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Mr Babatunde Olalere Gbadamosi is the Secretary, National Intervention Movement (NIM), Lagos State chapter. Gbadamosi, who is also a chieftain of the Action Democratic Party (ADP) and a former governorship aspirant on the platform of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Lagos, speaks on the state of the nation, the need for the establishment of NIM, among others, in this interview. BOLA BADMUS brings these excerpts:

 

Despite being a chieftain of the Action Democratic Party (ADP), you are a member of the National Intervention Movement (NIM). Can you shed more light on what the NIM stands for?

Yes, I am the secretary of the movement in Lagos State. The whole idea behind the movement is to get people to become more engaged with policies and politics that govern their lives. It is also for Nigerians in general to get more interested in who the decision makers are, the merits and the demerits of the policies that they are advocating or they want to implement and paying a little more attention to the kind of politics that is being played, with a degree of acrimony that their politics is generating and so on like that. Obviously, we only have one country, we don’t have two. There is only one Nigeria and we have nowhere else to go and if the whole thing falls apart, then we will only have ourselves as citizens to blame. It could be because perhaps we picked the wrong leaders and perhaps we allowed the wrong policies to fly without actually challenging them and perhaps because we allowed a certain type of politics to prevail, or perhaps we had done too much acrimony and too much violence.

The only way we can actually engage our citizens, is by voting and you can’t vote unless you have a Permanent Voter Card so NIM is also about encouraging people to activate their right to vote which basically offers them the right to participate fully in the political process.

 

Are you saying that the NIM does not have the agenda of transforming into a political party after 2019?

I think one needs to be careful not to look too far into the future. The public space is dynamic; things are constantly changing. The whole thing is by nature in the state of flux. Who knew for instance that it was going to be a reality? Who knew? Nobody thought it possible that Donald Trump could win the presidential election in the United States. No one thought it possible. So, basically what I am saying is that politics is dynamic so we can’t rule anything in and we can’t rule anything out yet.

 

There is a recent report that NIM had a meeting with the former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Is that a precursor to NIM teaming up with Obasanjo’s coalition?

Let me ask you this question, is the former president a Nigerian or not? I mean you know that he led Nigeria on two separate occasions. He is a leader of Nigeria, he is not a member of any political party right now. To the best of your knowledge, he has said it at various public forums that he is not a member of any political party. Meeting Obasanjo is pretty much part of the whole process of discussing the state of the nation with various personalities, that is people of influence in Nigeria to try and get them to influence what is going on within the polity. So, some members of NIM in their private personal capacities have gone to see the former president and nothing is stopping them from doing that. Nothing in the constitution, nothing under the law precludes anyone from seeing anyone. As some people have gone to see Obasanjo, so some people have gone to see Babangida, so some people have gone to see the sitting president. Likewise, so many people have gone to see General Gowon, some people have gone to see Chief Shonekan. All former leaders of the country, including Shehu Shagari, people have gone to see all these people in a bid to put together a position of harmony, a position on which we can build the unity of this country.

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So if that was the case, why were party leaders in that meeting?

It is an all-inclusive movement. Nobody is barred from participating in it. So if political parties want to come in as part of the NIM, they are very welcome. The whole idea is to open up the space and how do we understand what is going on if political parties find it unattractive to be a part of it? That shows you that we are actually succeeding in our aims and objectives, which are to be able to influence the polity whilst not being partisan.

 

If that is the case, should Nigerians still consider NIM as the Third Force?

I think the reasons you will see some leaders of NIM meeting with former President Obasanjo and some other people of his calibre will be some other things that have been said by both parties at different forums. One of the things Obasanjo has said is that this movement is not partisan; that’s one. Two, the whole idea is to find individual politicians whose profiles fit into the ideals espoused by the movement at the same time. The NIM also wants to identify principled personalities and knowledgeable people, not necessarily experienced in terms of Nigerian politics but experienced in various fields of human endeavour enough to be able to make an impact worthy to get into the public space or public service in one way or the other either by getting elected or by getting appointed into positions of responsibility. So, what NIM is about is not necessarily partisan politics; It’s more about influencing. Partisan politics does not exist in a vacuum, because it is driven by some people. So our agenda is to influence those people and perhaps have a situation where some of our members get into those positions either through their involvement in political parties or through getting appointed into certain positions such that we can begin to change this country for the better.

 

You were formerly in the PDP where you aspired to become governor in the last election. Why did you leave the party?

I really don’t want to dwell much on that. What is gone is gone and what is in the past is past. I took a considered decision after a long period of consultations to leave the party and focus on my business.

 

But people are asking why you left PDP. Is it because of the fact that you were not allowed to fly the governorship ticket of the party in 2015?

Whether I was allowed or not, the whole point is that at a point, I realised that the PDP’s political philosophy, the direction in which the party went, I think from around 2012, was completely at variance with the direction I expected it to go. On the basis of that principle, I’m not talking about the government per se. I’m talking about the party itself, the direction in which the party went was eventually what dragged the government down. It was the party that dragged the government down and not the other way round. People tend to look at it differently and think that it was the performance of the government that dragged the party down, but it was the party that dragged down the previous administration.

In my opinion, that administration [the Jonathan administration] actually did quite well, especially at the federal level. They actually did a lot for Nigeria; they did well in the area of agriculture. They did excellently well in the area of diversification of the economy by turning it into a service-based rather than a mono-product economy, which relies on just oil. If you look at the GDP figures for 2014, you will see that oil contributed just 15 per cent of the entire GDP, which is frankly not too much and wasn’t a lot. So I left PDP because of its behaviour, conduct which eventually seems to have become a culture was completely at variance with everything I hold dear. The result of the Lagos State 2015 PDP primary was just part of that culture.

 

What is your view on local government autonomy, true federalism and constitutional amendment and all these agitations for restructuring?

Let me put it to you like this, you can’t say you are truly a federal country unless your federating units are enjoying some measures of independence in their finances, most importantly, their civil defence, that is, the police and so on. It must include control over their resources and economic policies, even to some extent, some level of foreign policy. If your federating units are not able to take care of those aspects of their lives to some extent without interference from an overbearing federal authority, then it is not really a federation.; it is a unitary state and that is what Nigeria has been. Let us be honest with ourselves; we call it a federation but in reality and operation, it is not a federation, it’s a unitary state. This is so because there are so many powers concentrated at the federal level in the hands of the president that you have to wonder what is the point of the existence of the states? Why are they there? Why are governors called the Chief Security Officer of their states, if they have no control over any security apparatus? The constitution as it stands, unfortunately in my opinion, is a tissue of lies. The constitution seeks to legislate, for instance, over local criminal issues, seeks to control the police at the federal level so that the state governors have no control over the police. I have a problem with that, so it is very necessary that there must be full devolution not somebody’s form of devolution. We are still going to be going through the same problems.