The immediate past Director General of the Progressive Governors Forum, Salihu Lukman, is the National Vice Chairman (North West) of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Lukman, a member of the APC National Working Committee (NWC) spoke with select journalists in Abuja on a wide range of issues, including the performance of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, dissension within the ruling party over the single-faith presidential ticket and the indifference of certain power blocs in the party to the party’s presidential candidate campaign. TAIWO AMODU was at the session. He presents excerpts from the interaction.
With Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP and Peter Obi of the Labour party on the ballot, what competitive edge do you think your candidate has?
The question of competition is not a function of just one party simulating it or responding to it. No doubt, Atiku, Kwankwaso and Obi are respected people in politics. I will not toe the line of dismissing them. But like I said, in terms of edge and in terms of campaign, the advantage our candidate has is that he is not an election merchant. The last time he appeared on the ballot was in 2003. Unlike the other candidates you mentioned, he has never left the party for any other party which, for me, means some higher level of integrity and trustworthiness. It is up to Nigerians to make their conclusion. Democracy is about making choices but our business as a political party and political leaders is to promote our candidate and engage the competition in a way that the people would acknowledge and recognise their differences.
There is a growing discontentment among some aspirants who participated in the last APC convention. There was a directive from the presidency for their money to be refunded but that has yet to happen. What is the update?
It is part of the unfortunate internal challenges. Administratively, this should have been resolved long ago. For instance, in my own case, about four people stepped down for me and they have been talking to me. I have been drawing the attention of the party and I think now it is clear that the party has to resolve it as quickly as possible. I can assure you that that is going to happen.
The power blocs that participated in the presidential primary, Amaechi, Senate President and the others, have not been reconciled. What is the APC NWC doing to achieve a united political family ahead of the election?
It is my understanding that a number of the aspirants have been reconciled. After the national convention, I noticed that the candidate moved from house to house, meeting people. I expect that the consultations going on about the composition of the campaign council involve a number of these people. But like I said, because of the low party activities, there are speculations but most of the speculations may be unfounded; they can only be verified by the relevant actors. I am not part of the negotiations going on so I can’t talk authoritatively about that. But I believe that all the different aspirants are part of the process. They are being consulted and I am very confident that the campaign council that will be produced will accommodate everybody and everybody will be united.
What will the APC tell Nigerians in the course of its campaigns which will start next month?
Right now, what is going on is negotiation. Candidates have emerged but campaign is not starting immediately. This is the first time we are experiencing that. INEC has its reasons for developing that. The time gap between the period when candidates emerged and the period when campaign is going to start is almost three months. But the good thing about that is that it has also enabled political leaders to engage themselves. I mean, at the level of our party, the APC, consultations are ongoing, which ordinarily should have produced decisions.
In 2014, for instance, when Buhari emerged as the candidate, the period of consultation was so short. In less than a week, I think, the running mate emerged because the deadline for submission to INEC was very short. So, consultation was narrow; it didn’t involve the wide spectrum of party leaders as it were. But now that it is happening, it makes people to have a stronger say even in the process that is leading to the constitution of the campaign council. So, I will say that consultations are taking place and different layers of agreements are emerging. Part of the big challenge is whether agreements will be respected. I will try to talk more about our experience in politics in the course of this engagement. I think that the challenge of our democracy is that people who are more or less election merchants. Every election cycle, they present themselves as candidates or as aspirants and if they don’t become candidates, they dispute every process that produced the candidate.
This is the challenge of this democracy but it is not unique to the APC or the PDP; it is across all the political parties. Go and check, especially at the presidential level, we have a situation where all the candidates are known faces in terms of electoral process in this country at the highest level. The only exception I will see perhaps is even in the APC. Our candidate in the APC, the last time he appeared on the ballot was in 2003. But it is not the case with our so-called three popular parties – the PDP, NNPP and Labour Party. The candidate of Labour Party was on the ballot in 2019. So, I think these are some of the challenges and I think that for us in the APC, I can talk more in terms of the models explored which was very clear to all. It is clear that all the challenges, the internal dispute is about managing or regulating these people I call election merchants. And fortunately for us, the reality also is because that has been their objective all their lives. What they do is to ensure that they have surrogates whom they plant as so-called party leaders from wards to local government, to the state level, if they are strong enough, up to the national level.
Many of our states where you see an official of the party defecting to another party is because their godfather, or whatever it is called, is an election merchant who couldn’t get a ticket from our party has left and gotten a ticket elsewhere. So, in order to damage our party, you hear them putting up so-called resignation letter and there is nowhere in the constitution of the party or even in the national constitution where if you have to leave a party, you have to write a resignation letter. It is your freedom; you just leave because when you came in, you didn’t write an application letter. You just present yourself and you can just submit your membership card and move on. These are some of the challenges, which are part of the things we are discussing in the zone and we are working to see how we can address that permanently. Part of the reason why you have so many party leaders behaving as surrogates to election merchants is largely because there is no clarity in terms of how political parties are being funded. So, ward-level structures, local government structures, state level, zonal and even national level, how funds come in is so abnormal, and there are no defined sources of funding. What is at the national and the constitution of the party is that you will see some attempt to define it but it doesn’t translate to specific amount of stream of money coming in periodically. And that is why you find at all levels that there is hardly a budget. So, party leaders exist just in name. Right now because we are in a period of elections, it is about accessing campaign funds which belong to the election merchants. We are now trying at the level of our zone to work out clear funding proposal and sit down with the relevant structures of the party and get some agreement to do that. I believe if we are able to work successfully over the next period of two-four years to address a number of those, by the next election cycle, cases of people just coming into political parties for the purpose of contesting elections can be minimised. Not that it will be eliminated; it will still be there but the main function of a political party can begin to be exercised, which is delivering services to the people who elected their representatives. Parties can only do that if they are able to regulate the conduct of those elected representatives.
The current template that exists is that it is the other way round. Elected representatives regulate the conduct of political parties, not parties regulating the conduct of elected representatives. For me, that is a situation that has to be changed. And to be fair to President Buhari, the APC maintains some level of sanity in the midst of the madness going on. You understand that the madness is largely minimised in the APC when you take a headcount of the people who have come into the party from other parties with the purpose of contesting election. If you take a headcount of the people who have left the APC for other parties, you will see that most of the traffic is in the other direction.
Don’t you think it is because the APC is the ruling party?
Go back to 2007 when PDP was the ruling party and [Olusegun] Obasanjo was there. There were many instances where people who were not members of the PDP came to Abuja, got the approval of the president, sanctioned by Ahmadu Ali who was then the national chairman of the party, and it was just communicated down the line and those people emerged as candidates of the party. So, it is not about the APC being the ruling party but more about the fact that President Buhari has succeeded in a way to present a different leadership, which is not about pushing people to contest election. We were able to manage ourselves in the presidential primary with all the different problems that emerged at the last minute. If President Buhari had been interested in ensuring that a particular person emerged, it would have broken the APC, but he stepped down his interest, whatever it was. So, a decent election took place and he accepted the result. I think that is the leadership model that is required.
Buhari insulating himself from the management of the party, as you have painted to us, is an asset. What you see as an asset, people see it as damaging the party because his decision to insulate himself is taken as complacency that has aggravated the crises rocking the party. An example is the open rejection of single-faith ticket by APC chieftains from North-East who incidentally are of the Christian faith.
You see, this is the problem. It is either we want to respect the freedom or not. I think the most important thing is whether we want to allow freedom to be exercised in a way that breaches agreements. What you just cited emerged after agreements were produced. The same people who campaigned for the candidate to emerge in the first place simply because their choices of running mate did not emerge became aggrieved against the candidate and against the party. Now you can hardly do anything about that, even if you have a president who is ready to descend on everybody or even if you have a party that is willing to descend on everybody. What brought the PDP to where it is today? It is that same problem and that is why they have reached a point of no return. As the PDP is now, until their leaders are humble enough to acknowledge that freedom cannot be exercised in a draconian way, they can’t resolve their challenges. Because the point is, whether we like it or not, democracy is about contest. Contest means you and I will have basis for disagreement. What is required is for democracy, whatever system we have in place, to have a way of ensuring that we are resolved in a way that if you win, I accept and if I lose, I accept that you have won and we can work together.
All the problems we have in politics was created because the PDP had over the years given us a leadership model in politics which didn’t recognise freedom in politics and didn’t allow for fair contests. With all our challenges, we have been struggling to ensure some level of fair contests.
Going back to the point I was making, the main point is that there has to be a strategy to develop the structure of political parties which is why I always have to take people back. You are witnesses to how this party, since June 2020, has been undergoing a rebuilding process. We sacked a whole National Working Committee, put up a caretaker committee which, midway, became an authority unto itself; it was not listening to anybody. The vision that pushed people to support the dissolution of the National Working Committee was abused, because one of the visions was that if, within six months after the dissolution was done – six months would have been December 2020 – and a new leadership emerged, the leadership would have enough time to settle down and coordinate the process of candidates’ emergence for the 2023 elections. We had a situation where the caretaker committee or the caretaker chairman wanted to sit and organise the primaries that would produce the candidates for the 2023 elections. That led us to different extensions of the tenure of the caretaker committee which almost led to a crisis. By the time we had the convention that produced us as members of the National Working Committee we had less than four weeks to start organising the primaries. The main business which the caretaker committee would have handled was rebuilding the structures of the party. So, we came in and accepted what was there. Hopefully, it is after all these that the new leadership should be able to sit down and look at what needs to be done to reduce the different layers and at the zonal level, we had to initiate what we are doing to ensure that the process of rebuilding is back on track.
Back to the issue you raised about your presidential candidate not being on the ballot for some time now, do you see that counting against him? And what are your fears for 2023?
I raised the point of the candidate not being on the ballot since 2003 on a positive note, to demonstrate that he is not one of those I call election merchants. He wasn’t an election merchant and he had every reason to have aspired in 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019. He didn’t aspire; he engaged politics differently in a way that produced positive outcomes. That was the advantage I was trying to highlight. That can’t be said of the other candidates, whether Atiku Abubakar, Rabiu Kwankwaso or Peter Obi. Of course, I will not descend to the level of challenging their competence. They may be competent but in terms of personal integrity and trustworthiness, our candidate is about the only one, together with his running mate, that has not changed political party on account of aspiring to contest election. This means that they are people with some level of consciousness and integrity. And what that means is that trust can be invested in them more than the people who, when they don’t get what they want in a particular spot, move to another place. For me, these are the issues to highlight, and we are ready to debate them as a party with anybody, not the other issues about health challenges and what have you that cannot be verified. These ones I mentioned, you can verify them. So, I think these are some of the points.
On the second point you raised about fears, I tell you something, if I have any fear, it is about how to strengthen accountability and the capacity of the party to influence the initiative of elected officials. I have argued and I still argue that this election, for us in the APC, what is required is to have honesty, to review and look at what we promised between 2015 and 2019. What are the gaps? And there are gaps that exist. What is it that needs to be done in order to address those gaps? In addition to that, what are the new challenges? There are new challenges that have emerged. What do we need to do as a party aspiring to continue to rule this country in order to address those challenges? Now, there are challenges which ordinarily are human challenges which are not about politicising them. If we politicise them, we get them wrong. The issue of security challenges, for instance, which gets over-politicised. Some people wrongly say we used the same approach in 2014/15 against Goodluck Jonathan. It is not true. In 2014/2015, Jonathan and the PDP were completely in denial about those security challenges. If you remember, when the Chibok thing happened, there was a delegation from Borno led by the then governor himself, Kashim Shettima. What was the response of Patience Jonathan? Kashim had to shed tears publicly. Nobody is saying, for instance, that what happened to the train between Kaduna and Abuja didn’t happen. Nobody is saying that the attack on Kuje prison didn’t happen. If anything, we are as aggrieved as any other Nigerian. I come from Kaduna. I hardly spend two weeks without going to Kaduna. I could have been on that train. It doesn’t matter whether I am in the APC or the PDP. I mean, the same security challenge we all face. So, just like me, any other Nigerian wants the government to address this challenge. I want this government to address the challenge immediately because I don’t know whether it will consume me. This is the reason why we don’t need to politicise it. So, as far as I am concerned, we must prepare the campaign in such a way that there are answers to these challenges which Nigerians can see and can commit themselves to. In addition to that, the capacity of the party and all of us in the leadership of the party to direct and influence the conduct of all the elected representatives should be stronger than what it is today.
Aside from security and the economy, fixing the refineries is among the challenges the APC came into power to fix. Don’t you think the party in government has failed completely with what is happening in the country today? There is also the concern that the APC-led government has taken Nigeria back to the 60s where we are now talking about primordial politics of ethnicity and religion. What do you make of these concerns?
As a younger person in school, one of the things that we were very passionate about was knowledge. We don’t look at Nigeria in isolation from the world. That was why, for instance, ideological politics was very strong up to the 90s. But today, you have a situation where elementary reasoning and sentiment becloud application of knowledge. I am sure you are aware of concerns, not necessarily protests, in advanced countries about the cost of living, which, in a way, are consuming leaders. What is happening in Nigeria is not in isolation. If we are going to be fair to the APC government, we have to look at it in terms of the main challenge before the APC government came in. The only source of revenue has always been the problem. Two, there is a lot of corruption going on. Even when taxes were paid, sometimes taxes don’t even reflect in the account of the government. The whole cry about diversification has always been there. I mean, the PDP government, in 2006/2007, I remember, voted about N200 billion to support agriculture. And they distributed it to assumed farmers as loans, which were never recovered, and nothing came out of that. Immediately the APC came in way back in November 2015, one of the things that were introduced was the anchor borrower scheme which, to be fair, is one of the success stories of this administration. Different initiatives in agricultural produce have yielded results in such a way that now you can see the improvement. We may not be where we want to be but some progress has been recorded. So, if you read the economics of it, at least jobs have been created. The reality is that there are new challenges that have emerged. And for goodness sake, part of the crisis of knowledge we have faced not just in this country but in the world is the fact that the world shut down for how many months and we ran a normal life: salaries were paid when works were not done. Everybody operated almost normally and that is what the world is facing today. I mean, aviation crisis in Heathrow is coming out maybe because, to some extent, the UK government, the UK people appear to be more conservative and transparent. But it is going to come out in different forms in so many places. So, what we are facing in Nigeria is not an isolated case. It is a world reality and as far as I am concerned, as a party, preparing to take up a number of these challenges, we have to come up with a blueprint in terms of how to position this economy to bounce back.
I wouldn’t want us to end this session without talking about the fact that investment in public education is a necessity and not something that should be taken for granted. Since 1985, the crisis we have had is that investment in public education has been frozen, a situation which has produced the gap we have today whereby we have children but no schools for them to attend; where we have schools but no teachers; where we have schools but no teaching materials. We have to go back and see first, second and third national development plan and see the way this country planned and invested, using the education sector as the basis of national development. We have to return to that. We departed from it on account of our romance with the IMF, World Bank policies which imposed the Structural Adjustment Programme and stopped investment in public education.
Unfortunately, even our so-called public intellectuals, I don’t see any intellect in the debate going on now led by the ASUU [Academic Staff Union of Universities]. They are not talking about details; they talk about money in very crude term as if it is rainfall from heaven. They ask the government to bring X-billion and they don’t give a damn about whether on account of their action, they are destroying the lives of the younger generation. Part of the challenge that must be undertaken politically is to restore sanity in the critical sector which should drive the process of national development. And as a political party aspiring to rule this country in 2023, we must come up with a Marshall Plan. Of course, it is not going to be easy; it will involve very hard negotiations with stakeholders in that sector. It is about regulating their conduct and ensuring that it conforms to the minimum standard that will guarantee the development of the younger generation.
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