Follow Us on Google
• No one checks Tinubu; he has obliterated other arms of government
The presidential candidate of the Action Democratic Party (ADC) in the 2023 general elections, Alhaji Sani Yusuf Yabagi, has accused President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of watering down Nigeria’s democracy, where checks and balances don’t exist anymore. He said the president behaves like an emperor, and gets whatever he wants, which is the reason for the huge external debt.
In an interview with VINCENT KALU, the Jakardan of Nupe, pointed out that Tinubu has turned himself into a Yoruba president, making sure that all the critical aspects of the economy are cornered by his tribe. He further said that the amended electoral act is a way of legalisng rigging for the ruling party.
What are your expectations of 2027 elections?
It’s a continuation of entrenchment of democracy in Nigeria because elections are major events in every democratic environment that add to the strength of democracy. So, I believe that 2027 will be a year that will further strengthen our democracy.
Is your party supporting a presidential candidate or a political party or you are going solo?
Our party would definitely bring out a candidate, and of course, we don’t mind if any group wants to join us in the campaign to ensure that our candidate wins. So, there will be no solo situation; a situation where you say you want to go solo is not possible. It’s a situation where you want to as much as possible bring together all the forces that can help the party actualise its goal, which is to ensure that we win the majority of the states and at the centre also, the president of Nigeria will emerge from the platform of ADP.
So as it stands, you are not joining any party. Instead, other parties can join you to actualise your ambition?
It is exactly our plan.
APC, the ruling party has over 31 governors, and controls about 85 per cent of members of the National Assembly. Do you think that any party stands a chance to challenge it, including your party, even if others join you?
Let me remind you of what happened in the 2023 election, in case you have forgotten. Some governors who wanted to go to the senate came out to campaign and contest the elections, but they failed to get the support of their own people. So that tells volumes about what can happen. Don’t get carried away by these governors that are in that party. From what happened, we have seen that Nigerians today have really come of age when you talk about maturity if given the opportunity to really elect the person they want to be in the position.
If we are going to have free and fair election in this country, we’ll beat APC hands down because of its performance all over the place. Everybody knows that APC has performed very badly, and it’s just a question of parties like our party getting our act together and then presenting the candidate that will elicit the kind of support that we would require to win the elections.
Don’t be intimidated by people that are only in names or positions, but don’t have the electoral strength, electoral value or attraction that you are talking about to win elections.
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) is accusing Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of partisanship and being a tool in the hands of the APC to make sure that it is not on ballot. What’s your view on this issue?
The issue of ADC is something that you have to be very careful how you look at the whole scenario because the matter is before the court. If an issue is before the court, and the court has come out to say this is what they want, all institutions, especially INEC, are supposed to obey the rule of law. We’ll have no option than to follow the court pronouncements.
The question now is the interpretation of what the court says, whether it’s in tandem with what INEC is doing by saying that they want the status quo ante to remain; that they want everybody to go back to where they were before, because each of the two people that are now contesting the leadership of the party has advanced a reason that the court thinks that they deserve to take a look at before they decide one way or the other.
So, if INEC in its own judgment now says, okay let’s wait for the court so that we don’t run afoul of the court direction, you have to be careful how you look at that issue, because it’s about court’s pronouncement. Interpretation then is now what we can talk about.
ADC is now threatening fire and brimstone. If it is not on the ballot, would the heavens fall?
They are law abiding citizens, and of course, they will obey the court because they would have no option other than to obey the court.
Of course, you can’t deny them the right to express their displeasure with what the court has said. The sensible thing for them to do is to go back to the court and convince the court that the decision is not in their favour and may affect the future of the party in terms of being able to participate in elections. Like I told you, elections are one of the activities in any democracy; they define democracy and strengthen democracy.
You talked about free and fair election, but during the amendment of the electoral act, Nigerians had expected that real time electronic transmission of results would be the strongest point to ensure very credible polls. However, the ruling party that commands over 85 per cent of members of the National Assembly thwarted it. What is your take on this?
The ruling party is afraid of what I’ve just told you, that big names do not win elections in Nigeria. Because you are a governor or something, doesn’t mean you are going to win an election. We have seen it happen when the election was conducted in a manner that the votes counted.
The APC knows this, and that is why they want to create an alibi for to rig elections themselves by saying that the network will not work. Who told them the network will not work?
The network has been working. The operators of this network have come out to say that they have 97 per cent coverage. Not only that, they have almost 100 per cent availability of the network in terms of transmission of whatever information or data you want to transmit.
So, it’s a way by which APC wants to rig the election before the election even takes place.
And that’s what they did, they railroaded, the National Assembly, because they control it, and Mr. President also rushed to sign the bill without even the Executive taking a look at the bill, studying it, and then see its implications. That bill wasn’t given to the Attorney General of the Federation.
Normally, the Executive will receive the bill from the National Assembly and they’ll set up their own committee that will study the bill and see how it fits with the expectations of Nigerians, and the government of the day.
But here, just to demonstrate to you that we don’t have three independent arms of government – the Judiciary, the Legislature, and the Executive; the three arms of government that are supposed to be separate and independent, but that is not the case here.
Today, you have just one arm. That’s the Executive that controls all the other two arms of the government. So, we are in a situation that is strange to democracy because democracy did not anticipate this.
This is not the intention of our constitution that you wake up one day and then the Executive will take control of all the other two arms of government. That was never the intent of the constitution.
What Bola Ahmed Tinubu is doing is against the letter and spirit of the constitution and that is not also in favour of democracy. He has reduced democracy to Kleptocracy or whatever. He is virtually an emperor, he behaves like an emperor, and whatever he wants now, it’s done. There’s no democracy again where there are checks and balances
What they did to the electoral act is a way of legalising rigging. Before the election, they have already prepared how they’re going to rig it.
The Middle East war has led to the increase in price of petroleum products to about 45 per cent depending on location. This has caused more anguish to Nigerians. What should Tinubu do in this situation?
Look at the history of the sector you are talking about, especially the downstream sector. What has happened to our refineries, where billions of dollars were sunk into? Why is none of them working?
Why hasn’t Tinubu summoned all the past chief executives of NNPC to answer for their crimes against Nigerians? Because you have Dangote refinery that’s why the situation is even like this, otherwise, the situation would have been disastrous for an average Nigerian to just live.
We have four refineries, where we spent billions of dollars and not one is producing petrol and the president did not see anything wrong with that.
Are you saying that he should revive the refineries under this situation?
Not only to revive the refineries, but the people that stole our money should be asked to bring back the money so that we can fix the refineries. If we have four refineries working, and with Dangote, that would mean the price won’t be so high.
The constitution has made provisions for allocation to the domestic refineries, and this government has also said okay, there will be crude oil for naira. This means that whatever happens in the international market may not affect the price of petrol in Nigeria in the manner it is affecting it now.
What’s your view on the debt that keeps growing and government’s relentless borrowing? And people are asking, where are the trillions saved from fuel subsidy removal?
They are in the pockets of the government; people in government. It’s happening because, like I said, the constitution of this country is being violated. The three arms of government are not working, especially the National Assembly as an independent arm of government, in order to checkmate the excesses of the Executive.
That’s why you have the high unbearable level of debts that you are talking about, and there’s nobody saying anything.
Nobody has called the Executive to come and explain what they have you done with the monies they have borrowed, where they were invested, and the advantage to the economy? What is the cost-benefit of what you have done? So that we can now, as Nigerians, be able to say, okay, we are not just mortgaging the future of this country by way of taking money that is not for anything.
These things are happening because the president was not here to really build democracy, or was not here to really build the country called Nigeria for the future, to benefit and then enjoy the benefits of what God has given to us.
He is here to just promote himself and use our money the way they like, without being checked, without anybody questioning them or stopping them.
Like you know, which is happening, he has obliterated the entire system of governance, which says you must have Judiciary to be independent, you have the Assembly to be independent, and you have Executive to be independent. That doesn’t exist. And because it doesn’t exist, what is happening is a violation of the constitution.
A violation of the constitution would mean that you are doing something against the interests of the people of this country. And you have nobody to call him to order because the system is not being operated the way it’s supposed to be operated.
That’s why he stage-managed the elections of the principal officers of the National Assembly, from the Senate President to the Speaker, and to every principal officer.
He hand-picked them so as to obliterate the constitutional governance of the country; whereby you have an arm checking the other arm by way of having transparency and accountability.
That doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a crime against the people of this country. That’s the point I’m trying to make you understand.
Because it was not intended that the president should go and interfere with the election of the principal officers of the National Assembly, if he didn’t have something that is not in the interest of the people of this country, why didn’t you allow democracy to flourish; to operate in the manner that the constitution anticipated.
This is why you are having Bola Ahmed Tinubu behaving like an emperor and nobody is checking him; nobody can check him. You can’t. Where do you go to checkmate him? Nowhere!
If you look at even his Executive, he made sure that the most critical aspects of the sector of the economy are in the hands of people from his tribe – Yoruba. They are the ones running the financial sector, they are running the NNPC, they are the ones running all the productive sectors of the economy in this country. How bad can he get?
Insecurity in the country, especially in the North, is at an all-time high in recent history. What’s the cause of this and how can it be arrested?
The cause of it is that you have a president that is behaving as if he’s not a Nigerian president, but a Yoruba president. He doesn’t care about what is happening to the north or any other section of the country. The insecurity you are talking about is more endemic in the north; that’s why he has been lacklustre with his approach to fighting the insecurity in that region. Instead of the thing going down it’s increasing every day; every blessed day, you hear that somebody has been kidnapped, you hear that villages have been overrun, people are being killed, the bandits are holding sway; they are governing some places in this country.
A country like Nigeria that has all the wealth, with the army, and you cannot fight a ragtag army of bandits for so many years. What’s happening?
But, like I told you, it is happening because Tinubu assumed the leadership of this country, as if he is just the president of a Yoruba nation, not the president of Nigeria. That’s why every investment is going to Yoruba land. Everything about Nigeria, as far as this country is concerned is controlled by the Yoruba.
If you have had one per cent of this insecurity we are having in the north in the Yoruba land, it would have been solved long time ago, and you would not hear it again. He would have fought and stopped it long time ago.
Sheik Gumi recently said that the government knows all the financiers of terrorism in the country. What should a responsive government do with this revelation?
It’s to name the promoters of the insecurity; government should name those behind it and deal with them.
As I told you, Tinubu is not bothered because Yoruba people are not being killed. Have you heard of Yoruba people being kidnapped in the manner that the Northerners are being kidnapped? So, he doesn’t care.
How can this insecurity be tackled so that people will be have peace and move from one place to the other unchallenged?
It is by electing a Nigerian, a president that will love the country as a president of Nigeria; that will look at the whole country as his own constituency, not somebody who will come and look at the country from one side, and then only be serving his own people and forget about what is happening in the rest part of the country. That’s what Nigerians need to do.
You have to elect somebody who really believes in this country as a one indivisible entity. Tinubu has not demonstrated that kind of president that we want.
Everything cannot be Yorubanised. Everybody that is somebody is a Yoruba man in this country today, and all the bad things happening are happening in the other side, and not in the Yoruba land. This is a question we must ask ourselves. He is going to answer his creator because he won’t live forever
You presented yourself as the president of the country you were elected and then you swore by Quran you were going to defend the constitution of this country and the interest of this country, and then you become a tribal president by your conducts, by your utterances, by everything.
Who are you going to talk to, to stop the insecurity? We have given our allegiance; we have given you our resources as the president. So, where are you going to complain? is it the national assembly that is a rubber stamp; that he handpicked or is it the judiciary or is it the executives that are not there for you? Who do you go to?
Tinubu’s defenders say he is following the footsteps of his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, and that during the late president’s time, the northerners also kept quiet. How do you reconcile these two?
Nobody kept quiet, and nobody supported what Buhari did. But we expected that as a democrat, who we believe fought for democracy, we didn’t know that he was fighting for democracy for the Yoruba.
A democrat shouldn’t come and do what he is doing. Buhari did something that was bad. Look at Buhari’s pedigree and his training; the best part of his life was in the military, all they know is just one command, which is to obey the last order. He wasn’t a democrat in the manner that you should expect Tinubu. We expected the president to be more democratic; to be more magnanimous, to take the whole Nigeria as his constituency because he’s somebody who claimed to have friends all over the place. What happened to all these bridges that he built before he became the president with people from the other side of the country? Was he deceiving them so that the Yoruba can now rule over us and deceive everybody?
