In this interview with JACOB SEGUN_OLATUNJI, the national chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Alhaji Shehu Musa Gabam speaks on the general insecurity across the country vis-a-vis, preparations for the 2023 general election, among other issues: state of the nation:
WITH the spate of insecurity crisis in the country, are you confident the general election will hold in 2023?
I will not tell you there will be elections. I will be stupid to tell you there would be elections in 2023. In terms of theory there would be elections. In terms of practical, I am not sure of that because I cannot mention three states for you that elections will hold without any crisis right now. For instance take the North-West, you can only talk of relative peace and stability in Kano and Jigawa states in the entire North-West. If you look at North-Central, you can probably talk about Kwara. But from Plateau to Benue to Kogi to Niger, they are all crisis-ridden. The FCT also falls within the North-Central and has security issues. If you talk of the South- East, the entire zone is crisis-ridden. If you look at the North-East, only Bauchi State has relative peace and Gombe a little bit. But Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Taraba states are all crisis-ridden. Now if you take South-South, you will be amazed about what is going on; the huge number of illegal guns being displayed. The insecurity the zone is very high. If you talk of the South-West, look at Lagos, what is happening on a daily basis there. Look at what happened to vehicles of the presidential candidate of the APC recently in Osun State. That is the indices of instability all over the world. Look at Ondo, look at Osun. Ekiti has relative peace, but there is also kidnapping in Ekiti every day. Now, which of the zones can you tell me there can be free and fair and peaceful elections?
Nigerians are going through trauma; trauma of insecurity, kidnapping, fear of the unknown, killings and maiming, ritual killings by young people desperate to make money. These are critical factors that in any society would give you nightmares. This is why the president has failed woefully because he is the President and Commander-in-Chief. Article 1 of the 1999 Constitution talks about the protection of lives and property of Nigerians. That article has been violated by the same president. The same president says he has done his best; the same president said he cannot wait to leave the Villa; the same president said he has given order to all the security agencies. The same President said he has bought everything the security agencies needed.
The same president said he has given complete directives to security agencies to clear all the criminals. But, he has been saying this in the last three to four years. I was amazed to learn that the Tucano jets that were bought were bought on condition; that they can only operate in the North-East. And these are military hardwares that were purchased with trillions of public fund. How can a country go under an agreement for a system or operation to be dedicated to a particular zone of the country? What happens? The crisis might snowball from the North-East to other parts of the country. So, you have tied the purchase of the equipment to a particular zone. Now you are stranded. The security personnel are talking about equipment to work and function.
These are issues that no serious society would allow to happen. Not only that, the president’s convoy was attacked. This is audacious at the highest level. The audacity has gone beyond attacking; they say they want to kidnap the president and the governor of Kaduna State. How else would you describe the high level of insecurity? Nigeria is on high alert. We are in the red; people are disturbed. Who is responsible? The President and Commander in chief; the buck stops at his desk because he has an avalanche of power and authority to change those who are not doing their best in terms of making sure their beats are in order. How do you explain that a high crime would happen in a state where you have a commissioner of police, director of DSS, Brigade Commander, Area commanders, divisional police officers, all sorts of security institutions? And then a fundamental crime would happen and the criminals would go unidentified; you have a situation where people would be on bike with AK-47 on Nigerian roads. You don’t blame anybody; you blame the commander-in-chief. Every operation carried out in Nigeria the president must know about it. What is most amazing to me is that President Buhari is coming from a security background. A former military general who fought a civil war; every now and then you have a situation where a general in the Nigerian Army has failed to protect the country. It is unacceptable. There is no reason for Nigerians to be killed like ants. It is unacceptable and that is why we are in tandem with what the National Assembly is doing what they plan (impeachment move against Mr President), even though they are just waking form their slumbers because the battle is at their own doorsteps.
What is the way out?
The way out is simple. Once you have a serious president and a serious governor. if you give them two months dedicated to curbing crime and criminality, they would do it. The DSS are doing well in terms of generating intelligence. The Kuje incident they generated sufficient intelligence for Military and the Police to prevent it from happening from what was reported. If intelligence is being generated at the disposal of the president and service chiefs, and nothing is being done, who do you blame?
If you were with President Buhari today, what would be your advice to him on the state of the nation?
I have said it severally: the president deserves no advice because he has a security background. And he has people that have surrounded him who do have military background or political background. And you have service chiefs whose responsibility is to provide intelligence and guide the president on what to do. We, as politicians that also have a key role in peace and stability, the president has not invited political parties for conversation for input. So, the president needs to find a way out because the buck stops at his table. He cannot shift blame to anybody.
Then, how would you rate the present National Assembly?
I have listened to the Senate President who said his responsibility is not to oppose the executive. Then, I know that we are terribly in deep shit as a nation. If the parliament whose responsibility is to look at the budget being proposed by the executive, fix that budget and look at the over interest of the country. Input into the budget. Look at demands in various constituencies that are critical like water, roads, basic things and input it into the budget. The same National Assembly has an oversight function of ensuring the budget is implemented. Go and check the entire budget of Nigeria and check if anyone has been implemented up to 20 percent. What happened to the money? It is the same parliament responsibility to ensure that the budget is being implemented. In the parliament chairman of committees serve as ministers in their own right. That is why they can summon any minister or head of agency of parastatal, because it is their duty. Now if they abdicated that critical responsibility, what else do you expect. Who provides funding for security agencies? It is NASS. In the absence of using the funds for what they were designated for, whose responsibility to raise the alarm? It is the National assembly. Whose responsibility is it to pass vote of no confidence on the minister or president? It is National Assembly. The most powerful institution in the world is the parliament. That is why worldwide parliamentarians are even more recognized than governors. Because their primary responsibility is to make laws for the good of the citizens of the country. Where the country is not being governed well, they have a primary responsibility of correcting it. Where you have lousy provisions or clauses it is their responsibility to correct it. But if you ask me, are we short of laws? The answer is no. Are we short of implementation, enforcement and people with will? The answer is yes. There is no will and that is why we are paying for it.
What is your view on INEC so far, as preparations for the general election peak?
Honestly, INEC is doing very well, especially the innovation brought by the chairman of the commission. It is very unique and impressive. It is second to none. He has tremendously reformed INEC. He has taken away all those clashes and loss of documents in INEC. Right now whatever transaction does with INEC is done online. You transmit the names of candidates and their documents and CVS online. There is no physical contact anymore. So those issues of people’s documents missing is close to zero percent right now because once you submit the document, INEC generates acknowledgement of the name you have submitted. So the possibility of anybody to tamper with the process is very rare. So it is a great innovation. It is a very good achievement this Chairman has done in transforming INEC. Anybody who knows INEC before would admit openly that there is a great transformation. Also the BVAS they brought in are very unique. They are finger capturing or visual capturing. That is why it is very rare for people to rig elections. And even if the system is being manipulated, it has a way of checkmating itself, because from the point of accreditation, it is recorded by every individual. Your fingerprint and visual capturing is also recorded. So once someone has not gone through the process of accreditation you are not eligible to cast your vote and if you cast it it is null and void. Because at the end of the day when litigations are on INEC would produce the number of people accredited by each polling unit and must correspond with the number of votes at that polling unit. Once it does not correspond according to the system that particular polling unit would be cancelled. That is why 2023 would be a litigation year for elections. Right now INEC says they have almost one million litigation cases requested and about 15 political parties are deeply involved in litigation but SDP is not one of them, because we have navigated the troubled waters. We have studied and found out that there would be a lot of litigations in 2023 because of so many factors. Knowing this, we became very creative in SDP. We did not create a jam-pack in every position. We looked at the credibility of those contesting those positions and based on the credibility, we supported people to contest. We did not look at revenue generation as the basis of running the system. We looked at credibility and the quality of the individuals. Yes, we lost some revenue, but we are happy that we have credible people that are contesting. No people of questionable characters was allowed as candidates And even if you find issues surrounding certificates it cannot be our fault, because we cannot authenticate everything. Now if a legal department or any individual finds out that that particular individual has forged a certificate and there are litigations, he/she should have himself/ herself to blame, not the party. Because the party has done its best. The party has said; ‘bring your photocopies of your certificates’. We scanned and sent then to INEC. The commission has a legal department to go through all those things and certify or raise observations about any individual. So far, we have not received any response from INEC in terms of issues relating to any of our candidates. We don’t know later, maybe rivals from other from other parties might find out something funny. But so far we are okay with our submissions.
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