had a presidential election and the incumbent president wins, it means nobody will win any seat again; it is going to be the sitting president and his political party all through.
So, now what we are saying is that they should put the presidential election last and that Nigerians would have the opportunity to vote for senators and members of the House of Representatives; the ones they want, they elect them and those ones they don’t want, they reject them. The reason for this is very simple. We are trying to avoid mass trials, mass convictions and mass burials of senators and members of the House of Representatives. So, by that, we will now allow each person to go to his grave or to be acquitted before ‘Justice Electorate’.
You were at the JAMB Office recently with anti-snake venom. Some people have said you were trying to trivialize a serious national issue. What is your reaction to this negative impression?
My presence at the JAMB Office was on a rescue mission-to avoid further snakes eating more money, because if you have a story where snakes have consumed N36 million, that is very shocking. So, in order to prevent more money from being eaten by snakes, I brought in snake
repellents and snake charmers from my constituency. It is my own personal contribution to the fight against animal-based kind of corruption. And, again, if this is a drama, it needs to be finished and what I did was to finish the last aspect of the drama.
Your posters, ‘Shehu Sani for Governor’ are everywhere in Kaduna. Are you contesting for the governorship seat of your state in 2019?
Well, in politics, there are things you want and there could be decision on what may be or may not be. In the process where reconciliation is taking place now, I think it is in our interest to
put our ambitions in our pockets, according to what Mr President said and wait for Senator Tinubu to address the problem. It is going to be a tragedy if he fails. This is what I know and I can speak in parables. The pronouncement appointing Tinubu to reconcile members has averted
the tragedy of people defecting from APC to the other parties. It has been able to halt this, at least, for now.
and then