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| Lai Mohammed |
Following the recent deadly bomb blast at Nyanya motor park, Abuja, the Peoples Democratic Party blamed the opposition party, All Progressives Congress, for acts of terrorism in the country. In this interview with ADEOLA BALOGUN and GBENRO ADEOYE, the spokesperson for APC, Lai Mohammed, reacts to the allegations
Why is it that the All Progressives Congress is trying to get to power at all cost, even by using terrorism?
Is that your understanding of the issue? Will you please give me one example of the APC using terrorism to get to power?
That seems to be the consistent allegation by the PDP?
I would have preferred if you had framed your question to say, ‘What is your response to the allegations of PDP?’ But for you to ask why is APC trying to get to power by using all means; I’m very disappointed. Yes, it’s true that the PDP has made the allegations and those are very reckless allegations. Not only are they reckless, they are without any substance. I keep asking, if APC is behind terrorist acts, what has prevented the government from arresting those people? What are the acts of APC that suggest that we either support or back terrorism? Is it logical that the states that are ravaged by terrorism; by coincidence, also happened to be controlled by the APC? Does it make sense for the APC to direct violence at its own people? Wouldn’t they wage the war against other people? But I think it goes far beyond that; this government has been overwhelmed by the Boko Haram insurgency and despite increased spending on security, despite declaring state of emergency in some states for one year, the insurgency has proved intractable. But rather than admit and accept their failure and ask for help, they are shifting blame. In the first instance, under our constitution, it is not APC that is responsible for security. It is the commander-in-chief that is responsible for security. Now, they have gone out to quote certain leaders of the APC out of context, who either during electioneering campaign or during debates, have said just one thing; that if elections are not free and fair, there would normally be consequences. Anybody who has followed Nigeria’s history will realise that the first coup which was precipitated by the breakdown of law and order in the then Western Region was as a result of electoral malpractice. Since then, Nigeria has not been the same again. Also in 1979, it was also the result of electoral malpractice, especially in Ondo State that led to the breakdown of law and order and led to another coup, In 1993, it was the annulment of a free and fair election that led to Nigeria being declared a pariah state for five years. Even in 2011, it was the perception of some people in the north that the elections were rigged that led to violence. So all we have been saying is that the only panacea to electoral violence is a free, fair and credible election. But this is what PDP callously has been holding on to, to portray our party as a party that supports terrorism. As General Mohammadu Buhari (retd) rightly said, the Lemu Panel did investigate the post-presidential election violence in 2011, the panel didn’t say Buhari was responsible. Frankly speaking, I think Nigerians are tired of this. If any Nigerian is responsible for violence, the government should please make public the name of such a person and prosecute the person.
And on the contrary, it is this same government that came out and said Boko Haram was in its own government. The (former National Security Adviser) late General (Patrick) Aziza also said that the problem of Boko Haram was in the PDP. So when now did the perpetrator become the accuser? But we’ve gone beyond that. We have asked Mr. President to call a national summit on security and that we in the opposition will participate and contribute. So the issue of Boko Haram cannot be politicised. But from what we see, it appears that the Federal Government has an ulterior motive. From what we see, it appears the Federal Government is trying to benefit from this continued violence. From what we can read, it appears that the Federal Government is factoring 2015 into the situation, with the manner it is handling the Boko Haram issue. They have been flying several kites to inform Nigerians that there will be no election in the states that have Boko Haram, knowing that those states are firmly under the control of the APC. But doesn’t it bother Nigerians that the APC government of Yobe State in December 2011 conducted local government election and there was no single violence? Doesn’t it bother Nigerians that the APC in February this year conducted membership registration exercise in the entire country, including Yobe, Adamawa and Borno states and no violence was recorded? Doesn’t it bother the government that APC conducted ward congresses all over Nigeria, including these three states and there was no violence? Why then is the government saying that elections will not be conducted in those states? We are getting to a stage where Nigerians will begin to ask questions as to what is the role of the Federal Government in this insurgency? There are too many coincidences. Again only a few weeks ago, the government boasted that it had been able to drag Boko Haram out of the metropolis and in quick succession, Boko Haram replied. First, by the so-called attempted jail break at the SSS headquarters and now by the Nyanya bomb blast. Our position is this, it’s either the government is overwhelmed and has no solution, in which case, it should call a summit of security in Nigeria or the government knows more than it is telling us.
Some allegations have been made that the spokesperson for the PDP, Olisa Metuh, was a street fighter. Do you think his allegation that APC was responsible for Nyanya bomb blast came from the fighter in him?
It would appear that the PDP felt and still feels that it has lost the battle of public opinion. So I think it must have extracted him to become more combative and challenge anything APC says. Unfortunately, he’s missing the point. The PDP is not an opposition party and when it now starts behaving like an opposition party, then it becomes ridiculous. Take for instance, the opposition party has the unique advantage of criticising the government in power but not the other way round. What PDP is doing now is that it has turned us into the government and criticising us. It is not the APC that has the responsibility of securing Nigeria, it’s the PDP. I think at times, the party anticipates our reaction and tries to be proactive. In the process, it gets ridiculous because it becomes counterproductive. If there is a bomb blast today anywhere in Nigeria, the Federal Government has the responsibility to secure lives and property. So, the opposition will naturally say that the government is not doing well. It’s not for the government to now say the opposition is responsible. If it is responsible, why are you not arresting its members? But honestly I can understand Metuh’s position. There is nothing to report. That is why PDP has now become the opposition- APC 2. We are APC 1.
PDP is saying that APC members might not be seen carrying arms but that the utterances of their leaders have emboldened insurgents?
How did they? As I’ve been trying to explain to you, when someone like Lawal Kaita said that they would make Nigeria ungovernable if the North did not get the presidency, he was not talking as a member of the APC. As a matter of fact, he was speaking then as a member of the PDP. But as of today, Kaita is not even a member of the APC. And Kaita made the statement when Atiku was locked in battle with Jonathan. So how did that become an APC statement? General Buhari has said that he gave an interview in Hausa and gave a proverb in Hausa, and that proverb was deliberately mistranslated and misquoted to mean that he was blood thirsty. Nasir El Rufai said there would be more violence in 2015 than in 2011 if the elections are not free and fair. Does the government intend not to make elections free and fair? Compare all these with the statements of Asari Dokubo, E.K. Clark and some militants and tell me which statement has really encouraged violence? In the so-called APC statements credited to El Rufai and Buhari, they were talking within the context of free and fair elections. Compare them with Dokubo who said that even if elections are free and fair, and Jonathan does not win, there would be violence. He even went further to say that if APC should choose a candidate other than from the South-South, and if that candidate should win in a free and fair election, there would be violence. I think these are more inciting, more senseless than the statements they are hanging on the APC. You don’t call a dog a bad name in order to hang it. What we are saying is that no amount of name-calling can remove from the Federal Government the responsibility of keeping law and order. No amount of blame shifting can erase the fact that this government has failed woefully in the area of security. People have been talking about Boko Haram but it’s not the only security challenge that we have in Nigeria. Plateau (State) has been a killing field for more than 10 years. The killing in Plateau predates Boko Haram. The bloodletting associated with Ombatse group and co in Nasarawa State has nothing to do with Boko Haram. Yet, this government said it was not going to punish anybody even when some militias were accused of killing over 40 policemen and SSS officers. Why is that? More people have died in the herdsmen and Tiv clashes than probably even in Boko Haram attacks. What is the government doing?
I think Nigerians will not allow anyone to pull wools over their eyes. The Jonathan government has failed us woefully in the area of security. The little respite we have in some states, especially in APC states, is the result of the efforts of the Security Trust Funds set up to support the police, the army and other arms of government. But clearly, this government has failed Nigerians.
APC has promised that the issue of Boko Haram will die down if it wins the election. So the PDP is saying that APC must have known about terrorism before assuring Nigerians that it will solve the problem.
Is that not very stupid thinking? Absolute bunkum and childish. If I say that if APC wins at the Federal level, APC will make sure that the issue of unemployment becomes a thing of the past, can you now accuse me of being responsible for unemployment in Nigeria? It’s how illogical and how silly they can be. What we said was that if we were in government, this matter would not get to this level because we would have been able to identify the real cause of Boko Haram. This government for a long time pretended that Boko Haram was Northern Nigeria’s response to a southerner becoming a president. And we said ‘no, that’s not correct’. Boko Haram has been in existence since 2002. As a matter of fact, it was under (former president Umaru) Yar’Adua, a northerner that Yusuf Mohammed, their leader was summarily executed. So it’s not correct. They came again to say that Boko Haram is an attempt to Islamise Nigeria. Also, it’s not correct because the biggest victims of Boko Haram are from the North. They are mostly Muslims. And even to Boko Haram, I’m not a good Muslim, for instance, and we claim to have a secular state. Yes, there are some religious undertones in Boko Haram, there are some political undertones too. But at the base of Boko Haram is poor governance, hardship, corruption, unemployment and radicalisation of our youths. And we have always suggested to the Federal Government that you cannot defeat Boko Haram by military force alone. You must align the military with the political, the economic and the social. Everywhere in the world where there is insurgency, they use two things. One is what they call community cooperation and the other is rehabilitation. What do we mean by community cooperation? You can’t fight insurgency in an area without working with the community. They are not ghosts, they have relations and their bases are within these areas. If you work with the communities, you will get more results. But what do we do? We sit in Abuja, set up Joint Task Force in Abuja without asking them to collaborate with the local communities. I remember when after a long time, the President finally managed to go to Borno State and the leaders in the state made suggestions, he talked down on them. Now, is it not significant that Boko Haram has gotten worse between then and now? We advise the Federal Government that amongst what it needs to do is to ensure that the force enabler and welfare of soldiers are improved. This was what the Governor of Borno State was trying to say that ‘look, these people seem to be better motivated’ and the President got annoyed. We advised government to move in with a martial plan-complete economic and social rehabilitation of the Northeast. Believe me if we move in today to the Northeast with massive relief materials, with economic empowerment, we are going to distract 50 per cent of the youths from being recruited by the Boko Haram. What did the government do? It allocated N2bn only to rehabilitate the Northeast. That is an insult. It does not seem to know the magnitude of the destruction in the Northeast. Over the years, over 10,000 widows have been created as a result of this senseless war. The biggest cattle market in West Africa, Potiskum, has been destroyed. The economies of all these three states have been destroyed. Over 800 classrooms have been destroyed; 209 schools in Yobe and 300 in Borno states alone destroyed. Yet, you say you want to use N2bn to rehabilitate them. These are some of the things. And then we said, soldiers and policemen have never been known to bring peace. So on the one hand, you use soldiers to curb the insurgency but then you must have what we call internal peace makers. There are many NGOs that are trained for that. The situation is traumatic, so lots of trauma have been created; so we need specialists there. Otherwise, we are going to win the war and lose the peace. We understand how insurgency has been handled in other parts of the world, and that’s why we say if we were in government, we would resolve it. It doesn’t mean that when we get to government, it would just go like that. No. It’s simply because we are going to consult, we are going to dialogue. After all, at the height of the Niger Delta militancy, it was dialogue that solved the problem. It was not force.
Why is APC labelled a Muslim party?
APC is not a Muslim party. No political party in Nigeria today can win power either based on religion or ethnicity. Nigeria is too diversified and any attempt to pigeonhole any political party as either Muslim or Christian or North or South can only divide the country further. Now, it’s very convenient to say General Buhari is a Muslim and in APC. Or that Bola Tinubu is a Muslim and in APC. But Buhari or Tinubu, are they officials of the party? They are not. We have 17 Christians and 18 Muslims in our executive. The issue of whether the chairman and the secretary are Muslims is completely irrelevant, because the interim officers were not elected. It was the condition of the Independent National Electoral Commission that before a merger would be approved, we must submit a list of interim officers. So we could only ask the merging parties to bring us lists. Those who brought us Muslims, we could not ask them to change the list and bring Christians. Those like Abia that brought us only Christians, we couldn’t ask them to change the list and bring Muslims. At the end of the day, despite all these, we still achieved a balance. Yes, it is very convenient to talk about El Rufai, Lai Mohammed, Buhari, but they forget that Chief Tom Ikimi is a Christian and he’s a member of the national working committee of the party, Niyi Adebayo is a Christian and a member of the national working committee of the party because he’s the national vice chairman, South-west. Dr Iyerere is a Christian. Osita Izunazu is the national organising secretary of the party and he’s a Christian, Ima, the former ANPP national publicity secretary is the national welfare officer of the party and he’s a Christian. The deputy national youth leader is a Christian. So it’s true that people like Lai Mohammed has more recognition because of being the spokesperson, so he’s always probably visible on TV but I can assure you today that religion has never been an issue in APC and it will never be an issue. I can sit down here too and say the President is a Christian, the Senate President is a Christian, the deputy senate president is a Christian, the chief of staff is a Christian, the secretary to the government is a Christian. Does that make PDP a Christian party?
You said religion will never be an issue but isn’t it already an issue with Femi Fani Kayode saying that he would never support a Muslim-Muslim ticket in the APC?
Let me ask you a question, can the candidates emerge before the convention? It is the right of anybody in a party to aspire to any office and it’s also the right of anybody to campaign, mobilise and lobby for support, but at the end of the day, it is the national exco of the party that will formulate that. But we have not even gotten there at all. Again, it is part of the campaign of calumny against APC. And I begin to wonder why people are not asking those questions. When did the candidates emerge? Who announced it? It’s just a whole lot of distraction as far as we are concerned because at the end of the day, whoever will emerge will emerge in strict accordance with the party’s constitution and its guidelines.
At a time, APC seemed to be expanding up north but when the party absorbed some people from other parties, some members left, alleging imposition, why?
In Nigerian politics, the common thing is for people to benefit from a situation but refuse the burden of other situations. When the interim exco met and resolved that in states where we had governors, the governors would be allowed to drive the process of the interim excos of those states, we then had 11 governors. We didn’t have governors in Kano and Sokoto states, neither Ibrahim Shekarau (former Kano State governor) nor Attahiru Bafarawa (former Sokoto State governor) complained about it. But when we now had governors of PDP coming to join us, and the governors of Kano and Sokoto became APC members, they now wanted us to change the rule and we said no, we can’t change the rule because it affects your personal ambition and ego. That was what happened. But on the contrary, the party is by far more popular in the North today than it was two months ago. So don’t confuse label with content. Our party’s popularity is far higher in the Northern part of Nigeria and everywhere.
Are you saying that the exit of the former governors of Kano and Sokoto states did not affect the party?
In Kano, Shekarau left us for the PDP but we gained other converts. That’s why I said don’t confuse label with content. You see, Shekarau has a name but there are many voters who you don’t know, who flock to our party everyday. Today, if 10,000 people join our party and none of them is a former council chairman or a former minister, you just hear that some people joined. But if five people joined and all five of them are ministers, it makes news. So we are very comfortable with our fortunes in Kano. It has not dented at all by the exit of either Shekarau in Kano or Bafarawa in Sokoto.
Before the merger, APC used to be known as the party of the progressives. Can you say the same thing with the party now when there are all manners of people joining the party?
Very much so. What makes a party a party of progressives or conservatives is the manifesto of the party. It’s the constitution and the ethos of the party. Those who came to join us will not change our constitution and our manifesto. On the contrary, many of them are now doing what APC governors used to do. The Kwara State Governor immediately went to create 5,000 new jobs. Kano State Government introduced free education, so it’s not the people in a party that will necessarily determine the leaning of the party, it is the constitution and the manifesto of the party. Don’t forget that we unveiled our roadmap on March 6, 2014 and all the governors were there and they subscribed to it. The fact that some governors joined APC from the PDP did not make APC less progressive. So those who are saying that PDP has come to dilute us don’t even understand what it’s all about. But on the contrary, they have come to strengthen us.
Some people believe that there are some APC governors who are relatively young. Even though, you have not held your congress, is it not strange that all the names like Babatunde Fashola and Adams Oshimhole have not been prominent as presidential hopefuls? Why is it just Buhari and Tinubu that people are hearing about?
First, you mentioned Oshiomhole, he has a job at hand. You mentioned Fashola, he also has a job at hand as governor. If you mention Fayemi, he has an election coming up. Secondly, in politics, we cant stop anybody’s ambition and in politics, you also don’t make presumptions. Unknown to many people, the people you have mentioned are the brain box of the party, working tirelessly for the party because they are in charge. They just laugh at all these insinuations and conjectures.
But one allegation has refused to go away, which is that APC is a party of one man, Tinubu. Why is this so?
It’s part of the propaganda of the PDP. You know, when you start repeating a lie so many times, people will start believing it. When we were in the Action Congress of Nigeria, they called it Ashiwaju Congress of Nigeria. But many of us in the party knew the kind of robust debate that went on in the party. We knew the kind of dynamics in the party and that it was never a one-man party. There was a time we had only one state and then we had Edo State. At the height of ACN’s glory, we had only six states. Are you saying that Ashiwaju dictated what happened in Edo, Ekiti and so on. It didn’t happen at all. Now APC has 16 states and you still say it’s a one-man party. If we have 16 states and you still say it’s a one man party, then I think that people should come and join that party because that man must be super human. But the honest truth is that it is not true. Decisions in our party are taken in very democratic forms. Yes, one thing I will admit is that we have very strong personalities in our party. We have people you may hate or love, they are household names. They are people who have become legends in their own time. But then, we can’t blame the party for that. They are more of assets to the party. They are not liabilities to the party because without those strong characters in the party, we probably would not have achieved the level of compromise we achieved in merging the parties as one.
General Buhari came out to threaten legal action against the PDP for associating him with terrorism. Don’t you think this is coming too late because this has been on for some time?
I don’t think so. You know, this is the first time they have come out to mention names. It was when we challenged them to specifically name people that they named Buhari and El Rufai. El Rufai has already threatened court action but there has been no noise about it. Before, it used to be a very general allegation, that is, pointing to our leaders. I think what pushed them to name General Buhari was when about a month ago, I challenged the PDP to make public the names of these leaders in our party and Olisa Metuh mentioned El Rufai, citing certain statements credited to him. You know, immediately after the Nyanya bomb blast, about an hour or so, he issued a statement where he laid the blame on APC. I think he got so much backlash from Nigerians that he was now provoked to name Buhari. At that point, Buhari now said ‘enough is enough.’ So that’s when he made that statement and I can assure you that if no action is taken, the matter will go to court.
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