• Friday, March 29, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Personalising governance responsible for abandoned projects in Nigeria – Duke

Donald Duke, a former governor of Cross River State, who has just declared his intention to contest the 2019 presidential election, on a yet-to-be-disclosed platform, in this exclusive interview with ANTHONY OSAE-BROWN and ZEBULON AGOMUO, shared his experiences in government; his role in the Sani Abacha policy formulation Committee (National Economic Intelligence Committee), his economic direction as governor for eight years and his motivation to aspire to lead Nigeria. He sounded a note of warning that except Nigeria takes practical and conscious steps to plan for tomorrow, the future could be bleak with escalating population. Excerpts:

In the General Abdulsalami Abubakar regime, you were quite central in shaping economic policy in the National Economic Intelligence Committee that you belonged, which was a very strong group then. This is 20 years or more. Can you compare policy formulation then and now?

I started under General Sani Abacha. I got there in 1995. Let me start from Abacha’s time; policy was decided on a whim. We used to budget about 1.5 or 2billion dollars for Paris Club debt repayment and at the time the minister of finance had the leverage to determine among the creditors whom to service; so, it became a racket. If I owed you money, let’s say, I owed you N50million for 30 years; one day somebody would just show up and say, you know you’re being owed N50 million by Nigeria; if you are ready to give up N25million, I would give you the balance of N25 million.

And you have nothing to lose; after all, you had written off the debt; so that was what was going on. So, we decided that the money should go straight to the Paris Club and let them pay their members and not some individuals deciding who to pay the money; on individual’s credit. At that time, policy was just taken at whim; there were no meetings where you sit down, discuss and interface. Nothing like that. Abacha particularly depended a lot on NEIC, primarily because of Professor Aluko; he found him a very straightforward and honest person.

Literally, every memo that came to council would first come to us in NEIC to take position and make recommendations. So, when it goes to the council, it’s really our recommendations that would count; but you allowed the minister to present his memo.

We used to attend Council because we were of course members of the National Economic Council too.

There was nothing consistent.For instance, you sit and you are discussing fertilizer and you find out that fertilizer is not getting to the farmers, and you say, let’s stop it. Nothing consistent. That’s why I said policy was being decided at whim. Then the level of sycophancy was absolutely stunning. In Abacha’s time it was pure sycophancy because he would hire and fire at will.

Abdulsalami was in a hurry to meet the transition programme and leave. So, with the military it is pay as you go; there’s no depth; no rule in anything. The civilians are better.

Obasanjo came in trying to understand the process. In his first four years, he came in with the same mindset that he could direct governors who were elected; he could direct the National Assembly and also policy-wise he could do same. He fell out with a number of governors on that score. You know, the N’Abba time at the National Assembly, it was horror. You know, at a point they tried to impeach him. So, he learned the hard way that the democratic system of government is a government of compromise. It was designed to forestall the occurrence of dictatorship; so you have the legislative house that has almost equal powers with the executive; the Constitution also recognises that work has to be done; so it gives you a veto authority and that could be checked also by the judiciary. It took him a while to learn all these. I remember at a council meeting; he wanted to pass some order or some law; but he knew that if it got to the National Assembly, it was dead on arrival. He was instrumental in removing one Senate President or the other. You know, the eight years we were there; we had five Senate presidents.

Each South Eastern state produced one Senate president, starting from Enwerem to Okadigbo, Anyim, to Wabara and then to Nnamani. The executive was behind all these. So, going through them to pass laws was tedious. It was a lesson to him.

To be fair to him, he learnt pretty fast. In his second term he started changing. I can see the challenges that Buhari has; he is back to where Obasanjo was at the beginning; where he couldn’t understand who are these boys? It’s a mental thing.

In Jonathan or Umaru Yar’Adua’s time, it was a lot better; you had David Mark spend eight years as Senate president and Aminu Tambuwal was also the speaker for eight years. Even though they did not agree in all things; it was stable and there was consultation. Umaru Yar’Adua and Jonathan did not have this backdrop of the military, so it was easier for them to operate.

Obasanjo learnt it pretty late in the day; that you have to give and take; old habits die hard. That’s why you find today that not much has happened. If there was better rapport between the National Assembly and the Executive; the PIB would have been passed long, long ago.

 

The economy you and other folks in NEIC were planning on and projecting, is that what we have today?

No. You know, the first term of Obasanjo; he came in not knowing many people; so, he brought his old-school guards – Adamu Ciroma, Sunday Afolabi, the people he knew. He had been out of the radar for a while, so he was very suspicious of young; up-coming youths, the group he called ‘yuppies’ but he also found out that after four years, those folks just didn’t know what time of day was. These people had left into retirement at 79 and you bring them back, 20 years after.

But in his second term, he recruited young folks. A lot of the young people were brought on board. We opened up and there was a discernable growth in the economy. If there was a desire for third term, it was on the back of that. That story of third term will one day be told who played what role and all that. You know, when things fail, people duck. A lot of people who are ducking today championed that cause. The premise for those who were clamouring for third term was ‘we cannot afford to change the rider of the saddle now because things are going well’. The sad thing to that is that no one is indispensable.

Every leader assuming office tries to identify and groom successor because one day your time will come to an end. This is the major problem we have as a country. Each time we go back to the drawing board; we try to start all over again; it really hampers our progress as a people.

One of your signature projects while you were governor of Cross River State was the Tinapa, which was expected to generate some billions of naira to the state, annually. But that dream appears dead as Tinapa has been moribund for many years; how do you feel about its present state?

Let me tell about Cross River so you can understand where I was coming from. Here is a state; 3 million people; 23,000sqkm landmass. We are technically not an oil producing state. We are the end of Nigeria. In fact, I usually say that we are the end of the ECOWAS. After you leave Calabar, you enter Central Africa. My desire was to diversify economy and the dream was to be totally independent of the Federation Account.

We have very arable land in Cross River; there is absolutely nothing you cannot grow in Cross River. Even before our campaign, looking for office opportunity, we had a SWOT analysis of the state.

When you go for your low hanging fruit, you go for what you have a comparative advantage in. Our comparative advantage as we saw it at that time was agriculture because we had a very arable land. We focused on cassava; we are the largest producer of cassava and oil palm.

We are the largest producer of oil palm today; we are also the largest producer of banana and plantain. Most of the plantain you find going to the North is from Cross River. We used to be the first producer of cocoa, but we are now number two after Ondo. So, we focused on that; but that was Ok for the rural areas, but the urban areas, we are not industrialised; they are purely civil service-oriented. They all work in the public sector.

So, we asked ourselves ‘what can we do?’ Two things – we can attract investments; after Obajana, we have the second largest cement plant in Nigeria – UNICEM; it is in Cross River; we attracted Flour Mills at a time. It is a 5 million per annum mill. Then we looked at tourism. It was such novel concept; people that were there were wondering; what do you mean by tourism? Because when you say tourism, you are expected to see white feet on the ground.

But we say no; let’s get traffic to come to Cross River. Things were so bad that even though we were called part of the NDDC states, we were only getting N198,000 (One hundred and ninety-eight thousand naira a month) as derivation. We need to put that in context. I remember going to President Obasanjo and said to him, when we divided the assets between Cross River and Akwa Ibom; it was 45-55 percent. And if you look at the totality of the asset; the oil receipt was part of the asset which we got 45 percent of it, when we were getting N198, 000 a month; Akwa Ibom was getting N5 billion. This is 2000, 2001 – N5 billion was different from N5 billion of today; it was good money.

So, I told Obasanjo that it was not fair; seeing that Cross River has 45 and Akwa Ibom 55 percent getting only N198,000? How come this asset is now treated this way?

Besides, the principle of derivation is to assuage the effect of production; so whenever there was a spill for instance, Cross River suffers more than Akwa Ibom. In fact, the last Mobil spill, we were by far adversely affected; the effect was by far, in terms of effect, it was 70:30 against us.

It was that observation and complaint that gave rise to what we have now – because Akwa Ibom State under Governor Attah went to court, and Federal Government also went to court to get an interpretation.

So, it was after the determination and interpretation that Cross River went from N198,000 a month to N250 million on the average. So, it just reinforces how fragile our state was and we needed to do something. If you said you wanted to industrialise, that would take a long time; so what are the quick fixes? One thing we don’t appreciate is that tourism is a big industry; but it is not a top down industry but a bottom up.

Top down industries are like oil where the royalties are paid to the Federal Government. In tourism, the money is made by the people and government has its money from taxes. So the success of the government is the disposable income available to the people, which is good.

So, we noted our various sites – Obudu. That’s how we developed the Ranch to a world class resort. We became the 4th busiest airport in Nigeria after Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt.

We had nine flights in and out a day. Now Tinapa would have been an icing on the cake. The concept was very simple. It was not the nomenclature of the building; it was the fact that there’s a free zone.

It was not impeded; anything can come in. No duties are paid. Once the purchases are within one thousand dollars, you don’t pay duties. The effect of that is to drive patronage and traffic. If I can go to Calabar and buy a good cheap bag instead of having to go to Dubai and because I can’t buy more than 1000-dollar bag, am going to bring four or five other people. The good thing is you will fill all my hotels; you would use the vehicles, restaurants and when you have a society where foodery is working, farmers also enjoy; there are linkages in all these. The essence is to bring traffic because ordinarily, you will not go to Calabar.

It is not like Benin that you stop over if you are going to other places or Kaduna; if you are going to Kano. No; there’s no other important stop after Calabar that you can use Calabar as a transit; Benin is a transitory place.

If you are going to the Eastern part of the country, you pass Benin; if you are going to the North; you pass through it. So, we had to create a reason for people to want to go to Calabar; so that was the essence of the tourism thing. Even in Obudu, a few things we have there, we were already successful. There was hardly any bank that won’t have its AGM in Calabar. We would promote and give them some discounts when they come in.

If you look at the Carnival, for instance, which at the time, at the peak; over a million people were coming there.

They are not foreigners; they are Nigerians and Nigerians living abroad whether they are from Cross River State or not. When they come to Nigeria, they just want to experience what the carnival is all about, and invariably they go to the Ranch. We had three flights a week going to the Ranch. On one occasion; I had gone to the Ranch but could not get a room even as a governor. I had to squat with the general manager of the restaurant. We were the only state that had internal flights. People in Calabar would say ‘I want to go and spend my weekend in Ogoja’ for instance; they would fly to Obudu and 30 minutes they are in Ogoja. So, there was activity. It was all about activity. If you stop people from going to London today; it becomes less appealing. London depends on traffic. That’s why Heathrow and the airport are very important to them.

Dubai also is conceived purely on traffic. Las Vegas was conceived purely on traffic. Atlantic City was built on traffic; to get the traffic from New York because New Jersey was a poor city, how do we attract this excess money from New York to come to this area? So, we are not doing anything new.

Now, if Tinapa had been allowed to work that would have been a lot of traffic. KPMG conservatively said we should expect 3 million visitors annually; this is KPMG report. Three million visitors annually; each spending a hundred thousand naira (N100,000), that would have been N300 billion annually just coming into Calabar economy. Now a good chunk of that would also visit the Ranch. So, if you take the multiplier effect of N300 billion, may be times three or times four, over a trillion naira would have been circulating in the state’s economy.

So, there’s a lot of potential in the hospitality industry. Unfortunately, the problem with governments in Nigeria is very, very personal. The head of state or governor appropriates the authority. For instance, when Umaru Yar’Adua was in hospital, sick, the budget had to go to Saudi Arabia to be signed but he had a bonafide vice president. So when you leave office; the man who comes after you will say ‘that’s your own, let me do my own’. Now, we are shift workers in government.

Governance is shift. If the next shift comes and starts from the foundation, you will never finish this property. But if they start from where you stopped; if there are things to correct, they correct as they go along; not to abandon the thing and start again.

Now, unfortunately, my immediate successor, who was actually a part of the dream fell into that trap and abandoned the Tinapa project; and even when he was building what he called his legacy project which was the Convention Centre; I said to him, you need Tinapa to drive the Convention Centre; nobody is going to come because you have huge halls; but if they know they can get deals like shopping, buying stuff and all that, they will come; but they don’t see the larger picture.

The Chinese plan 50 years; they have only done 30 years and see where they are.

They sat down and reasoned that ‘we can’t be so many people with such an ancient civilisation and be subservient in the world. We need to take the bull by the horns; so they did it.

Tinapa has become a world for abandonment; it is something in our DNA. Look at Ajaokuta, which was N8 billion; it is such a strategic project that could have aided the economy of this country; we still import a lot of steel; but we left it derelict after spending all that money. There are several Tinapas dotted around Nigeria. In Lagos, don’t forget that Mobolaji Johnson built the incinerators but they were abandoned when he left; we wanted to do metro line but we cancelled it and paid compensation much more than the project would have cost. So it is the appropriation of governance; you don’t see yourself as a caretaker but as an owner; so even when you aspire for an office, they get so upset that you have the temerity to aspire for this ‘my God-given gift’. It is expressed in many ways. So, that’s the summary of Tinapa.

 

Now you have such pain in your heart having seen such projects go moribund and other instances you have cited; what would you do differently if you get elected as president of Nigeria?

First of all, it is to dialogue with ourselves in the political space. We all want to look at ‘my glory, my glory’. But our glory should be the wellbeing of our people. We need to talk to them. Tinapa is just one. At the last count; I am not sure of the figure; am told that projects worth over N23 trillion are abandoned in Nigeria; probably more; I am sure that those who came out with this did not even go to the local government level. So, it is something we need to lock ourselves, may be, inside the Conference Hall in Abuja; all local government chairmen and their vice; all governors and their deputies, and executives, and say to ourselves, ‘look what can we start with?’ We can’t continue this way. That’s one. You can’t by legislation change anything; you have to appeal to them; but as a government we also have to look at the strategic ones that we can quickly revamp. It is not only morally and financially suicidal that we abandoned Ajaokuta.

We need it for our industrialisation. We are talking of having rail here and there and we are going to import all the rail lines and slippers when we can make them here. We have gas and the fundamental for steel is power, yet we are flaring the gas here. It doesn’t add up. So, you would start by dialogue; so that the people can build consensus and decide how to move forward.

 

Now, can you be a bit more specific. Can you help us look at key areas where you think things are wrong; that maybe, will be your focus for your first 30, 60 or 90 days?

Our credit policy. You can’t have a country that is aspiring to grow and like I have said in other forum that Nigeria has to grow 15 percent non-oil sector for consecutive 10 years to recalibrate the country because in another 10 years our population will be 230 million; our GDP today is under 500 billion dollars; we need to be a 2.5 trillion-dollar economy to sustain this sort of population; so that you don’t have all this restiveness – Boko Haram, herdsmen crisis; militancy – it is purely economic. We did something in Cross River when we wanted to build the water scheme. They were going to use mechanical diggers to put the pipelines all over; I called the contractor and said to him, you are not going to spend all this money and people won’t feel it; so, we are going to get people to dig the trenches for you to pass the pipelines; he said no; it would take too long; but I insisted and say I am the client, it is either you do what I want or… So, he agreed. I tell you, for the 12 months that the programme was going on there was no reported crime in Calabar.

So, you find that a lot of the discontent in Nigeria is triggered by economic dislocation; people have no stake in this country. So you need to get people to see themselves as stakeholders in this country.

One of the facts is the credit system; you and I can’t get to the banks today reasonably and say we want to do something. If you wanted to start a press today, you can’t try it because of the interest rate. The interest rates are so high that you can’t try it. But banks are declaring profits that don’t make sense. They are making profit of almost 2 billion dollars per annum, after tax, in an economy that does not function; you ask yourself, how?

So, you’ve got to address it. Now, they may not want to hear it, but there was a time when we were growing faster when we had a regulated financial sector than today.

You’ve got to address the financials. Then you look for quick wins; folks may tell you power, that power is a great mitigant and I agree; but you can’t continue to do the same thing over the years and continue to get the same result which is not a progressive result and you continue to do it.

But here you continue to flare gas; it has reduced now, but at a time we used to flare about 2.5 billion cubit gas a day which is equivalent to 25 million litres of diesel. If you spent 5 billion dollars which you can afford and build pipelines five thousand kilometer – a million dollar for a kilometer; so five thousand kilometres of pipelines throughout the country, you would have made gas available throughout Nigeria. By extension, you would have succeeded in addressing the power problem.

Part of the problems in the North East is that the area which used to be one of the world’s largest cotton belts is no longer producing cotton. Adamawa and Taraba used to compete with Mississippi; we had textile industries in those areas, but as long as we allowed cheap imports from emerging China and South East Asia and India to come in, our local factories could not compete; and as long as they could not compete, they shut down, when they shut down cotton growing ebbed in Adamawa.

That’s the genesis of all these Boko Haram crises; because Borno and all those areas were cotton belt. So agriculture and industries are related. One must be there to drive the other. You cannot develop industries because of the high interest the banks are charging. Some of the companies that claim they produce locally here import and repackage. They can’t compete. Why? The reason is simple; if they were to manufacture it from scratch here, they can’t compete because you have opened up your market for all sorts of things to come in. Even in the United States, they are kicking against such a thing. US is saying, no more of such things. We must insist on reciprocal tariff; you just can’t bring in anything anyhow. Nigeria has become a vast dumping ground. We have no reciprocal trading. For instance, Thailand, we are buying about 2 or 3 trillion-dollar worth of rice, they didn’t even have an embassy in Nigeria. To go to Thailand, you have to go London to get the visa; with all that volume of rice we buy and the amount of money involved they didn’t even consider us worthy to have their embassy here. They opened it a year or two ago.

Another big issue is that we buy so much wheat from America. Many Nigerians eat bread every morning and other wheat-related products, but the basic raw material for bread is wheat, and it is imported; can you sustain a country like that? What is the quid pro quo in that? Ok, if we are going to buy that volume of wheat from America, come and develop our rice industry or something that would also help us. There must be some sense in our trading. If you take South Africa, that’s a mature economy, but they have a problem. The problem is that there are no markets around them for their products. Nigeria is a great market for them; a huge consumer market for their products. But there must be some reciprocity. We give them areas that they need to develop for us by virtue of our heavy patronage for their products. We can demand that reciprocity from South Africa. But the bottom-line is creating jobs for our people. The level of disenchantment is too high. And there are quick fixes- we have 20 million housing shortage in Nigeria. It is a big challenge, but also an opportunity. The Navy in Calabar has a beautiful barracks they built, using laterite- nice, clean, and neat. This is Nigerian Navy, and they built 100 units at an average price of N2million per unit. They built these 100 units in 6months, and it could have been shorter, but you know Calabar rains all the time. So, using that you can actually do up to two million units nationwide, that would absorb 15 to 20 million people. That would even start off its own industry because that would take care of the carpentry; the masonry, the ceramic industry, and all the input would be local. So, there are opportunities; the critical thing is to come up with a system that enables entrepreneurship and productivity. There are so many young people today; for instance who want to do so many things but they can’t; they are handicapped. Right now, some young people leverage on what I call a ‘goodwill economy’, but it shouldn’t be so. Every day, we all get text messages from people requesting for all manner of financial favours. You go to a ministry for instance, you see a man, who is employed greeting you so often and you know he is begging for money. That’s now brings me to the issue of corruption. There are two types of corruption- corruption of need and corruption of greed. The corruption of need is based on the fact that the take home pay of a man does not take him home. So, he is going to use his office to generate money. And in the corruption pyramid, that’s the bulk, but the corruption of greed is a smaller segment.

 

I would like you to speak on three things, education reform; healthcare, and youth unemployment. How are you going to tackle them if elected president?

I have dealt with youth unemployment. You need to get them start their own businesses; the way to go is entrepreneurship, and people have to think outside the box and create their own businesses. On education, our educational system still belongs to the past; our teaching methods have not changed. You can have a graduate in mechanical engineering that has not seen an engine before, it is all theory. I would readily want to adopt the German system which is tied onto industry. So, part of your schooling, at least, at the tertiary level is tied on to a practical experience and that counts as much as your theory. We need to reform and rebrand our educational system. But it is also a system that can create a lot of jobs because I would want to see a system where for the first 18 years of your life, you acquire a skill; it could be as menial as gardening or as sophisticated as IT. But you have acquired a skill; so if you want to go to the university thereafter, that’s another thing. But to make that work, you have to fund the system. You can’t charge fees and still make education compulsory, but we can afford it. In building more schools; we had a system in Cross River where each school had 30 students in a class, three arms in a class; that’s 90; six classes, that’s 540 students. So, each school had only 540 students which was a manageable number. So we found out that we needed to build 200 new schools to accommodate more students and we were in the process. If you make teaching rewarding, a lot of graduates will go into it; even if for the first five years after leaving school. At that time we took the teachers off the tax net and we were paying them extra N10,000 (Ten thousand naira) for those in the urban areas, and N15,000 (Fifteen thousand naira) for those in the rural areas. We relocated all the civil servants who were idling in other areas into the teaching cadre. But there was also a caveat to that; every two years they had to do a qualifying exam to make sure they are up to the task. University of Ibadan (UI) was handling that. And again, if a school says more than 20 percent failed in a particular course, such teacher loses his job. You can mark their contributions; they just don’t get all this money. But, you must make teaching rewarding. We also absorbed a lot of youth unemployment. A lot of graduates working the streets doing nothing; you absorb them into the system and give them three months’ short course. Then you time their performance. If you know you are teaching and you are sure of having a basic lifestyle, there’s a limit to what you would want to involve yourself in. If you look at even our tertiary education, we had the leadership of World Council of Surgeons here last year; we had a medical mission in Calabar and Lagos (LUTH and University of Calabar Teaching Hospital) he said the method they were using in those hospitals were the method they used in the ‘60s in the Western world; in other words, we have not evolved; we are still doing what we used to do in the past. Surgeries that we would do for 45 minutes, they would do for five, six minutes. They will tell you that it is dangerous putting someone under anesthesia for so long. He watched a surgery that went on for three hours in LUTH and said in the States that would have been 15 minutes. Quite a lot of people pass on under anesthesia. We need to prepare ourselves for modern technology. We need to have primary health centres in every ward in this country depending on the population of the ward. So a place like Agege, Alimosho and Mushin in Lagos may have three, four primary healthcare centres. They may have two doctors, five nurses- the doctors may have to do shift- to take care of the small things that affect the people. The centres take care of things like typhoid, malaria and all that. They don’t take care of big issues. At this stage of our development, we should be able to have local pharmaceutical companies that can provide malaria drugs- talking of public health. Every four months, the government gives you free malaria drug to reduce incidence of malaria occurrence. You know that in the North, in the hot season between June and September, they have Cerebrospinal meningitis. When we were in school; I went to school in Sokoto, they would give you a preventive drug. So, the good thing about this is, if I give you a concession to provide malaria drug, you have started a factory on that score because you are going to provide malaria drug for 200 million people every year. You have started a big, big industry on that line alone. Today, if you come up with that policy they would go and buy from China. Why would I go and buy from China when you can take a Nigerian who is into pharmaceutical and build that? Once you have a primary healthcare centre in every political ward; one or two general hospitals in every local government; then you are building up. You have your tertiary; your specialist hospitals, but you can’t have them enough. It is not just having specialist doctors here and there, yes you need them, but handling the basis. Ransome-Kuti got it right but continuity is also the problem. They abandoned it when he left. By now, that system would have been well-entrenched and established throughout Nigeria.

 

There’s a movement or silent revolution in Nigeria we hear; the youth feel, perhaps, understandably quite disenfranchised; they don’t see a future or hope; so there is this mobilisation attempt to get the youth galvanised by your group. So we would like to get some understanding as to where we are; how many people have so far registered? Again, do you have any confidence that the next election would be fairly won and lost?

Let me take the first one. You may be referring to the Coalition for Nigeria Movement, 3million people registered, but I have to update that figure. But once it transited toward a political party, I think that figure ebbed a bit. What was it all about? It was actually to encourage youth participation. There’s huge youth disenchantment in the polity. Most of these folks that shout about next election do not even have voters’ cards. I have addressed various youth fora where I asked ‘how many people here have voters’ cards?’ On the average it is 20 to 25 percent that put up their hands. In some places, it was pathetic, because some people were giving all manner of excuses. The truth is that they don’t believe that their votes will count; so why bother. But ask them how many of them have sim cards, some of them would put their hands and legs up. So, you have got to get them to appreciate that it matters. It is better now, though, than four years ago; but it could be a lot better. The second leg of your question, will the votes count? Again, it depends on participation. Election malpractices exist where there is a vacuum. If you go to a polling booth that has 500 names and only 20 showed up; there are 480 names to play with there. They will thumb-print everything, you go to court if you have the resources to go and fight; because your opponent would be declared governor or whatever, so the state would now defend him, while you use your own money and go to court and bring some experts. If you look at Mimiko election, for instance, they had to go and bring an expert from another country to come and look at the thumbprints, etc. So, how many people can afford that? It is tied up to participation. The system is more mature now than it was in 1999.

 

So, on what platform are you coming up?

Since elections are not tomorrow, there is no urgency. There is no urgency because, there’s a move to organise the opposition and I don’t want to preempt that move. There’s a lot of discussion going on now within the opposition. There are 68 parties in Nigeria; two known and 66 not really known. So, there’s a move to pull them together. Whether they would succeed or not, I don’t know. But in the next one month or so, it would be clearer. So, announcing the party now…; I think we should wait for another one month.