As Nigeria inches closer to the February 25th Presidential election date, making a choice among the 18 Presidential contestants, no doubt remains a herculean task. But, Don Pedro Obaseki, director, Research, Strategy and Documentation of the Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign Council, in this interview with JOHN OSADOLOR and TONY AILEMEN, believes that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s candidate, Atiku Abubakar remains Nigeria’s best option, given his preparedness and the great challenges facing the country. Excerpts:
What is your assessment of the Atiku/Okowa Presidential campaigns so far?
We started in the month of October and to create a kind of global overview, I will say that it has been a very good story and as you know, no good story is a linear story. In a linear story, everything is a straight line and there is nothing interesting about that. I will like to say that Atiku’s present campaign has been like an epic with variegated episodes and everything has made Atiku actually like a Peacock, with different colourations.
In terms of high points, I think the major high point is the fact that, in spite of all the things that have been thrown at him, both from within and outside the party, he has remained resolute, calm and shown one of the major tenets of leadership. He has remained a dealer in hope. A good leader must remain a dealer in hope. He has amplified to a very large extent, the capacity of the new, revived and energised PDP. That is one of the major things that has made me very comfortable. So, when everybody seem to be losing their heads, our Presidential candidate remains cool. He is calm and has a working knowledge of absolutely, every viscera part of the Nigerian governance space. He is not a man with short memories and that alone gives me succor. So, whether we like it or not, this has shown that Atiku Abubakar is as Presidential as anyone who has ever aspired to be President of Nigeria. Amongst the current front runners, Atiku certainly stands out more Presidential than any of them and that is a plus.
I don’t want to say that there are no low points. The low points are more or less internally generated and that is why it may be a sore point but not really a wound. It is like differentiating between a sin and a misdemeanor. I see the actions of the dissenting group of Governors, as an internal issue that will be resolved soon. I keep saying that, the fact that it is limited to the five Governors, four of who have little or no immediate electoral challenges, makes it look like a woman entering her menopause. There is always this discomfiture of the middle age. Outside of that, from what we have seen in the campaigns, with very important people like Abubakar Shekarau, the former Governor of Kano state who dropped his ambition to join the Atiku campaign train and others who have come in to strengthen the party, these have indeed helped to reduce the effect of the stress posed by the G5 Governors. Again, they have made it clear that they are not foreclosed to rapport with the PDP, their party. This shows also that there are still chances for reconciliation.
What you may see as challenges are institutionalised obstacles. They are systemic attempts by the government in power to deny us access to a fair level playing field. We have seen Governors in states decreeing that billboards, adverts and TV space should not be given to the opposition parties and even some Journalists recruited as front line attackers, forgetting that they are integral to the sustenance of democracy. I am a media man, I cannot support anyone trying to gag the press. I have been to jail for refusing to allow anyone gag the Press and I think those are the major challenges. However, from the body language of President Muhammadu Buhari, he does appears to be committed to a free, fair and credible election in 2023, at least from what we have seen at the surface. Whether his subordinates or party are on the same boat on this, is a different kettle of fish. As for the campaign, Atiku is the only one so far that has ran a conscientious, systematic campaign that has also obeyed both its timelines and milestones, as well as the INEC timelines and milestones. We never shifted our primaries as others did. We did not create jabberwocky over the choice of who is the running mate, while all the others chose running mates who ended up not being running mates. They created things that were alien to our Constitution. We met those deadlines and from day one, Atiku had articulated his agenda in bullet points and a comprehensive 178 page manifesto, which he titled “ My Covenant With Nigeria”, there is an end to end and he is not going to run a government by throwing a fishing hook into the river, and hope to catch something…no…there are deliverables and he knows how he will run his government when he assumes power.
It is funny that some Nigerians are clapping for some persons who, weeks to the election, are still gathering together, what their manifesto and vision for Nigeria should be.
Looking at the statistics, what do you see? Can you say PDP will take 2/3 of 36 states or 1/2 of 36 states. What does it look like for the party?
You know I am a man of statistics, that is why I am Director of Research and Strategy. The research we have done actually is what informed the strategy. I am not the best politician amongst the other team members and that is why I cannot tell Atiku that it is shinning on the Western front, when it is war. I won’t. My father used to say that lies are products of fear and you are lesser than any man you lie to and I am not lesser than anybody. So, I don’t lie to anyone. That is why when I saw some polls that were conducted by some of my friends in Lagos, I laughed, because, I know how to do polls, using the right methodologies and how to create jabberwocky, or the abracadabra. But on an arithmetic level, prior to now, every election in Nigeria had been basically a two horse race. Right now, what we are having is a three and half horse race. I see the NNPP candidate as a one legged horse, which has created a different dynamics altogether. So, it is no longer just going to be a North versus South issue. Secondly, it is no longer going to be a case of who is a leftist or rightist, Muslims or Christians race, but you are going to have a potpourri of sort. You are going to have a motley of factors that some Nigerians are not factoring into the equations now. If you look at it from an ethno- religious divide, the metrics are different. If you look at it from age demographics, they are different. If you also look at it from policy preparedness divide, the metrics are different. Looking at how ethnography will affect this election, everybody will assume that the transmutation from “emilokan” to “awalokan”, has created a seeming bastion amongst our brothers in the South West of six states, with a chunk of Kwara and a few local governments in Kogi state. Everybody will also expect that the Labour Party candidate, Peter Obi will perform very well in the five states of the South East, including the Igbo influenced areas of Delta and Rivers states. The other playing fields can now be left for the small tribes like us who are very vociferous. Now, if you play out this same scenarios in the north, Atiku is at his behest, minus probably two or three states, in some demography in the north. You do not need rocket science. Whether it is from Adamawa, to the people of Borno, down to the Kerekeres in Yobe, Bauchi, to Gombe, Jigawa, can you compare this to any of the other two I mentioned earlier? Atiku already boasts of 12 million votes in the previous election which he won, but was denied, in his bag? Especially when there is no Buhari, a one time, defacto accumulator of votes who did not shift, plus or minus from this same block of votes from 2003 to 2015?
So, the metrics are different and all these only point to the fact that it is PDP and Atiku’s election to lose. That is on the arithmetic level. We have sorted ourselves properly and we know our strengths, weaknesses, the opportunities we are faced with as well as the threats before us.
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If you look at it against the structured nature of the PDP, the party has enjoyed organogramic growth, deliberately structured and entrenched. So , you are either PDP for, or PDP against, because the PDP is the recurring decimal, even for those who are in the APC. Just a few elements in the APC are aboriginal to the party, the rest are PDP members who migrated there in 2013. So, if you look at the four front runners, only Tinubu may not have had direct romance with the PDP. Kwankwaso was a two time Governor of Kano state under the platform of the PDP, he was elected a Senator under the same platform and served in the cabinet of former President Obasanjo as Defence Minister. Peter Obi would have been the current serving Vice President, if we had won the 2019 Presidential election. Until the 21st of May, 2022, Peter Obi was running for Presidency under the platform of the PDP. So, there is absolutely no way that we will lose this election. The only challenge is the permutations from some quarters from skewed narratives and I laugh because they are based on some social media flimsies based on people prejudices and preconceived notions that every northerner is a Hausa / Fulani Muslims. Nothing can be farther from the truth. If you go into Borno, the tribal and electoral demographics in Borno is as coloured as they are in any diverse area of the South. It is even worse in Adamawa where you will walk into one local government area with three different languages, each having variegated ideas. Nobody knows that the percentage of Christians in Adamawa is 50/50, if not 51/49, in favor of the Christians. So, when I see those figures coming out of their cubicles in Lagos because they tweet, I call their arithmetic, jabberwocky. If you take the anger quotient that has risen, the new rising interests in the youth demography, how Nigeria is being governed, look at the cancellation of over 50% of those who newly registered on the INEC voters list etc. So, you can be angry, yet you can’t vote because there is a systemic disenfranchisement particularly in Lagos where about 68% of the total number of cancelled voters registrants are based. Some people have become Mephistophelian, working as Satan’s lieutenants to disenfranchise a lot of people before even the elections begin. When I put all these into a mix, what comes out is that, that the APC will make a lot of noise that they have been rejected by Nigerians in 2023, is a truism. That the Labour Party will just be vote disturbers, is also a truism, because there is no cross border end- to – end capacity to win an election of this magnitude in this complex federated Nigeria. When the APC was being founded, I, as the then MD of Daar Communications was part of those that sat down at Adiran House in Lagos to work on how APC had to be formed. The party was formed because, the likes of ACN, CPC, etc in their cubicles, could not have won the Presidency with their 2 states here and 3 states there capacity then, in a federation like Nigeria, where you will have three ballot papers trusted in the hands of 85% people who are illiterate to elect the President, Senators and House of Representative members the same day. The Labour Party is in disarray. What is holding them is the Peter Obi Movement. No one knows Labour anywhere.
People are bothering themselves over our Presidential candidate and Chairman of the party being from the North, they have forgotten that it has always been that way. Whether it is the Ahmadu Ali and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Presidency, or the Okwesilieze Nwodo and Goodluck Jonathan Presidency. It has alway been that way. Nobody is raising the same issues in the Labour Party with Peter Obi from Anambra and Julius Abure the Labour Party National Chairman who is from Edo state. Obi’s village is about 140km from Benin. Nobody bothers about that. In the APC , it is the same. President Muhammadu Buhari is from the North, the party’s National Chairman Abdullahi Adamu is also from the north, before Adamu, we had Mai Mala Buni, the Yobe state Governor. No one has taken time to study the PDP constitution which stipulates that if you remove any official of the party without a convention, he or she has to be replaced with someone from the same zone. This provision was inserted into the party’s constitution in 2018 by the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike himself and while he was playing chess with everyone, people thought he was playing draft, again, in doing so, he did not know that he was checkmating himself. I don’t see how the PDP will lose this election.
Are you scared that the current security situation may impact negatively the 2023 elections?
I am not scared. In 2015, former President Jonathan allowed himself to be scared of Boko Haram which they used to chase him out of office. In 2013 particularly, I finished building the Africa Independent Television (AIT), complex in Maiduguri when Boko Haram was at it highest peak and it was opened by the then Governor Shetima and I remembered him commending my Chairman, Chief Raymond Dokpesi for coming to build the edifice in Borno when everybody was running away, I remembered how we had to ferry the heavy duty transmitting equipment from Abuja by road to Maiduguri, through Gombe, Biu, Fika, to get to Maiduguri. This so called security threat is a rouse. In 2019, election held in Borno state, but on that same day, there was a bomb blast in areas just a little outside of the polling units in Maiduguri. They even bombed the NAF base. On that day, there was still 43% voters turnout, according to INEC statistics. So, anybody who is pleading an unseen security threat, where INEC said they already have the capacity, cannot derail the election. Yes, INEC offices are being burnt down, I remembered Natasha Akpoti , same thing happened during the last election in her constituency. It is for INEC and security agencies to beef up their security operations. In Jonathan’s election, Rivers state turned out 1.4m votes plus, in 2015, but could barely meet 500,000 in 2019, because there was blockade at Abonema. The truth is security apparatus work in hand with the arsonists in some states to disrupt elections. This is why I support President Buhari’s warnings to the security agencies not to compromise, or do something funny that will disrupt or democracy. Is there something he was told that has led to this consistent warnings? The NSA has also insisted that trouble makers will be dealt with. If he could come out to accused some of the Governors of sponsoring these, then, it is time they changed. All the area or most areas where security threats have been heightened of recent are in the APC controlled states. I think the government of President Buhari is serious about dealing with insecurity during elections this time. We know that the APC has continued to fan the amber of motor park democracy so as to keep us where we are, but 2023 will be a different ball game in Nigeria.
How is your party viewing and reacting to the new CBN’s Naira redesign and cashless policy? What impact will they have on your party’s operations, ahead of the elections?
Well , I wish I wasn’t involved in this campaigns. I would have taken on the CBN frontally for two reasons. Firstly, I thank God that I have an MBA so I don’t think the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele has better degrees than I have. A recoloration does not necessarily mean redesign. There is nothing to indicate any single redesign of the Naira. What they did is just a re- splashing of colours on the Naira. Outside of that, every attached micro and macro explanation as well as the cash withdrawal limits, don’t make any sense. You are talking about a situation of redesigning the Naira look, when, the Naira cash spent outside is less than 5% of the total worth of the money in the country. They used almost N3 to redesign N1. It doesn’t make sense. They did not say that there is excess liquidity mind you. They are saying that much of the liquidity is outside the banking environment and I disagree. Any Naira someone has hidden in his village is a Naira in the banking system because he didn’t get the money from outer space. Your desire to withdraw from the bank and return to the bank is strictly your prerogative, so long as when it is produced on demand, it is a legal tender. The paper is not the money. It is anything that can purchase something that is money. The paper is just representation of capacity and ability to purchase same. It is the purchasing power parity (PPP) of whatever you do that is actually money. So, what the CBN is doing is “tomatoes economics”.
Now, they say that almost everybody in the rural area is not banked, again, I ask, have they bothered to look at the maps of the banks, especially in rural Nigeria? The geographical spread of the banks in Nigeria? It is only in the Southern part of this country that you see every two kilometers there is a bank, but I can tell you that it is not the same in the Northern part. In a distance of 150kilometers, you may not have up to four banks. So, you are holding the average Nigerians in rural areas responsible for the inability of the government to create banking facilities in those localities. It doesn’t make sense. Why are they chasing the cash ? Hiding cash money under your mattress doesn’t make any economic sense. You know why ? Because of oxidization, cash need to breath. That is why when they bring them out, some of them get bad. Any money that you hide is the factor of an economic idiocy, because, if you have N1000 today and you don’t invest it in something, when you come back in two months time, the purchasing power would have dropped in value that equals the percentage rise in inflation. For instance, I had N1000 in January and a loaf of bread was N300, today, the same loaf is N500, meaning that the N1000 can only buy me two loafs instead of the three and some change in January. The purchasing power has reduced by almost 50%. I think they have other things in mind that they are not telling us. When I gave one woman the new money, she thought it was fake. The money looks pale and very unauthentic.
For the political parties, I think they are a bit quiet over it because they are busy with their campaigns. The APC government knows that their end is near. On the 25th of February, once they lose power and the PDP takes over, things will change. In Atiku’s “My Covenant with Nigerians”, we have explanations of over 25 pages of how this economy will work both on a micro and macro levels. How they will be funded is clear. We know where the expenditures will come from, what the taxation levels will be, has been clearly mapped out. That the CBN will reverse itself is not impossible because, we are creating a cashless society which must be encouraged but we also need to strengthen the technology to effectively support and drive the process, because right now it is at best infantile. I think the policy is faulty, done in a hurry and I also believe that maybe it is a policy put in place with something else in mind that they are not telling us yet.
Do we see the party and the integrity group coming together soon; if not, what is the way forward for Atiku?
I believe that the possibilities of coming back together is strong despite all that we have seen or heard. There is a saying in Edo State that before you pass judgment, try and put yourself in the shoes of the man that is on trial. I tried to think like Governor Nyesom Wike sometimes and the options are very few for me, if I were Wike. There are some doves and some hawks, but all of them are birds. I believe that the hawks on both sides of the divide, appears to be the ones winning the arguments, but as the elections come closer, it is obvious now, that the doves are the ones who have the listening ears on both sides. I believe at the end of the day things will workout, because of the complexities of both situations and the election process on that day. It will not be beneficial to Governor Wike and his friends, to have a divided house on that day. I keep telling people that just as garrulous as Wike might be, there is also the value added. If he comes as hard as he has been on the party on the election day, it might be injurious, even to himself. If you noticed, of late, my Principal, Atiku Abubakar has been very quiet on the issue. He said he has met with the group about five times. At least, I was at one of the meetings in Abuja, and he made sure that nobody insults Wike. He has never made any statement to pull down Wike because he understands the issues more than everyone else. He sees Governor Wike as a friend. Secondly, our Campaign DG, Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto state, has made it a cardinal project because they are friends and will remain so. Tambuwal and Governor Ortom are very close friends. They are also political and ideological comrades. So, I see them working out a reconciliation that will favor everyone. I believe that if Wike and co do not concede to a party first mantra, it may be more injurious to them than it will be for the campaign because it cannot be worse for the campaign than it presently is. I believe that in spite of whatever anyone may say about these people, they are not stupid. They also know that their arguments over North or South Chairman, is flawed. I am an apostle of the policy to give the zoning of the Nigerian Presidency to the northeast or micro zone it to the South East or better still, throw it open. Nigerians know that the man who threw the primaries of the PDP open was Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State.
We know that the PDP and APC are not the same. The APC must give their Presidential candidate to the South. They have never had a southern candidate, whether it is AD, ANPP, APP, AC, CPC, ACN, etc. apart from when they made Chief Olu Falae their candidate, all other candidates have come from the north right from 1999 to date. Go and verify. But to the contrary, the PDP has had six Presidential elections, with four given to the South and only two to the north. From former President Obasanjo, twice, 1999 and 2003. In 2007, to Yar’Adua. Former President Jonathan completed that tenure in 2010. PDP has won four elections and three were by the South and only one by the North. The South spent 13 years as President between 1999 and 2015, while the North spent only 3 years- 2007 to May, 2010. If the party had given it to the South again in 2022, it would have meant that the party would have given the Southern candidates 5 and the Northern candidates only 2, that is 2007 and 2019. It does not make sense. For 56 years, after Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Aguyi Ironsi, no northerner from North East or Southerner from the South East has ever tasted power. This is very wrong. PDP is on the side of history. It is left for Nigerians now to chose wisely in 2023. Atiku is a truly detribalized Nigerian. That is how and why you can understand the more subliminal meaning of the word “ Atiku is a Unifier”. He has built a bridge across the Niger. He has in-laws and friends in Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa parts of the country.
What is happening in Edo PDP. How strong is the party in Edo State?
I won’t lie. That there is a seeming propensity towards Peter Obi in Edo State is not a lie at all. There is a saying in Edo that “na new thing dey catch body.” but Edo State is a state with a PDP DNA. No matter how you look at it, even when former Governor Adams Oshiomhole was ruling the state, out of the nine House of Representatives members, about six were PDP members and majority of the House of Assembly members were PDP. 60percent of the state elected members were PDP. So, I don’t think that this will change. But is there any kind of organic momentum, that the Labour Party seems to have had because of the Obi movement,? The answer is yes. So, what we have done of late is to embark on house to house campaigns so that we do not dissipate our votes. We want our votes to resonate within the larger Nigeria polity. We don’t want our votes to be lost in a haystack because that will be what will happen voting Labour Party in Edo State. I keep telling people that on the day of the election, Peter Obi will vote the PDP because he is a man of statistics. He knows that his ability to win the Presidential election in 2023 is a mathematical improbability. INEC statistics show that the Labour Party does not have candidates in 12 states. There is no doubt that there appears to be some kind of disconnect between the Governor of Edo and the PDP National Vice Chairman, South-South, Dan Obih. But I told our people that may we not fight for Obaseki or Dan Obih when we should be fighting for the overall commonwealth of Edo people. We must be in the main stream by making sure that we support the emergence of an Atiku Presidency. We now have the Atiku/Okowa coalition driving the electoral process in Edo state. Okowa is our son. For us, Okowa is our project. In Edo, only 14 kilometers separate Benn city from the Okowa’s Village in Delta State. Not to vote Atiku/Okowa will be a deliberate harakiri.
