A former member of the House of Representatives and member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Honourable Godfrey Ali Gaiya, in this interview with TAOFEEK LAWAL, speaks on what Nigerians should look out for in electing the next president.
Presidential candidate of your party, Atiku Abubakar picked Delta State Governor, Dr Ifeanyi Okowa, as his running mate. However, there are those who hold that he should have picked Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State. What’s your view on Atiku’s choice of running mate?
We are comfortable that Atiku has taken his time to bring a vice presidential candidate that is urbane and who has succeeded as an executive governor and he is also bringing not just the experience of being a governor but also coming with an experience of being a lawmaker. He has been a senator and of course the normal friction will always be between the legislature and the executive. If Atiku is bringing a man of such pedigree who has also been a senator, I’m sure he did so to strike a balance between what will come from the legislature and what the executive will do by bringing an intermediary between the two arms of government.
Yes, Wike was favoured and did so well in the primaries; he is a very vocal and a material to the PDP but sometimes when it comes to choices like this, there is what they call hard choices, hard decisions and if you are not able to make those hard decisions, you may not be in a position to balance other interests. Wike is a very loyal party man and has done so much to hold and revive the party. He has been supporting the party in almost all our activities and I’m sure he will never allow that his labour to go in vain. We believe Wike is such a very committed person that will still work assiduously for the party to form the next government at the federal level. We believe in him and we believe that he also believe in Nigeria that the only party that can redeem Nigeria from its ailments will be a PDP president under the leadership of Atiku. And like I always say, governance is not all about position; the fact that you are not a vice president does not mean that you won’t be part and parcel of the government. We believe that after winning, Wike will still be a very key instrument in running this government in any capacity that the Presidency may deem it fit for him to act. I think there is no love lost and like I said it was a choice between two very committed and perfect people and since you cannot have two persons in the same position, one hard choice had to be made.
Atiku as at the last count will be vying for the presidency for the fourth time. Why do you think Nigerians will want an Atiku this time?
Atiku is a man of principle and some people will tell you that we did not lose the 2019 election. People were afraid of what Atiku will bring to the table and those that were not comfortable to what he would bring did all to manipulate the outcome. But, we are not worried because the mark of a man is that he who fights and run away comes back to fight another day. His repeated effort to be president is not borne out of selfish wish but purely on his desire to rule and rule well. Like I said, he did so with Obasanjo between 1999 and 2007 and we saw a lot of reforms. He handled the economic team then and we saw what happened to the economy. You cannot compare our naira value today to what it was before and so many other indices of comparisons. We still have every hope that Atiku is bringing something that Buhari could not bring from 2015 till date. Atiku is a much organised person; we call him the bridge builder and the unifier. He has all it takes to be friendly and to be at home across the six geopolitical zones in the country. He has investments all through and businesses that he has developed over the years and he will not go the way of the present regime where they allow some level of nepotism and sectionalism that if you are not from this part of the country, you cannot do this. Atiku is a mixer and will bring the best from every section of this country and at the end of the day he will not look at tribe or religion but at competence and merit.
In 2023, majority of the states will be electing new governors. Do you see your governorship candidates coming back in the states it hitherto controlled?
There is no Nigerian whether from Kaduna State or any state in Nigeria that has really enjoyed good governance under the APC. So, the yearnings and the wish is the same all over Nigeria except the states that are governed by the PDP. Outside the PDP governed state, Nigerians are clamouring that there must be a shift to the PDP so that the good governance that they enjoyed for 16 years will continue. Of course, nobody will say it is all Uhuru when PDP was in power but having the benefits of learning from the sidelines, we now know what we ought to do to make things better for Nigerians and to ensure that nobody will have a reason to point a finger at us after eight years of suffering. So, the states that are under the APC now, most of the governors will be ending their second tenure and you will agree with me that, in Nigeria, hardly will a sitting governor lose an election because apart from it not being free and fair, they use other means to actualise their ambition. We believe now that most of them are coming from neutral perspective after their eight years in office, we are sure that we are going to bounce back. PDP is targeting 21 states out of 36 and I will tell you that that is even a small figure. It is a figure we are using with due respect to the country not to be over ambitious and over optimistic but I will call it a very pessimistic figure.
By the time you have 21 states controlled by the PDP out of 36 and of course the FCT senator will be PDP, we will be comfortable. PDP is set to upturn the apple cart and ensure that PDP return to power in the states. Nigerians now believe that the only way to survive is to vote for PDP at all levels. The power of the people cannot be underestimated because they know who and what they want and I am calling on Nigerians to use their power to tell the whole world that we are going through this hard time and nobody is happy about it. And whatever it takes by legal means to take over power so that good governance can be enshrined, Nigerians should not shy away in 2023. We must allow our personal voters’ card (PVC) to speak and allow our votes to be counted and the winners to be announced and with the mood in the land I can assure you that you don’t require persuasion to vote out APC because they have failed, Nigeria is failing and it is time to bring somebody else that can come in and fix the country for us. We are almost a failed state by every international index and if we continue with the same system in the next four years, of course Nigeria will not just be a failed state but a state in anarchy and crisis.
What will be your comments about the security situation in the country and the power generation which is at an all time low?
The number responsibility of any responsible government is to guarantee safety to lives and property. Insecurity is the failure of that guarantee. Nigerians are not safe, their properties too, nowhere is safe again. If that is the number one problem bedeviling this country, it is good to conclude without fear or favour that the government has failed. We now sleep with one eye open. You cannot travel on our roads, you cannot even travel on our train and you cannot go to our airports and be comfortable. You cannot go to your office and not look at your back. You cannot even drive without looking at who is following you. The entirety of the system where security is involved has failed. The normal responsibility of Police in ensuring peace and order has been taken over by the military. It is a first sign of telling you that things are not okay.
You see soldiers mounting roadblocks and I think you don’t need a soothsayer to tell you that our security apparatus has collapsed. What we are doing presently in Nigeria now is adhoc arrangement with security. There is no organised system that can make separation of powers possible within the military. You see a naval officer who should be manning the sea at the road blocks, you see an Airforce personnel who should be flying manning the airspace security on the roads. What we see now is Joint Task Force of these personnel moving from one place to the other, where did we lose it? This is a clear manifestation of failure. God forbid, if today there is an external aggression against Nigeria, we will be very open. This is because we have redeployed the security personnel to areas not relevant to our national security. By the time there is no Airforce man flying to ensure the integrity of our safety in the air because we are manning the ground to make sure the next village does not fight the next, we are finished.
This is the present situation in Nigeria and we cannot allow that to happen. That is why there is a need for purposeful governance; purposeful presidency to come in is more paramount. Atiku has said that if given the opportunity, he understands the nitty gritty of the terrorism activities going on. He understands the banditry and all the societal and communal crises and can get it solved within some few days in office. If Nigerians believe and they know that these people cannot get it done, let them try Atiku and if he does not give Nigerians what they want when he comes to office, they should vote him out, that is the beauty of democracy.
The power situation in the country has never been this bad, the same applies to the education sector where the government cannot fulfill the promise they made to the lecturers. Our children have been at home in the past six months. How can a Nigerian graduate compete favourably with his friend from Ghana? Our education sector is in tatters and it is the same in the health, sports, economy just to mention but few. Nothing is working. There is failure everywhere. How much was a dollar to naira before the APC government came on board? Before the end of this government, a dollar will exchange for N1,000. Can our business men compete favourably with their counterparts? The system is dead and that is why we need to do something fast to redeem ourselves from the gradual descent to the abyss we are facing as a nation.