At APC meetings, I saw members who couldn’t afford transport fare back home —Ladepo, US diplomat in Ghana

Mr Biodun Ladepo, a former journalist and member of the All Progressives Party (APC), is a social commentator, public affairs analyst, an employee of an agency of the United States of America (USA) and diplomat based in Ghana. He was in Nigeria for the Easter holiday and in this interview with Saturday Tribune’s DEPUTY EDITOR DAPO FALADE, he spoke on sundry national issues, asserting that President Muhammadu Buhari is unfit to run for a second term in office.

Why are you in Nigeria now?

I am in Nigeria from my base in Ghana for the Easter holiday, to mingle with some of my political friends. I have always done this. I have been in the US for 30 years, but I have never spent my annual leave outside Nigeria. I always come home once or twice a year, depending on how much time I have. This is just one of those trips and I am closer to Nigeria now that I am in Ghana. I can come many times. In fact, I have come to Nigeria 14 times in the last three and a half years that I have been in Ghana.

Compared to where you are coming from, there are cases in Nigeria where your vote does not really count, where the system is marred by sharp electoral practices. How do you explain this?

If you think your vote will not count and because of that you don’t vote, you are shooting yourself in the foot. I live abroad and as much as I criticize the Nigerian political system and the Nigerian government, which I have been doing since I was in secondary school, I am a registered voter. I came home to assist the present administration to come to power. I brought my family home in 2015 to assist the APC to come to power. That was my own contribution towards bringing the APC to power at the federal level and in Oyo State. I have friends who are by no means poor but who don’t have voter cards and they are the ones complaining about the rots in the system. When you tell them, ‘look, if you cannot join a political party, at least, go and register to vote’, they will say, ‘my vote will not count’.

There is a meeting of a political party going on in a room not far from where we are now. If you go in there and take a look at the people who are sitting there from the local government, you will not find a single university graduate among them. Those are the people making decisions for the country. Those are the people who are spending their time and talking about the country. I am not being condescended; I am just saying it as it is. I am not experienced in fixing a car because I am not a mechanic. Somebody who has not attended a university does not know what the students and the lecturers feel. He will not know how a university is run or how a medical institution operates. But those are the people electing people into the National Assembly. And those elected into the National Assembly, though educated, take advantage of the fact that those who are going to elect them don’t know the difference between left and right. So, they can just come with N100,000 and distribute a bag of rice and collect their votes.

Don’t you think that attitude has to do with the pervasive poverty in the country?

I love this question and I have heard it so many times. I was in Igbeti on Sunday and Monday for the town’s cultural show. I even saw the level of poverty in Ibadan here when I went to the ward and local government meetings of the APC. I saw the people that showed up there. Some of them did not have transport fare to go back home. They had to collect N500, N1,000 here and there and those are the people that are going to vote for you. But those people have children in secondary schools who are above 18 years and who can vote. Perhaps they have children in the universities who have not participated in anything. They have children who have no jobs other than riding okada all over the place. They are the ones that should come out, but they couldn’t do so because they know the difference because somebody who has not had goodwill has nothing to measure him by. They look at what they can get right now and they think it is the best.

All the people they are voting for don’t treat themselves here whenever they fall sick. They don’t even need to go to Europe or America anymore. I have spent three and a half years in Ghana and I have four of my friends who are into politics here in Nigeria who have gone to Ghana to seek medical care, either for themselves or members of their family. Some of them, actually all of them, would read this interview and they know what I am talking about. They dare not treat their family members for serious sicknesses in Nigeria and I have thrown this question to them. But they will say to me, ‘igi kan ko le da igbo se’ (a tree does not make a forest). I am not the only one there’.

What I have come to realise is that the so-called elites have taken politics as a dirty game and they are not participating in it. But my argument has always been, okay, if dirty people are there, the not-so-dirty people can also go there and overwhelm them by numbers. If you have the numerical strength over them, then you start to change people’s mindset. When I came home, I called the people of my ward to a meeting in my own house and I knew that I am going to give them one thing or the other. But I sat them down and talked to them. I brought to them projectors and showed them the schools my children are attending in the US. I will show them hospitals where they get treatment in the US. I showed them comparable government-owned schools in Nigeria and I asked them, ‘do tell me, two children born on the same day by a Nigerian parent, one is going to school here and one is going to school in the US, don’t you think the one schooling in Nigeria is already short-changed for life?’ That child that is going to school here will definitely go and serve the one that is schooling abroad. I do tell them the power is in their hands. That is why I am using the word ‘patriotism’ in an encompassing way. If we think about Nigeria as one, then you will start to critique how government officials do. You start to ask them questions. They will change.

•  My classmates mocked me for being the son of a cigarette seller—Ayo Adebanjo

Do you think the government is doing enough to curb the activities of killer herdsmen?

I will give you an example. I wrote about it on my Facebook page. I took a tour of Ghana last February, all the way from Accra to Burkina Faso, by road, and returned to Ghana. I saw a similar experience. I saw herdsmen in all these grasslands but I didn’t see a single one carrying a weapon, either in Ghana or in Burkina Faso. There was an incident in Ghana in December 2017 or thereabouts where, somewhere in the Volta Region, some farms were destroyed by cattle and some herdsmen were seen there. You know what the regional police officer did? It was in the news. The man ordered the police force to shoot at sight, any herdsman they saw with weapon, whether they were aiming to shoot or kill people or not. The herdsmen who were there and whom you thought were illiterates from the Stone Age heard about the order. They were able to call their colleagues from the bushes and told them not carry guns anymore. Nobody is carrying guns there again. So, if these herdsmen were real herdsmen, they will not be carrying guns.

With the way things are going in the country now, do you see President Muhammadu Buhari returning to power in 2019?

I certainly hope that he does not come back to contest in 2019. I took a bet with my wife that he would surprise everybody and say he is not running. I don’t think he is fit to run, health-wise. If you look at him, he is frail. If I were him, I certainly would want to do Nigeria good and not run. The public still don’t know what his true ailments are and this is another shame. We really don’t know what his problem is. All we were made to know is that he has a hearing problem.

Let us put that aside. Right now, we need somebody with energy. Nigeria’s problems are too numerous and too complex to have the country running on auto pilot. As things are, the country is running on auto pilot. So, if some people are saying, ‘oh, let him run for another four years, it is the turn of the North’, say that to a man who is 67 years old and tell him to wait for another four years. That puts him at 71 years. Tell a young man that is 27 years to wait for another four years, that puts him at 31 years. Those are huge milestones in ages that people should cross and you are telling a man to waste those four years.

APC came to power on high hopes from Nigerians, and three years down the line, how would you rate your party?

All my answers to your questions have been straight from the heart. I have been sincere because I do what I preach. In all I do, integrity matters to me. I will tell you now that we have suffered a lot under the PDP [Peoples Democratic Party] and so we expected a lot from the APC. We expected miracles so fast from the ruling party. We feel disappointed now. Really, the party itself has not been forthcoming on its explanations to Nigerians. The government has not met the expectations of the people. In the mood that Nigerians were at that time, when the party came to power, most of the people voted for Buhari because of this anti-corruption stance and everybody trusted him, not because they were expecting him to perform miracles. If, when he came to power, he was able to quickly settle down and get some things done; if he was able to get some of the people who are corrupt and put them in jail, regardless of what political party they belong to; do a few things that will instill confidence in the people, Nigerians would still have more hope, more confidence in his government and they would say Buhari is trying.

But what we have seen now is a Buhari that is more or less like every other politician. And so, if Buhari is just like every other politician, why couldn’t we have just kept former President Jonathan there then? This is because, at least, we know he is younger — even though I don’t believe being younger is a licence for good governance and I still think Buhari is far better than Jonathan in some respect. Though I still think Buhari is better than Jonathan, now I can do with anybody but Buhari. While we didn’t make any mistake in throwing PDP out then, there is still corruption in the land, even on a higher scale.

People are saying that a former administration is being probed while a high level of corruption is allegedly being perpetrated in the present administration and the president is not doing anything about it…

The Buhari we knew is 1984 would not have allowed that kind of nonsense to go on under him. That is why the man needs to step aside. In my humble opinion, he is the one running the country.