2019 Presidency: Why Buhari is yet to declare his ambition- Abdulkadir
The National Vice Chairman (North West) of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and former Minister of Youth and Social Development, Alhaji Inuwa Abdulkadir, in this interview with TONY AMOKEODO, LATEEF IBRAHIM and OLU SAMUEL, speaks on a wide range of national issues. Abdulkadir, who holds the traditional title of Magatakarda Babba of Sokoto State, insists that APC has not sidelined former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, former Lagos State governor, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu or any other chieftain.
There is this impression, in many quarters, that the APC is a hot house now and that there are discordant tunes among some of the principal actors and players within the party. Is that the true situation?
It is not correct. Let me correct this impression. You see, the word discordant used is not so. If you say it is a hot house, you see it is a relative term.
It is something needed. Because the party is something needed, people need to be in APC. You should realise always that APC is the party to beat.
APC has opened new vista in Nigerian politics since its inception till date, because it is bringing about change, a change in our political system.
APC is not a party that condones or promotes impunity. What we have archived as a political party at the level of management and operation, if you make comparison with other parties, particularly the PDP, you will see that we respect due process, we respect the rule of law and we respect court orders.
The sanctity of law is being respected. Ever since, we never had any occasion where the presidency intervened in the running of affairs of the party, either in terms of nomination of candidates during one bye election or the elections we have had so far since the inception of this administration.
Even when we came as a new party in 2014/2015, in elections where we had to nominate candidates, there was no imposition of candidates. There was no interference by the leadership of the party.
Overtime, the expectation of the people is to see that the normal thing is being done. The belief is that there are some people up stairs who will dictate what happens.
Secondly, because of the potentials, the viability of the APC as a platform, as a party for people who want to have a platform for them to win elections, so they see the potentials of APC as very important and so everybody is struggling to be in APC.
Everybody wants to have the ticket of APC. So, certainly, there will be struggles and in the course of the struggles, there will be frictions.
Naturally, people want to grab. They want to grab unto themselves and as such there will be resistance. These things are dynamic and normal. It is not as negative as the picture being painted.
Recently, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar said that he is being sidelined in the party and that he doesn’t know what happens in the party. Remember also that former governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, when APC took off, we used to see him everywhere, but he is no longer that visible now. If top members of the party feel they are being sidelined, does that not tell you that something is wrong?
We are not sharing or doing something extraordinary or spectacular that somebody will think that he is being sidelined. APC is a political party, which makes it an institution. We have government that is produced by APC.
Government also is an institution. You see, there are normal things in any power game. Like some of us who were elected to run the affairs of this party, we are the dejure leaders of this party.
But naturally, in our own African setting and the Nigerian way of doing things, there are defacto leaders of this party, whether anybody likes or not.
The Asiwaju (Bola Tinubu) you mentioned, played a very formidable role in the formation of the party, the merger and the build up to 2015 elections, there is no doubt about this. He was one of the driving forces.
It is even an understatement to say that he has made contributions to the party, building that party and the electoral victory because he has electoral value, which he added.
Atiku Abubakar is one of the defacto leaders of the party. He came to APC from PDP and you can’t dismiss the fact that his presence as a former Vice President, his political stature added value to the build up to 2015 elections.
He is an interested party, he contested election against Buhari and Buhari defeated him and won the ticket and that is it. But that did not make him to lose his status as a senior member of the party, as an elder of the party and also a leader in his own right.
So, I could remember, prior to the elections and even after the elections, we attended several meetings of the leadership of the party.
At that time, we had a group called ‘Leaders of the Party Forum’ comprising all the governors, former governors and key members of the party, where the National Chairman of the party presides.
Even before Oyegun ( Cheif John Odigie-Oyegun, National Chairman of APC), was elected. It was either in those meetings strategies for the party, recruitment, campaign strategies were formulated there because we were facing a formidable Federal Government and an odd system of PDP.
So, thereafter, I could remember vividly, that we had formal meetings of the party which he (Atiku) attended and he had been attending, where decisions were taken.
Like also the national caucus of the party, which also an important organ of the party, he attended. I think he made more contributions at that meeting than even the President. He was on the high table with the Chairman, the President and Asiwaju as the leaders of the party.
So also, there was one informal leadership meeting where issues of the party were synchronized, articulated, which was called G-19, made up of select leaders of the party, and he is one of them and he attended those meetings.
That apart, like I said earlier, Atiku has access to the President. He pays private visits to the President. What I am trying to say is that the issue of sidelining and what he had said, do not arise.
Secondly, somebody who has reached that status and age, who has been on this mother earth for at least seven decades and who has attained the enviable position of a Vice President of this country, in itself, qualifies him to be a statesman.
So, having attained that position, there are ways of communication, because his words are not like those of ordinary persons.
Whether locally or globally, when he speaks, he is a statesman, so, that his status has its own etiquette of not saying things anyhow.
Even the missing links by many commentators is that those of us who listened to what he said in the Hausa radio interview he granted, the weight is even bigger than the translated version as reported in English. Certainly, these things, you have to look at and situate them as in their context.
Atiku, as a former Vice President, could as a matter of our tradition and decorum, speak to all these governors, including Asiwaju and others, and if there are problems, he can make contact with them and say let’s go and see the President and advice him on how to do things, not in the public in order to ridicule the President and ridicule the party as if we have failed the nation or the party has failed.
This issue of sidelining, his own is even exclusive because he has exclusive privileges like other equally important party members. There are millions of Nigerians who have equally contributed their own personal money to the campaign.
They may not even have access to the President. Probably, they may have access to their governors or the local leaders. Certainly, it is not fair, it is not proper and it doesn’t befit his status because some of us are supposed to learn how to behave from our elders.
The APC, no doubt, needs a full house to face the coming elections. Now that leaders are talking like this, expressing their disenchantments with the party, are you planning to call them with a view to dialoguing with them?
It is our leaders who should call us and not we calling them. The proper thing is for us, who are the dejure leaders of this party to call people to attend statutory meetings.
But those kind of extra ordinary engagements, it is the leaders, who at their own instance, should say we want to see XYZ people, please come.
There is a problem here, let us solve it. Let us do it this way, this is our thinking. You better reconcile this with that etc. That is how it works.
But if you go by the books, as chairman, will I just sit down and say because am the chairman of the party from my zone, that’s North West, where President Buhari comes from, I will just summon a meeting and sit down in my house and say Buhari should come.
Of course, Buhari is a member of the North West zonal committee, which am the Chairman. If we are going to have that meeting, I will convene a formal meeting.
But when it comes to the reality, it is not me who will call the President and tell him what to do. He is the one who has the right to call me and say that ‘you see chairman, this thing, the way they are going is not nice, let us do it this way or let us do it that way’.
This, I think, is the way things should be done in black Africa. Even elsewhere, you have to respect leadership, you have to respect elders. But the mistake here was going to the public.
We don’t have to wash our dirty linen in the public because what such suggests is not just the plain words used. If I remember, he said after forming government, in which they used their own money and resources, they were sidelined.
You could have used whatever. You could have made contributions. I remember there was this old woman who contributed her savings, one million naira to Buhari’s election, old woman.
Before her death, she even came here before Bihari’s inauguration, she was here. What was she expecting? She didn’t have a company. Was she expecting the Federal Government to buy her foods because she sells food in her village?
She did it because she believed there is somebody who will add value to the leadership of this country. Many of us have contributed. Are we complaining? Even if we want to complain, is this how we should complain?
From the way you have spoken, it is clear that there are many others who contributed and are not complaining. Are you then saying that Atiku should stop complaining?
The contributions am talking about here are relative. There are people who died. I attended all the rallies in my zone. Eight rallies. We had eight presidential campaign rallies in the zone.
There was none that I did not notice somebody falling down there, starving and dying. This is somebody who has family and so on. Is that not a greater sacrifice?
He is there, he is not thinking of being consulted before you appoint Ministers or before you appoint anybody. He is not even expecting personal benefits apart from good governance.
Is that not a better or a bigger contribution than those who spent their profits from their businesses, which in most cases are not all these government patronages?
These are privileged people. What am saying here is this: in all these campaigns, some people will have accidents, some will record injuries, some will record loss of incomes, they will leave their businesses for that day for the rallies.
Some people, on the election day, while waiting to vote, they will lose some incomes. So, it is relative if you say contributions.
How can you compare Asiwaju, the former governor of Lagos State they are talking about? You don’t need to be told his level of contributions. The goodwill that was brought. All these things are there.
The leading opposition party in the country, the PDP, has been maintaining, all along, that they will dethrone the APC in 2019 and take over the Aso Rock presidential villa. With these discordant tunes in your party, are you not paving the way for that?
No. It is normal for people to have quarrel, especially the elite. Anything that the elites are involved, whether the clergy, they quarrel in terms of opinion and so on. It is normal human phenomenon.
If I do the same business with you, there will be quarrel. In terms of marketing your product, maybe we sell detergent, you sell Omo and I sell a Elephant Power, there must be competition.
There must he quarrel here and there. How to retain your customers, how to impress others depend on your marketing strategies. I may record losses this month, but next month my profits and turn over may consume all the profits you have made in the last six months.
The issue of PDP, don’t forget, is what we are still suffering from those problems that were caused by the PDP administration. On a general note, don’t forget, I always want to be blunt and very frank; it is a quarrel by the elite.
It depends on how you act together. We have advantage. Since the inception of this Buhari’s administration, whether we like it or not, the government has introduced certain things, the impact you may not feel immediately.
Some people who have felt the impact may not even have access to media to say it. At least, impunity has been cut to size in both administration of party and governance, because of the attitude of the leader.
The President has changed the psyche. The psyche of an average Nigerian has changed because Buhari respects prudence, wants prudence and accountability.
You may not attain that level of cleanliness in just two years. But in public and even private life now, people are imbibing it because the leader is doing to some extent, the right thing.
The larger population follows the leader. That leader may be wrong, but they still follow him. If he is leading them in the right direction, everybody will be happy.
If he is leading them in the wrong direction, they will only be following and they won’t know that they are in a mess, until a particular stage when there will be a revolt, which happened in 2015.
That’s what happened. People have been following PDP anyhow, because they declare elections, they do whatever they like and there is nothing anybody can do. Gradually, the voters and even the elite themselves realised that they were in a big mess.
That’s why they all came together and formed a party of like minds and they changed the situation. That is what happened in 2015.
All these wrangling is in an effort to consolidate. People now realise that they need to come together and make it more forceful.
In a very clear term, are you saying that APC, at any point in time, did not wrong Atiku, Tinubu and others like them?
Are they not members of the party? Who wronged them? APC is in an institution. Did APC deprive anybody of his entitlements, rights or privilege? Even if not Atiku, but any other member of the party?
He (Atiku) contested election, primary election, was he deprived? He was cleared, he was screened like any other person, it is his right to. Nobody deprived him.
There were no elections which he wanted to contest, as far as I could remember, even in Adamawa, his home state, there were no election which he wanted to contest that we deprived him as a party.
What some people are trying to do to rather misguide other members of the party is just trying to cry wolf where none exist.
Some of these things is that if you look at how President Buhari allows regular National Economic Council, which has been institutionalised now, unlike before, is remarkable.
He gave the Vice President free hand to operate. Some governors in the states don’t even allow their deputies to act on their behalf.
How will you react to the allegation that the President is too rigid and puts too much emphasis on Due Process?
Rigidity is different from due process. That due process is to ensure that everything is done according to the law. It is different from rigidity. The President is not the chopping type and he would not allow you to chop wrongly.
Sir, 2019 is almost around the corner. Was there anytime, whether orally or in writing, that the President told anybody that he would only be running for one term?
Buhari is the President of Nigeria and he is holding the flag of APC, which was given to him for four years. He indicated interest and he was given the ticket after going through the processes of primaries and so on and he won the election.
The constitution of Nigeria provides for two terms. If the time comes for the processes of election for 2019, there will certainly be primaries and these processes require that the party will inform those who are interested to show their interest, indicate their interest and will follow the procedure.
At that point, that’s when this kind of question will arise. As for me, as a leader of the party, I am supposed to play a role of listening to all.
So, it is not our prerogative or our business to know whether Mr A wants to contest in 2019 or not, or the President wants to contest in 2019 or not.
But in fairness to the President, it is something that he would indicate at an appropriate time, not now. You see, if he starts talking now about the 2019 election, it will be a distraction. It will affect governance.
In fact, it will affect every facet of things. Don’t forget, we have investors who have invested in this country because they believe that man (Buhari) can deliver.
By the time you are debating whether he will continue or not, they will have a rethink as businessmen, because they don’t want to risk their investment.
Recently, the Minister of Women Affairs, Hajia Jumai Alhassan created a ripple when she openly threw her support behind the presidential aspiration of Atiku. So many people believe that this development has changed the political equation as well kick started the struggles for 2019. How is the APC going to tackle that, knowing that she is still a member of the party?
The stage we are in as a party and the way I look at is that in partisan politics, our responsibility is to caution members in respect of their conduct which may bring the party to disrepute.
But you can’t gag members from expressing their rights of opinions. However, she has put the cart before the horse. She should have made up her mind and say she is no longer comfortable to be in the same team with Buhari and that Atiku will be a better option.
If that is the case, the simple thing to do in a civilised democracy is for her to resign and say my reason for resignation is that I want to join Atiku because I believe so much in his ability than Buhari. Simple.
Everybody is going to respect that position. Unlike this kind of situation. I know her, she is my sister. She is a very nice person, but on this matter, she has goofed. She goofed on this matter.
People complain that the APC doesn’t have money. Is the party broke?
How do we get money? When people are not paying their dues, how do we get money? It is a tradition that we met in Nigeria, all the political parties, all the members, they subscribe to the parties but they don’t pay their subscription fees.
In the past, part of the abuses of office is that largely, government resources were being deployed to operate the activities of political parties.
Why is APC not holding its national convention, two years after forming the government?
The constitution provides that we have our convention every two years and this year has not passed. We are in September now. We still have up till December for the year to run out and we are in the process of holding our convention.
Some weeks ago, we conducted local government congresses to elect delegates for the purpose of national convention which was done nationwide.
It is not correct to say we are avoiding to have our convention for one reason or the other. After all, it is not an elective convention. It is just a convention to consider reports.
If it were to be elective convention, people may start insinuating that we want to extend our tenure.
So, you are saying that the party has not breached any part provision of its constitution?
For now, yes.
Why is the National Executive Committee, NEC, meetings of the APC not holding as regularly as stipulates by the constitution?
That is part of what we are saying. One exigency or the other. Frankly, we couldn’t have held this meeting in the absence of the President, who is an important member of the party.
One, we cannot pretend about it and if we do so, there will be insinuations about this or that. After all, we don’t have urgent things to discuss at NEC. But we are required to do it.
You see, these are special circumstances, an unusual circumstance that we have found ourselves and even the nation joined us in prayers over the health of the President.
We thank God he is back and he is back to work and in all these things, the processes are on to continue with the normal business.
Assuming we had something urgent, we would have called the NEC meeting and that is why you see that in order to bridge that gap, that is why we have monthly consultative meetings with the governors.
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But in fairness to the President, it is something that he would indicate at an appropriate time, not now. You see, if he starts talking now about the 2019 election, it will be a distraction. It will affect governance. In fact, it will affect every facet of things. Don’t forget, we have investors who have invested in this country because they believe that man (Buhari) can deliver. By the time you are debating whether he will continue or not, they will have a rethink as businessmen, because they don’t want to risk their investment.
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She should have made up her mind and say she is no longer comfortable to be in the same team with Buhari and that Atiku will be a better option. If that is the case, the simple thing to do in a civilised democracy is for her to resign and say my reason for resignation is that I want to join Atiku because I believe so much in his ability than Buhari. Simple. Everybody is going to respect that position. Unlike this kind of situation. I know her, she is my sister. She is a very nice person, but on this matter, she has goofed.
