Why I’m not proud to call Buhari my president — Aribisala
Why I’m not proud to call Buhari my president — Aribisala
Dr. Femi Aribisala, a pastor and Vanguard columnist, in this
interaction with Vanguard editors, ventilates his passion for President
Goodluck Jonathan and explains his position on the person and politics
of the president-elect, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari. Excerpts:
Femi Aribisala
What is your perspective on the just concluded presidential election?
This has been the most important political campaign I have witnessed
in Nigeria. And the campaign will, to some extent, define the
presidency. There were things that needed to be said, emphasized and
brought to Buhari’s attention because we needed to remind him that some
things would not be acceptable if he becomes the president. Buhari was
made to go through a lot of phases. There were some things like the
Muslim-Muslim ticket which some of us made so much noise about and they
just had to drop it at some point. There were other things that Buhari
did which he would not normally do because we made so much noise about
his antecedents. Sometimes people simplistically define the process by
the result. No! The whole debate is to make him understand that it is
not what he had before. It was to make him realize that this is a
democratic framework. It was also to sensitize him that certain things
would not be acceptable.
How did you come about your claim that INEC rigged the election for Buhari?
There are certain things that are interesting about this election.
The first one is that it is one of the most keenly contested elections
that we have had in this country. It involved more people. But 10
million less people voted than last time, which gives us some idea as to
how true some of the figures we have been having before had been. But
the question is: Where did the decline of 10 million come from? I
discovered that it came disproportionately in certain areas than it did
in others. And to some extent, if you look at the PVC distribution, you
can project the election. It is because Buhari could campaign in the
South, but the North did not permit same kind of liberty for the
president. The president was stoned in Buachi and he was threatened. By
the time the pattern of PVC distribution became very known even in
war-torn states, it was easy to know that it had been front-loaded. When
you then analyze the election result itself, you will discover that
some places just had an incredible suppression of voters in spite of
high level of interest. Some people had an incredible number of voters.
And I am still interested in why more people voted in the governorship
election in Katsina than the presidential election.
On alleged gang- up against President Jonathan
If Buhari had contested in the United States, there is no way that he
could win. It is impossible. We know his antecedents. Nigeria doesn’t
even teach history in schools. Once you bring up the antecedents, the
very idea of having such a person gunning for a position, not even talk
of the presidency, would have nullified his candidacy. I was not just
writing about Buhari because he tried to arrest me. There were all sorts
of things that he did and for which he never apologised. Buhari took
ownership of those things. And he never asked for forgiveness. At
different points in the history of Nigeria, he was given an opportunity
to do that. We set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but he
refused to do it. You don’t forgive a man who does not repent.
With regards to President Jonathan, I had a problem with the gang-up.
And I think it is wrong for two major tribes to gang up against someone
from the minority. Why should a President be called clueless? I don’t
think that someone will get away with calling Obasanjo clueless. Somehow
I feel that the South-South is entitled to have their son as president
and we were acting as if we were doing them a favour. If it was not
providence that threw up Goodluck Jonathan, I wonder if we would have
considered having a South-South president. In the interest of national
unity, the North-West producing the president again does not balance any
equation in Nigeria. If we are talking about a president from the
North, we should be talking about the North-East. I was offended that
from the beginning, some people insisted that there would be a civil war
if the man ran. They also insisted that they would create a problem if
the man ran. And I said that Nigeria belongs to every one of us. So that
was an issue to me.
Wole Soyinka had vowed not to support Buhari but a few weeks
to the election, he asked Nigerians to forget the past and move on. Are
you not being unfair to Buhari given the circumstances we found
ourselves?
I said you only forgive somebody who repents. Buhari has never asked
anyone to forgive him. So you are jumping into conclusion that we have a
new Buhari? And the fact that he has won the election has not won him
forgiveness. We are going to see if Buhari has changed. And I have said
that if he has changed, he will do more than just wearing a suit. He
will come out and apologise for things done and overdone. He said he
took responsibility which is different from apologising. The man who
admitted stealing a cow is different from the one who said forgive me
for stealing a cow. Buhari is a very deliberate man.
I am not persuaded by the election campaign that Buhari is going to
be a very competent president. I have not seen any competence in him.
There was nothing in the campaign that was of substance that impressed
me. No new ideas came from Buhari or the APC. Most of the people in APC
are PDP people. So I am not persuaded that we are in for any new thing.
But I hope you are right.
Beyond Buhari, you are also not a friend of Bola Tinubu. What are your reasons?
I wonder why anybody will be a fan of Bola Tinubu especially if you
live in Lagos. He is not a democrat. I don’t like Bola Tinubu because he
has monopolised Lagos politics. To some extent, Ekiti governorship
election was lost because of him. I live in Lekki and every day I have
to pay toll fare and I wish I was not doing that. APC is in control of
the media to a very large extent. Governor Fashola has gotten an easy
pass with the media. It is easy for a Lagos State governor to be seen to
be good because he has resources. In the light of the resources of the
state, only 10 percent of the people have access to potable water, the
same percentage has access to educational structures. In order for the
APC to survive, the resources of this state had to be commandeered for
political purposes. So, you can see the end justifies the means.
I think it will be foolish of Tinubu to take AIT to court over the
Lion of Bourdillion case because if he does, the kind of things that
would be revealed about him would be shocking. This godfather business
is undemocratic. Let people choose their leaders. One person cannot sit
somewhere and decide what is best for everybody. I don’t believe that
elections are free and fair in Lagos. I do not believe that Jimi Agbaje
lost this election. It was APC’s manipulation that brought out the
governorship election result. That is my own opinion.
Not many Nigerians are asking Buhari to apologise. What exactly do you want him to apologise for?
It is part of my problem with the media at the moment. We are being
given the impression that Buhari won by a landslide. Please let us look
at what INEC declared. 12.8 million people voted for Goodluck Jonathan.
So don’t assume that they don’t have their reasons or that the people
that want him to apologise don’t exist. I maintain that it is very easy
to say that we don’t want to look at the past because we want to look at
the future. But we need to understand the past in order to move to the
future.
So, Buhari needed to apologise. He needed to ask for forgiveness
because he killed people through extra-judicial means, he jailed people
for telling the truth, he kept people in jail even when kangaroo courts
that he set up said they were not guilty. He manipulated the judiciary
into jailing some people. I could go on and on. That is why I said that
if we were a serious democracy, he would never have gotten away with it.
There is a reason Buhari was not nominated by the northerners. They
voted for Kwankwaso and Atiku at the primaries. Buhari got his candidacy
through Tinubu. We don’t have to pretend that Buhari is well liked
because he has won, it seems to be like that but we should know that he
only has the plurality of 2.5 million votes.
In your penultimate column you claimed the emphasis on the alleged rigging was in the South-South and South-East, but the PDP was beaten in areas where they had strengths like Niger, Kaduna and other places. You think the resentment was not real?
I mentioned those areas as well. I mentioned Kano, Jigawa, Katsina
and Bauchi. I said the results from these places were inflated. We have
video recordings of underage voting. There is a problem with the
election because if we accept what the PVCs are saying that 17.1 million
registered for the election in the North-West alone, the zone will
determine future elections. If they decide that they want somebody to be
president, by the time we will be looking at the result and they will
come up with 9.1 million from Kano, the whole equation would change.
What can you get from Imo and Anambra? So, if the North-West vote is
more than the South-South and South-East, there is going to be a
problem. There will be a problem if we don’t get the proper census of
Nigeria. They used to tell us that Kano was bigger than Lagos. Jigawa
was split from Kano and Kano is still supposedly bigger than Lagos. In
this last election, about 3.1 million people voted in Kano and Jigawa.
And 1.4 million people voted in Lagos. That is twice the number of the
people in Lagos. I don’t believe these figures. If you do, fine. I am
entitled to my opinion.
You said you don’t like Tinubu because of
the reasons you adduced, but when the books would be written, it would
be said that Tinubu contributed significantly to Buhari’s emergence as a
democratically elected president. What do you make of that?
I don’t agree that Tinubu made Buhari the president. Let’s get the
facts right. Tinubu made Buhari the presidential candidate of the APC.
But in the presidential election, Buhari did not win Tinubu’s votes. And
that is part of the problem. All the discussion before was that
everything would be determined in the South-West, but Tinubu did not
deliver the South-West. The margin of defeat in the presidential
election was not much in Lagos. Tinubu, to some extent at the
presidential level, is expendable. And that is the problem. You can
actually not choose a president just from the North. It interests me
that while the campaign was going on, all the northerners making noise
that it was their turn disappeared.
They did not campaign with Buhari. The people campaigning were
Tinubu, Amaechi, Fashola. I bet you that the northerners are going to
come out come May 29. And you will see it happen. Don’t think that the
people that had been clamouring for power to return to the North in the
past six years, were doing that for Tinubu to inherit. I don’t believe
that. They have an agenda. That is why I said the story is not told
because the election has taken place, the story will unfold when the
administration comes on board.
Are you saying that you are impressed with Jonathan’s performance?
Yes I am. I think APC ran a fantastic campaign. They hired Obama’s
people and they controlled so many different things. So, a lot of things
were simply propaganda. And part of the problem with the PDP was that
they had it so easy for so long that they did not know how to campaign
anymore. So, they thought that it was just going to be another cake
work, and this was a different issue for them. Many of the things that
Jonathan did, his people like Reuben Abati did not talk about it. People
just did not know anything until some spirited efforts were made at the
last-minute during the extension. That was when they now told people
what had happened. But within the framework of Nigerian presidency,
Jonathan is a good president if you compare him with others who had
occupied that position.
You are talking about the North being the
decider with the way things are now. What then do you think the
South-East and South-South can do?
Within the framework of the democratic experiment in Nigeria, the
North has been the part of Nigeria that has held the country together.
The South-East is neither here nor there. The civil war is still an
issue. The South-West doesn’t often show an inclination to take a
national outlook. The North voted for Abiola. But the problem with this
particular election is that we have an APC that is very sectarian in
outlook. APC is not a national party like the PDP. APC is an aggregation
of sectarian parties that came together simply to get power at the
centre. And in order to do that, they had to distort the process. That
is why I said that northerners were intimidated and told that they must
vote for Buhari. And this is bad for democracy. When politics gets to
the sectarian level, it becomes a problem. And we have allowed it to
define and determine this election.
There was no level-playing ground. Buhari could go anywhere in the
South and nobody threatened him, but anytime Jonathan wanted to campaign
in the North, bombs will explode. We can’t say we are not aware of it.
And this tendency will not help this democracy. But we must talk about
it. Even though we will say that we are glad that we have missed the
bullets of rioters, we need to talk about it.
The truth is that if Jonathan had won, there would have been
conflagration because you have a party that only accepts victory. And
there is nothing democratic about that. Buhari lost three times, he
never congratulated the winners. Jonathan lost once and conceded defeat.
Thank God for that. But if Buhari had won, we would have been in
trouble. And democracy is not like that. It should not be like that.
That is why people who say I am an intractable opponent of Buhari are
mistaking my passion. Why can I hate them? In the final analysis, Buhari
is now the president-elect, he is going to be my president because the
people have spoken. We must ensure that the culture of our democracy is
such that a party can field a candidate in the North and not be
intimidated with all kinds of sentiments that are going to be
introduced. So, this was, in many respects, a flawed election.
Looking forward, do you think this man has
the capacity to do the job because many people voted for him because he
is seen to be incorruptible? In your view, do you think this man will
deliver on the expectations?
In my view, I am pessimistic. I don’t think Buhari can move the
economy forward because he has no understanding of economics. I tell
people that I am waiting for our currency to be equal to the dollar
which is one of the things he promised.
One has to see who his advisers are. Again, one has to deal with his
antecedents. If there was a change in Buhari, we should have known it in
the last three months. It should have come out from his pronouncements
during the campaign, but there was nothing there. He said he is going to
give N5,000 to 20 million poor people in Nigeria and that is N120
billion which he is going to give away in a situation where the country
is cash strapped. I am going to see how this is going to happen. Buhari
does not understand how to tame corruption. He did not succeed the last
time.
There are certain tendencies in the man that tells me he does not
understand how to tame corruption because we are talking of a change
campaign. But who are the people around him? They are not changed
people. It is paradoxical that now, the party chairman is saying they
don’t want defectors anymore. But how did they come to where they are? I
don’t see these changes coming with Buhari. This was a rhetoric that
was convenient for the purpose of winning an election. It has succeeded,
but don’t let us ascribe more to it. It is going to have some grand
gestures but, in the final analysis, will be meaningless.
Don’t you think Nigeria needs a strong leader that can look
at influential people in the society and insist that the right things be
done? It was so bad that even after the Immigration recruitment tragedy
that the Minister of Interior, instead of being sanctioned, was given a
national award?
That is not the problem now. Buhari is not the type of person that I
would like to call my president. I don’t even agree that he is a strong
leader. He is not very intelligent, he is not very articulate and I
don’t even agree that he is a strong leader. Most of the positions he
held, his deputies were in charge. People run circles around him. Part
of the problem with democracy is that we don’t necessarily have the best
choices. You have to choose between bad choices or some bad choices. I
don’t see anything that will, ordinarily, make me to want Buhari as my
president. I don’t see how he is an improvement on Jonathan for whatever
it is that you think of Jonathan.
Are you not expressing preconceived biased.
People are saying Jonathan saved the country from crisis but that he did
not do us proud as president, a situation that Chad and Niger now
assist us to combat internal security challenges. Are you saying that
you have not recognised personal failings on the side of Jonathan and
that you don’t see anything good in Buhari?
Buhari left the army 30 years ago; a lot has changed in 30 years.
Maitasine were bow and arrow people. But Boko Haram is a completely
different kettle of fish. And his approach to the campaign does not seem
to recognise that. Part of the problem is that we could not run after
Boko Haram so that the borders of Chad, Cameroon and Niger are not
violated. And they only became receptive to that when Boko Haram became a
problem to them. And that was recently. If we could have surrounded
them, it would have been easier for us.
Why didn’t we?
We couldn’t because they could run into Cameroon. The issue about
Nigeria is that we are such a big country relating to our neighbours. We
have traditionally bent over backwards to tell our neighbours that we
have no territorial ambitions and intentions, which could account for
the fact that we gave away Bakassi to Cameroon. No country gives away
its territory to another country. The tendency in Nigeria is not one
that we will begin to violate the territorial integrity of our
neigbours. And Goodluck Jonathan is not that kind of person. A situation
where, in the middle of an election, Britain and America will begin to
interfere does not mean well.
Isn’t that part of the president’s failure?
It is not. It shows you that they have been biased against this
country. The Americans refused to sell arms to the government and the
government had to go looking in other places. Boko Haram is a different
thing. It took the Americans 10 years to get Osama Bin Laden.
But America violated another country’s territory to get him?
That is different. The government invited them and they got a United
Nations resolution to back it up. It is so bad that when you read the
papers today, you don’t hear about the Jonathan people. They have all
disappeared. I am insisting on Jonathan because he is important. The
voices of his people have not disappeared. We are going to come back and
hold this government to task.
They have made all sorts of noise about Boko Haram, I want to see how
Buhari, a retired general, would handle the situation. I want to see
him destroy Boko Haram. I want to see how long it would take him. I want
to see how long he is going to get the Chibok girls back. Ezekwesili
has been making noise about that and I tweeted her to suggest how to get
these girls back. We would see how Buhari will do the magic.
Does it mean that you don’t see anything wrong in Jonathan?
The Americans say nice guys don’t win ball games. The president may be a
nice chap, but his niceness diminished Nigeria’s standing and
reputation. Don’t you think he was too nice for the job?
Jonathan has lots of faults. Jonathan had a peculiar problem. He knew
that he could not win an election in Nigeria without the North because
he is from a minority area. So he bent over backwards with many things.
That is why some of us were interested in his second term because
then he would not need any of these people. Some people in the
South-South said he did not even do anything in the South. Most of the
things he did were in the North yet all he got were four million votes.
There were a number of things he did for political expediency. If he
fought insurgency in a particular way, people like Buhari would have
risen against him. And if he did not fight insurgency, they would have
said that he is incompetent. He had to play both sides and clearly the
approach that he took did not work. It failed him but that should not
prevent us from recognising the dilemma that he was in. He was a
president that had his eyes on second term and he felt that he needed to
placate some people but it did not work.
Do you think that it was politically savvy of him?
It was his prerogative to have decided not to even run. But he
thought he was going to get the votes. In 2011, he got eight million
votes from the North and Buhari got 12 million. In 2015, he got four
million votes from the North. It was not unrealistic for him to still
think that he could still get votes from the North. In 2011, Jonathan
got 37 percent of the votes in Katsina. Given the fact that PDP had
foothold in the North, it was not unrealistic for him to expect that he
could still use the party structure and the governors to get an
appreciable amount of votes from the North. But in a place like Bauchi,
which is under PDP, practically no vote came from there. Jigawa is under
PDP but it was like PDP was non-existent in those states.
However, our democracy is in trouble because the numbers have already
been manipulated according to the pattern of PVC distribution. It was
not manipulated for not just this election, but the next one. Therefore,
we will have a situation where same people will decide again that the
North will produce the president as long as we are dealing with these
so-called PVCs. They have permanently ensured that one region has
supremacy over others. Let us not pretend that it is not what has been
achieved. So we need to address that now. We need to start talking about
it now.
What is the problem with the PVC?
The problem with the PVC is that nine million people are registering
to vote in war-torn Borno. Where are they getting these people? How are
they getting 17.1 million people in the North-West? And 15 million in
the South-South and the South-East. We have to determine who gets the
PVCs. At the point of registering for the PVC, we need to know the
nationality of those registering. We need to know if they are Chadians,
Nigerians, children or adults. It is quite significant for me that these
PVCs failed in the election in some places.
Why should the PVC fail in the South? Buhari did not have any problem
of voting but the PVC did not recognise the number one citizen of the
country. The failure rate of the PVC in the South-South and South-East
was high. In the middle of the election, the rules of the game were
changed and the PVC was not needed anymore. By the time we got to the
governorship election, the PVC worked better. And I ask: Why did it work
better? I believe that the PVC was programmed to fail.
Is this not just prejudice?
I wrote an article in Vanguard before the election where I said I don’t believe.
