Under Buhari, the ship of state is threatening to capsize —Okurounmu

Afenifere chieftain and former chairman of the Advisory Committee on National Conference, Senator Femi Okurounmu, spoke with KUNLE ODEREMI and DARE ADEKANMBI, a few hours before the public endorsement of the candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, by former President Olusegun Obasanjom on the state of the nation, the Buhari administration, the emergence of Atiku in the 2019 presidential contest, among other issues.

 

AS an elder statesman, how do you see the ship of the nation at the moment?

The ship of the nation is being tossed around a very stormy ocean. It is in a big storm and it is swirling round and round, almost threatening to capsize.

 

Why is it so?

It is so because we have a government that does not seem to have its bearing correct.

 

After the government has been in the saddle for almost four years?

If you don’t know your way, you may spend 10 years tossing around the ocean. It is not the number of years you spend. The longer time you spend when you don’t know where you are going, the more you want to sink the ship.

 

Are you saying this is so because there was no preparation done by President Muhammadu Buhari on how to govern the country?

About four years ago, they marketed Buhari to us. They did a professional marketing job of brainwashing a lot of Nigerians. They said Buhari is a changed man; now a democrat; not an Islamic fanatic. Everything Buhari was not, they said he was. They suppressed all his bad qualities and dressed him in borrowed clothes to make him good. They made him look as though he is a saint who is above corruption, an angel and labeled Goodluck Jonathan as evil. So, they painted this contrast and most Nigerians, without thinking, swallowed it. Most Nigerians don’t think for themselves; they are easily carried away by brainwashing. Surprisingly, a lot of us in the South-West who pride ourselves on education showed that our education is just to read books and pass. We don’t think. An average northerner who does not go to school is smarter than us politically. When it comes to political sense and political thinking, the illiterate northerners are better and smarter than us. We just talk a lot of grammar from morning till night and the whole talking centres around nothing.

Bola Tinubu, using his publicity machinery, brainwashed a lot of people to vote for Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC). Most people in the South-West fell for their propaganda. It was not until they got into the current mess that they began to see the real Buhari. As soon as they began to see the real Buhari, the intelligent ones among us have started to have a second thought about Buhari. But up till today, there are still some fanatics who are too proud to admit they made a mistake by electing Buhari. There are still many Yoruba-Buharists today who, maybe because of pride or arrogance, are not admitting they made a mistake. They are ready to swim and sink with Buhari.

 

Buhari sat for an examination more than three years ago. Is it possible for him to score zero in all subjects? Are you saying he is a complete failure?

It is not what I say about Buhari. It is what everybody can see. You can see that the economy has nosedived since he got there. Before his advent, our economy was the biggest in Africa. But now, we are not even among the best 10 in Africa today. Our GDP was growing at a much faster rate than that of South-Africa before Buhari came. We have gone down now. Unemployment has boomeranged. 50 per cent of those leaving schools are not able to get jobs. Corruption is multiplying instead of dwindling and, most time, the corrupt people are those around Buhari who say he is fighting corruption. And on insecurity, I think it was Matthew Kukah who said Nigeria is now a massive graveyard of people killed by the herdsmen, innocent farmers and families killed by the herdsmen. Overnight while people are sleeping, the herdsmen set fire on their houses, killing people and massacring them and Buhari does nothing about it because he is a patron to Miyetti Allah whose members commit all these crimes. Buhari is a patron of murderers today.

 

When you elders saw that the president is not getting it right, why didn’t you advise him?

We have been talking. But you should know I was not one of those who voted for him. I cried out loud against voting for him. I told those who voted for him that they would regret doing so. I even took newspaper advertisements, including in your paper, Tribune, to let Nigerians know they are voting for an Islamic fundamentalist, a Jihadist, a Fulani hegemonist. I warned Nigerians. But I could not match Tinubu’s money when it comes to propaganda. Tinubu persuaded many of you to support Buhari.

But since then, I have not kept quiet. I have been playing my own role to let Nigerians know that we have entered a ‘one-chance’ bus in the country today. But we are not giving up and this is why we are organising this workshop to further sensitise Nigerians.

 

At a point in time, Nigerians were talking of a third force, since they have tried APC and PDP. Don’t you think we need a third force?

I am one of those clamouring for a third force. But that third force should have been engineered by the youths mostly. If we have motivated youths, committed youths with vision and who believe that the future of the country really belongs to them, that the elders have ruined the country and they want to build a country they will be all proud to hand over to their children if the youths had come together to organise a third force, they would have succeeded.

But a lot of our youths are busy looking for where they can get money from people. Money has ruined the society; it has corrupted everybody, young and old. Instead of the youth going after principles, the good of Nigeria, they are running after money too. It is those who have money that will control the youth and that is what is happening in the country today.

This is why the choice as of today is between the APC and the PDP because all the other parties have only divided the votes that should have been for the third force. The third force is now divided into so many parties, instead of them uniting to form one solid force. Everybody is now seeing himself or herself as president. We can’t have five different third forces. If they insist on being separate political parties as they are now, they are only helping Buhari because all they are doing is dividing the votes of the opposition. The best thing for them is to coalesce and vote PDP because there must be two clear parties and Nigerians must have a choice against APC. The only viable alternative to APC is PDP.

 

Do you see the emergence former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar as a candidate who is potent enough to stop Buhari in 2019?

I think he is potent enough to challenge Buhari.

 

How do you mean? People raise allegation of corruption against him and that he is another Fulani man.

The only negative thing about Atiku, from my point of view, is that he is another Fulani man. If I had a choice, I would have preferred somebody who is not a Fulani man. But then we always have to look at the choices before us. The choice before us today is between Buhari and Atiku. None of the other presidential candidates can face Buhari.

 

Including former governor of Cross River, Donald Duke?

Donald Duke is a joke. He is even being challenged by those in his party. They are saying the presidential ticket has been zoned to the North and should not have gone to him. They are therefore asking that he should be disqualified and the slot given to Professor Jerry Gana.

 

So, you believe in Atiku?

Look, it is not what I believe in. Given two things, you will always have a choice of which one you prefer. The two choices before Nigerians today are Buhari and Atiku. And, definitely, I will prefer Atiku to Buhari.

 

Atiku was with Olusegun Obasanjo for eight years. What is he capable of bringing to the table in 2019?

In a presidential system, a vice president has no power. A president can decide to give a vice-president nothing to do. A vice-president can go to the office and be reading newspapers. It depends on the president, how much responsibility he gives to his vice-president. So, you can’t hold a vice-president accountable for what he has done or what he has not done. It is the president who is elected to do things. Atiku was elected vice-president to assist Obasanjo in whatever capacity Obasanjo deemed fit.

 

He was in charge of the controversial privatisation of some critical national assets and some criticise him that much didn’t happen under him in this area?

He did not head a decision-making body. It was just an advisory body. In a presidential system, all powers rest on the president. There are no two people. The power is not shared with anybody. In the United States, all powers are with Donald Trump. If he likes, he can fire his attorney-general as he has been thinking of doing lately.

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But Atiku is likely to meet a stiff resistance from Obasanjo who said God won’t forgive him if he ever put Atiku forward as a presidential candidate.

Obasanjo is a very intelligent man. No matter our disagreement, I will credit him for being an intelligent man. He has written at least one or two letters condemning Buhari and telling us why Buhari must not be allowed to return. And I am sure Obasanjo won’t eat his words. It is too late in the day for him to eat his words. Buhari has not changed and Obasanjo, being an intelligent man, knows all these things I am talking about. If he does not want Buhari again, he has only one choice which is to mend fences with Atiku. Obasanjo is a pastor now and he knows that God forgives sinners and he can also forgive Atiku. God sometimes changes his mind if a sinner repents.

 

What do you think should be the dominant issue as we approach 2019 general election campaign?

Of all the presidential candidates now, Atiku has made no secret of the fact that he supports restructuring. So, we should hold him to his commitment to restructure Nigeria. That is even the more reason why those of us who believe in restructuring should support him. People may say he is not sincere, but at least he is one person who has said he is committed to it. Unlike Buhari who does not even want to hear anything about restructuring. We should hold Atiku to his promise of restructuring and I think that is going to be a very important issue during campaign. We will make him campaign on it to let the whole world know that he is campaigning on restructuring. Of course, once we have restructuring, all other problems will be solved. The economy can be better managed if we restructure, even corruption will be minimal. Nigeria will be a much more dynamic place because security will be better handled if we restructure. All the inter-ethnic tensions and rivalries will disappear if we restructure. Every section will be autonomous to manage its own affairs. The fear of domination will disappear. Nobody is going to be afraid that a Fulani man is coming to overrun us. So, restructuring is very crucial.

 

The victory of Dr Kayode Fayemi as APC governor in Ekiti has completed APC’s total routing of the PDP in the South-West. Do you think Atiku will be able to make any inroads in the region?

We had two recent elections in the South-West, Ekiti and Osun states. Compare the margin of the so-called victory of APC in the states to what it was in 2014. In 2015, Buhari swept Osun. But in the recent election, APC lost Osun actually. INEC rigged it for them this time. APC lost the election and INEC said it was inconclusive and APC went to mobilize soldiers to chase people away and they wrote their figures. So, you can’t tell me APC won in Osun. In Ekiti, APC won by a small margin. That shows you that the popularity of Buhari even in the South-West is going down. The embarrassing thing to me is that if you look at the country today, the South-West is where Buhari’s support is strongest, even as diminishing as it is in the South-West. Our people in the West are the ones giving him the strongest support of all the zones in the country. All the other zones don’t even want to hear about Buhari. When you look at the core North where you can say he has a big base, it is from this North that people like Aminu Tambuwal, Rabiu Kwankwaso and others have left his party for PDP. I am sure Tambuwal would not have dumped APC for PDP without the tacit approval of the Sultan.

 

It is mainly difficult to defeat an incumbent in Africa…

I know and that is why one of the issues we will deal with has to do with impediments to free and fair 2019 elections.