• Nigeria practising autocratic system of government
The presidential candidate of the Action Democratic Party (ADP) in the 2023 general elections, Alhaji Sani Yusuf Yabagi has said that under President Bola Tinubu, the judiciary, the legislature and the executive have collapsed into one, and he rules like an emperor.
He warned politicians thinking of using the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to challenge Tinubu in 2027 to stop raising hopes that he insisted could not be realised. He said the SDP belongs to the Yoruba, and as such cannot be used to fight a Yoruba man.
In an interview with Saturday Sun, the Jakardan of Nupe, asked Tinubu to revisit the emergency rule he declared in Rivers State in order to preserve the current democratic system.
According to him, the president violated the constitution in order to tackle a purely political matter.
He also gave reasons the coalition of political parties that is being built up for the 2027 elections will not stand. He spoke with VINCENT KALU
Several elected politicians and other members of the opposition political parties are defecting in droves to the APC. What does this portend for the nation’s democracy?
It shows that party politics is still at an infant stage. But it’s strange because one would expect that after this number of years that we have spent in playing party politics, that people would be loyal to their political parties.
But, like you know, and I know, political parties in Nigeria today lack ideology, rather than money. And it’s unfortunate because the institutions that will guarantee growth of democracy in this country are weak; they are made deliberately to be weak.
The drafters of the constitution were not true politicians. Some of them were hand-picked by the military. So, they had little or no grounding in politics or political party management. What happened is that you have political parties that do not have protection in terms of the institutions that are meant to midwife the growth of political parties or politics in Nigeria.
For instance, elected members of political parties are cross carpeting from their parties to the party in power and in the end you don’t have any recourse in terms of what the constitution says. Those that emerge winners on particular political party remain members of those parties and if at all they want to move from that party to another party, they should not benefit from the victory of the party.
The contradiction here is that when you are contesting for an election, it is not the individual that is on the ballot, it is the political party that is on the ballot. But strangely, this individual now will just decide that one day, I’m going and he goes with the property of the political party, which is the victory at the polls.
These are things that do not take much to understand; it’s a contradiction and it’s something that the constitution should be able to sort out in order to grow democracy and party politics in Nigeria.
So, this is the reason for what is happening. Our laws are weak, the institutions are weak. There’s no enforcement that will guarantee that those who emerge winners on a particular platform remain on those platforms.
And if you want to leave, then the party should be able to nominate another person to continue on behalf of the party because they are representing the party.
But could these people be moving to the APC because the ruling party has been performing very well?
No, it’s because our politics has become a mercantile kind of exercise; it’s not what it should be. It’s no longer something for service, that you go into to offer service to the people. It is something you now go into to take care of yourself; how much can I make for myself? Like you know, since APC is controlling our treasury, they have all the money, which belongs to all of us; they have cornered it so they can now dish it out the way they want. These people that are moving there are not moving there to serve the people. They are moving there to serve themselves.
Are you not afraid that these defections may lead to a one-party state?
One party state or no one party state, the fact of the matter is that if you don’t have institutions that guarantee law and order; that guarantee promotion of democracy itself, what you find is something that is not democracy.
So, a one party state, like people say, is today a reality in Nigeria because other parties do not have any recourse to anything in terms of guarantee of their rights, freedom and things like that. So, you go to court, the court is there for the highest bidder. All the institutions have been cornered; they have been cowed by the people in power.
So, you don’t have a one-party state, rather it’s an autocratic system that we are having.
There’s a coalition of political parties building up to challenge Tinubu in 2027. Is your party part of it?
This is not the first time that what you are talking about is happening in this country. You know that anytime elections are coming, you’ll find some collection of people coalescing because they want to see who will come and give them money for elections.
So long as that is the case, you can come together as much as you want but on the day of election the electorate are looking for money.
Apart from the coalition, there’s another emerging force, which is the SDP, where some people who couldn’t be accommodated in APC are now moving into. What is your view on this?
Do you know the history of SDP? It is purely a party that is rooted in the South-West. Of course, the immediate past chairman is Olu Falae. We know that the real owners of SDP are largely Yoruba people. It’s like you are talking about APGA, and by chance you have an Igbo man in power and you want to fight him by going into APGA. For instance, the Igbo man emerged on the platform of say PDP, and you now go into APGA to fight him. It’s a futile effort. I don’t know how you can go to SDP to fight Bola Tinubu. It’s not possible because the owners of the party cannot and will not allow you to use their platform to destroy one of their own.
This is the Nigerian politics we have today; we are still in these primordial sentiments that have defined our politics. You can’t use an instrument put in place by Yoruba people to fight and defeat a Yoruba man.
What is your position on the declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State?
It’s an aberration. The president was either deceived or he himself decided to act in the manner he did to make a ridicule of the politics or the democracy or the constitution of this country.
Because the constitution is very clear as to what you can do in the circumstance. Even if you had, like he said, state assets, pipelines being vandalised, there was a danger of a breakdown of law and order. There are available remedies provided by the constitution. You don’t have to go and then violate the constitution itself in order to cure a purely political matter.
You don’t have to violate the constitution; what he has done is a violation of the constitution. That is why the dust will not settle, and I know the president will have to take a second look at what he has done in order to preserve this democracy which all of us fought for. The issue is that the constitution makes provision for when the House of Assembly is incapacitated. The National Assembly takes over and then plays the role that the House of Assembly is supposed to play in order to ensure that the three arms of government are at work in the state. Whenever you have insecurity or a breakdown of law and order affecting the economy, you have the police, you have other security agencies.
In the north, where former President Jonathan declared a state of emergency in about three states, the military men moved in to checkmate the excesses of the bandits and the Boko Haram and whatever. So, there is nothing stopping Tinubu from moving soldiers and any other apparatus of the security that he requires to checkmate those who are vandalising our pipelines. You don’t have to take out an elected governor in order to achieve that.
It’s an aberration, it’s a violation of the constitution and it doesn’t have any place in our constitution. What Mr. President did is alien to our constitution. So, it can’t stand.
On the state of emergency, the constitution provides that two thirds majority in the National Assembly should affirm the decision of the president. But what we saw was a voice vote. What do you say to that?
It’s a mockery of democracy. Everybody knows. They themselves are aware. They didn’t just do it by accident, they knew what they were doing, they know that it was a mockery of democracy and of course everything has its own repercussion. They will suffer it more than any other person because whatever goes around comes around.
What they did wasn’t by accident, it was planned, it was deliberate, and it was to tell you that you have an autocratic system. Under Bola Tinubu, the judiciary the legislature and the executive have been collapsed into one, and he rules like an emperor, and that’s what you have seen. It’s an echo chamber that you have in our system of governance today.
Now, what’s your expectation of INEC in 2027?
INEC cannot operate in a vacuum; it needs us to give them laws that will guarantee free, fair, and credible elections. You need to check and then take a second look at what we have as our electoral act, our electoral laws. If we look at the process of the election itself, you will find that the weakest point in the election process today in Nigeria is that of the collation of results. Collation is still very much in the hands of INEC; it was manually done, isn’t it?
Yes, you are able to digitalise accreditation, meaning that it is not manually done, as it’s done by BIVAS. But when it comes to the actual critical point of the election itself, which is the collation of the votes, that is left in the hands of those who are managing the elections.
So, until we address that aspect, there’s no way you will not find people taking advantage of that loophole that has been created deliberately in our election process. In spite of all the digitalisation process that INEC has introduced, why have we left collation in the hands of the election officers? Why election officials? It’s supposed to have gone far beyond digitalizing the collation today. You have AI and other things needed to ensure that collation is done automatically. Something is there. There is some kind of conspiracy against the process itself and until you now address that conspiracy, and you take out that critical defect in the election process, there’s no way we can get it right.
Take for instance, the INEC chairman and the commissioners are in Abuja here, and at the best, maybe, they go to the state’s headquarters. So, what do they know about what is happening in the field, about the people collating the results? How do they manage them? They can’t sit in their offices and then supervise their officers in the field, that’s why you need to digitalise, automate the entire process, especially the collation. That’s why there is the saying that, ‘it’s not those who cast their votes that determine the winner but those who count the vote.’ This means you must address the issue of counting and then automate it.
We’re told that Nigeria’s external debt is now N150trn. What is your take on this?
The system of governance in this country and the scenario in which you find yourself is like an open cheque that you give to people who are running the affairs of the government to issue to themselves whatever amount of money they want to squander. The borrowing by the government, there are no checks and balances in our constitution or in any statute that I’m aware of which controls how much the government brings out or spends on frivolous things. This is why you have a problem. The kind of programmes that the government embarks upon, who checks the usefulness of those things as far as the growth of the economy is concerned? This is why you have a ballooning kind of debt; you don’t have the checks and balances. The National Assembly that is supposed to apply the checks and balances are eager to approve whatever loans that the government wants to take.
Like I told you from the beginning, they have collapsed into one echo chamber, and the executive controls everything. So, until you sort that out, you will now have a government that behaves like an irresponsible manager that you ask to manage your affairs and nobody checks his excesses. That is what we have now. The National Assembly is a rubberstamp, the moment the executive brings anything, especially that has to do with money, they approve it without asking questions. This is why you have a ballooning debt profile and there is nothing to show for it in terms of infrastructural development, the growth of the economy itself in the real sense of it, except the allowances that they give to themselves. Until we become a responsible government; we are not responsible because checks and balances have been completely abused. See other governments, you talk about America, Europe etc, there are checks and balances. The executive cannot just do whatever they like. But, in our own case, we do not have a system even from the political point of view, from the recruitment of leadership to the behaviour of the executive, and how it affects the entire system of governance, it is not so much to be desired because we have deliberately made the system to be so weak. This is the tragedy of the Nigerian state today.
What should Nigerians expect from ADP in 2027?
We are networking. We are talking to people we believe would help to save this scenario that we have just painted – a scenario of hopelessness, because we believe that people should come to serve and not to be served. So ADP, as a party, we are talking to people. At the nick of time, we will come out with our blueprint to tell Nigerians what we are doing and the good plans we have for the country. Like we all know this country has a promise of greatness. What is lacking is the right leadership that will drive the process.