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•Repentant terrorists rehabilitated, taken care of more than their victims
Former President of the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU), Dr Jonathan Asake has said that the North is opposed to President Tinubu because he’s not playing politics according to the agenda of the Caliphate, noting that the North always gets agitated whenever a President from Southern Nigeria wants to contest for a second term.
“They feel agitated, intolerant becomes unaccommodating, and feel that the world has come to an end once they do not take over the reins of power,” he noted.
In an interview with VINCENT KALU, he stressed that the inability of the former President Olusegun Obasanjo to wield the big stick to defend the Constitution of Nigeria, when former Zamfara State governor, Ahmed Sani Yerima introduced Sharia, has led to the insecurity the country is suffering today, caused by Fulani bandits, Boko Haram, ISWAP, Lakurawa and other terrorist groups.
What are your expectations on the 2027 elections?
Honestly, my expectations are not what I think will happen. If one has been reading the political weather as we go move towards 2027, it is very clear that we are moving towards a one-party system because, from what is happening, all other parties are being strangulated one way or the other.
So, it appears that we are going to have a one-party arrangement, and so Nigerians may not really have that option or those options that normally avail themselves in a political or democratic arrangement, which means that we are likely to continue with what we have now.
The APC government is likely to just continue unless if something changes from what I see.
The ADC now is accusing INEC of being a tool in the hands of Tinubu or APC to frustrate it, and probably other parties. Do you share in their sentiment?
It is not just now that we have that kind of arrangement of INEC being a tool. The people that are speaking today, where were they in other dispensations when INEC was clearly a tool in the hands of the government of the day or the party in power? So, it isn’t now that it is happening.
But, most of those people were either silent or were even accomplices in making INEC a tool and making our elections not really credible the way it is supposed to be.
If you look at the line-up of the people in ADC today, most of them were part of the former system that even made INEC worse off in being an accomplice to making our elections very unfair or making people that went to vote not to have the outcome of what they voted for.
They are now talking because they are now on the other side. INEC has always been like that from 2015 up to today.
So, why do they expect INEC to change when they themselves have been part of that crude process?
With 31 or more governors on the side of Tinubu, do you see anybody wresting power from him in 2027?
The arrangement on the ground is to move towards the one-party system so that Nigerians will not have an option. So, when you don’t have an option, the only option available is the one that stays, whether it is good or bad. Nobody is in a position to now say, I want this or I want that, or I want to belong to this party or the other party; no, all the other parties become inconsequential, they are merely existing as an endorsement. Most of these parties, the governors will be there to just say, okay, they are invoking the other parties to come up and say, we align with the ruling party.
It’s a one-party system arrangement, and truly it’s a very terrible picture for any democracy in any country, and this is what always causes a crisis in nations or a revolution in nations, when people are not given the options to choose what they want. It’s a democracy, so the option of choosing what you want should be available to everybody, but when there are no options then people are pushed to the wall. It’s a very dangerous trend that we’re moving towards.
What does one party system portend for a growing democracy like Nigeria?
It portends danger for any democracy; it can truncate the democracy because it is not what is in our constitution. The constitution stipulates clearly a multi-party system, where people can have options, can play their party democracy the way they want, but when you don’t have an option, it portends a very great danger of truncating the democracy. It has done that in other nations. That is where we need to be very careful in this country, the way we are going about it.
We have run this democracy since 1999; when we took our exit out of military rule, it is almost 30 years. If we are moving at this rate now, it portends a lot of danger, and it should be a cause of concern for every Nigerian; for every lover of democracy. No matter how we think we love the present administration, let the right thing be done. What I expect is that the president and the ruling party should allow Nigerians to have their options. And then let people choose. If the present leadership is elected by Nigerians under a free and fair election, good and fine. We have seen democracies, like it just happened few days ago, on Sunday, in Hungary, where the sitting Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, who is a far-right person, and loved by the people, lost out to a centre-right person, Peter Magyar. And if you look at it, this is where democracy is at play, they didn’t force everybody to belong to the same party so that the sitting president would win. No, the options were there. The sitting prime minister has been there for 16 years, and he lost the election, and congratulated the winner.
You can’t force everybody to belong to the same party or you make other parties irrelevant, where there is no option. This portends a very grave danger for the country and for our democracy.
But how did this thing begin?
We can all have our own independent analysis on how it began, depending on who is making the comment. When we started in 1999, within the first four years; between 1999 and 2003, we had Obasanjo, who tried to sustain the structures, and continue with the system, and then between 2003 to 2007, he continued, but there is one thing that happened during his reign, which I would not want to forget.
Even when the party in power was the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which is power to the people, but Obasanjo stylishly moved power to the governors in the state, and to me that is where this whole thing started.
He shifted the power to the governors. No matter how hard working and committed and patriotic you are to the nation; no matter how dedicated you have been to the party; you could not get an appointment for anything until you were nominated and endorsed by a governor in the state.
So, the governors became very power drunk at that time and that is where the democracy began to wobble. If you can remember, the governors became so powerful that a governor can even infringe on the constitution at that time and nothing will happen.
For instance, when the Governor of Zamfara State brought in Sharia and implemented Sharia in the state, against the provisions of the constitution, and instead of the president wielding the sovereignty of the nation and the constitution, which is the grundnorm, and then nipping it in the bud so that democracy can continue, Obasanjo looked the other way and said, well, it will fizzle out. That was the beginning of implementation of a law within a law.
Now, it did not fizzle out. That singular action of a governor that now rolls above the constitution to implement Sharia has given birth to what we are struggling with today that we call insecurity. The result is – Boko Haram, ISWAP, Fulani herdsmen/ militia, bandits that are in different shapes and plaguing the country in various states and in various communities. It is almost becoming intractable that the government at the centre today is only struggling to hold power at the centre. That is where it started.
If you have a leader that took his oath of office by swearing to the constitution of the land, and the constitution is being flagrantly violated at any point in time, and he does not wield that stick to defend the constitution so that the unity of the nation will remain, then things will begin to fall apart.
In my own opinion, things started falling apart from the time of Obasanjo, when he turned the other way and looked the other side when the constitution and the constitutional provisions were being violated, and he refused to wield the stick, in spite of the mandate given to him by Nigerians.
Governors began to behave the way they behaved. Up to today, we still witness these things in one form or the other.
When governors have won election in one party; based on the party, the people voted for them, yes, as individuals and as the party. So, people didn’t even want to know who was standing for election, but they know that this is the party that they want; this is the party that will come and implement the programmes, and that is the party they are voting for.
You win and become a governor, and then all of a sudden, you are changing party; you are saying you want to belong to the ruling party, and nothing happens.
There must be sanctions when somebody just changed a party, while he campaigned on another or different party platform; and then when you won election, you just change a party, and nothing happens.
And that is why we have up to 31 governors that are APC; most of them were not voted on the platform of APC.
But most of them, as we know, have been coaxed into joining APC, so that the parties they represent will become weaker and almost not an option for the Nigerian people. So that is where we find ourselves today.
The Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and also other Northern groups are insisting that the INEC Chairman, Joash Amupitan must be removed based on his earlier stand on Christian genocide sometimes ago. What’s your view on this?
They are only being extremely and inordinately hypocritical and self-serving by that call. Majority of those northern leaders and clerics have actually caused what we are going through today.
That call is not in good faith. That shows that it is not about the person, but about their own agenda, which is well entrenched in the nation that everybody knows. The insecurity that the nation is suffering from comes from this implementation of Sharia that I told you about. So, these people are the champions of the implementation of Sharia, which is already in 12 of the 19 northern states, and so their call is that anything that will distort that programme of implementation of Sharia should be done away with. That is first one.
The second is that, they are the same people that championed the Muslim-Muslim ticket in 2023. It is that Muslim Muslim ticket that brought in the present administration led by Tinubu and Kashim Shettima. But, in their own arrangement and agenda, while they call for the Muslim Muslim ticket, they thought that when Tinubu comes on board, as a Muslim from the south with Shettima as a Muslim from the north, then the entire agenda would be achieved and Nigeria would now become a Sharia state, and after that, we can now find ourselves in a new phase of governance in Nigeria. Not democracy, but governance like the one we have in Iran or we had in Iran before the war, where you will have a supreme spiritual Islamic leader, like maybe, the Sultan of Sokoto will now become the supreme leader, who will command the military, command so many other aspects of the governance and we may just have a ceremonial political leader like it is in Iran.
That is what they were working towards, but unfortunately when Tinubu took over the rein of governance, he found out that with the present arrangement of the constitution and with the international community looking at the issues of Nigeria, as a democratic state, it is difficult to go by that.
So, they could not have Tinubu implementing what they had lined up in their agenda towards a caliphate state, and that is why the extreme hatred for him, and that is why the desperation to remove him; and that desperation is never stopping.
The whole issue is not about Amupitan; the whole issue is about if Tinubu should remove Amupitan today and appoints Gumi as the new INEC chairman, then you will hear their applause because they are much closer to the caliphate state that they are working on.
I’m telling you that the northern conspiracy is working towards a caliphate state, where the supreme leader will be an Islamic leader in the country, not a democracy. They are not interested in democracy. The democracy we are playing today is that they just don’t have an option,
but whenever the option comes, they will truncate this democracy and go into a caliphate state. So, it is not about the INEC chairman, but it’s about appointing people that would take strategic positions towards achieving the caliphate state.
You can see today, even the National Security Adviser that everybody is complaining and saying that there is some form of support that his office is giving particularly to the so-called bandits today; those terrorists that are ravaging the entire north, but he’s still being kept there because he is strategically positioned to play that role towards meeting up with the agenda of the caliphate state. So, when they look and found out that key officers that have been given
appointment in the nation are not people that are part of that agenda of the ultimate caliphate state, they would protest.
Do you remember when the former Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa was removed all of a sudden because they found out that he was not playing his role in line with the ultimate achievement of the caliphate state? He was playing a contrary role, and all of a sudden they called for his removal.
So, what we are going to see ahead is that there is going to be an uprising against the Tinubu government because he does not align with that agenda of an ultimate caliphate state.
Not only the INEC chairman, every other appointment he makes, if it is not in line with achieving that agenda of the ultimate caliphate state, he will suffer serious opposition.
The way we are going in the north particularly, it will reach a point where Tinubu people will not be able to go for campaigns in most of the states because of the agenda before them.
You said, it might get to a point that the Tinubu people may not go to campaign in the north because of their agenda. But, he has almost all the northern governors belonging to APC, except Bala Mohammed of Bauchi. Why wouldn’t he have the power to campaign there?
A lot of those governors that are with him are there in person, but they left their people behind. That is the truth. They are not there with their people.
This thing happened to Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. Even in Kaduna here, we were here when he came, but the governors were claiming they were together in one party, but wherever he went for campaign, the people would throw objects at him, and boo him because the governors had mobilised the people at the grassroots to do that, but they themselves were claiming and pretending to be with the president, and it’s even worse off in this Tinubu government.
Most of those governors that you saw; that left their parties to join him, claiming that they are with the APC and with the Tinubu government, left alone, they did not leave with their people. They’re only pretending to be with Tinubu for now, but most of them left their people behind; they didn’t carry their people along and most of them are even working against the Tinubu government, using their people that they left behind. In fact, they are using the resources that they are getting to work against him; that is enough. The north has never changed the way they do their things. Whenever a southern president comes in, after his first term, you will see that the north is agitated; they become intolerant, they feel unaccommodated and they feel that the world has come to an end if they don’t take over the reins of power and that is what we are going to see towards 2027.
When you talk about the north, is it the entire 19 states of the north, or you are talking about the core north?
I talk about the core north, not the Middle Belt. The Middle Belt states are always looking for a democratic arrangement, where options are thrown to them and they have a choice and they choose the person that appeals to them; the party that appeals to them, the party that promises to work for them. They do not have those sentiments.
But the core north is irretrievably attached to religious beliefs that whoever that comes on board if he is not governing according to their own religious expectation, then that person has been a failure.
If you remember, there is a viral video recording of a Muslim Iman from the core north, who made a public statement; it is not hidden, and he stated that they would rather have a most corrupt, a most wicked Muslim from the north, as a leader who will do everything against democratic standing, who will punish the people, who will kill the people, but let him be a Muslim from the north, than to have a non-Muslim or somebody else from the south that will be a very good man; that will be leading according to democratic principles and make the people happy. That, to them, is not what matters. What matters is that the person must be a core Muslim from the north that will lead according to Islam. So, when you have a set of people like this, where is that country headed?
We have so many nations of the world that have different cultures, different religions, and different ethnicities within one country, but what binds them together is a constitution and of course the democratic norms and principles that they follow. That is what keeps them together united, but when we have people that are so myopic and everything is looked at from the prism of religion and ethnicity and region, then we hardly can get it right.
Unless we have to revisit our constitution again and redefine the very essence of our existence, we’ll continue to have a bunch of people from a particular section of the country that is weighing down the country; that is making the country not to move along the nations in spite of the huge human and material resources that God has given us.
The insecurity in the north is at an all-time high. In the last days, several high-ranking officers and about 30 soldiers have been taken down by Boko Haram. Just at the same period, 13 people were killed in Zamfara, with other killings in the region. What is your take on this?
Does it surprise anyone of what is happening today? When we have a nation that is doing things in the reverse, or toeing towards an evil agenda that is entrenched, and we are not ready to fight it, then that is the result.
We have a situation where you have terrorists, whether they are the Fulani bandits, Boko Haram, ISWAP, or they are the Lakurawa. We have so many of them. Some have come in from the other Sahel region, like Mali, and Niger, and other countries, to join with the ones that are inside the nation, and they have been killing Nigerians, making huge destruction.
But the rhetoric we have from government over time is that these people the so-called repentant ones are being rehabilitated. They are being taken care of more than their victims. And some are being absorbed into the military and other organs of the nation.
Do you know what that means? That means that over time these people that have been reabsorbed, have been entrenched in the military and they will not allow the military to do its work. That is what we are having today. They have been entrenched in the military and some of them have even grown to be big time officers over time that this programme started.
I remember that this programme of re-absorption of so-called repentant terrorists started not less than 10 years ago. Some of them could have grown to sensitive positions within the military architecture, and they are part of the military in fighting terrorism.
Does anyone recall what happened in Afghanistan? When the Taliban came, they also pretended that they have repented, and were absorbed into the main Taliban military. When most of them grew and took strategic positions, took command positions, they simply stood up against the government and chased the government out and took over. So, terrorist organisations took over government in the nation.
If care is not taken; if we continue at the rate we are going, rehabilitating so-called repentant terrorists and then absorbing them into the Nigerian military and other security and intelligent organisations, in not too distant future, these people will grow and take strategic positions and chase the national government out and take over, and Nigeria will be saddled with the terrorist government just like we have today in Afghanistan and life will be hellish, and Nigeria will now be a different country.
The insecurity we are seeing today has become intractable because we already have those elements within the military architecture. They provide advanced information; they provide intelligence for their people to counter our military operation. So, what can we do? Well, that is where we find ourselves.
Unless something very urgent is done and we have people that are men of courage in government or this present government develops the political will to arrange the situation, we are already drifting down the same line with Afghanistan
