PDP crisis won’t stop its victory in 2027-Pearse

• Coalition for 2027 dead on arrival

A public affairs analyst and Convener of the Reset Lagos Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr Adetokunbo Pearse, has said that Nigeria needs to devolve more powers to the states so that they can use their resources to develop and be economically viable.

He noted that God has given the states all sorts of minerals – gold, uranium, bauxites, gas, lithium, bitumen, etc, noting that the exclusive list of the federal government in the 1999 constitution has hampered the states from extracting these resources to develop their economies.

In an interview with VINCENT KALU, Pearse, a member of the 2023 PDP National Presidential Campaign Council, noted that the House of Representatives lacks critical thinking  by recommending additional 31states when only three or four of the present 36 states and Abuja FCT can sustain themselves.

The way the PDP is going, are you not afraid that it will perform worse in 2027 than it did in 2023?

The first issue is that the party is not in disarray. The party is not divided, but we have some problems. I have been in the media for the last four or five weeks talking about this same issue.

What is the problem with the PDP? Simple. After you lose an election, you have challenges. People become jittery; they become nervous. They lose confidence, and it’s easy to buy them into the other party.

How can we perform less than we did in 2023? Don’t forget that Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, won 12 states; Obi won 12 states for Labour Party, and Tinubu won 12 states.

So, Tinubu didn’t do very well in that election. All of them were even. The only difference among the three of them was that INEC decided to call the election for Tinubu.

Don’t forget, only 31 per cent of the votes had come in when INEC made the announcement.

If all the votes had come in, that is the remaining 69 per cent or so had come in, who would have won? It could have been Obi, it could have been Atiku. Who knows? INEC gave that election to Tinubu. Because we used to be a superstar, and we won everything in Nigeria for 16 years, everybody thought that we were going to be the same. No, things have changed.

But, we have not done as badly as people think.

I’m going to give you the example of what is happening in the English Premier League. Everybody says that Man City is finished because Man City used to win everything. But, Man City is number four or number five now out of about 20 teams running. So, Man City is not doing as badly as people make it out.

What is happening to PDP is this: People who love PDP, who want PDP to come back into power to save Nigeria from this disastrous administration of Tinubu and the APC are nervous; they are unhappy. Any little problem in the party, they are afraid. They think we are going to collapse. No!

And those who do not like us, like the APC, who want to remain in power and continue to unleash havoc, pain and anguish on Nigerians in every way will do everything possible to give the impression that PDP is in trouble, therefore, PDP can’t compete. So, if they rig the election again, they will say, it’s because PDP was not strong. PDP is alive and well. PDP is strong, stronger than ever.

We had a problem with the issue of our national secretary. That problem has been resolved. The national secretary is being headstrong. He’s resisting the law, resisting the constitution, resisting everybody.

If PDP was in this array, all the organs of the party will not be speaking with one voice. As it is now, the Board of Trustees is speaking with one voice. The Governors Forum is speaking with one voice. The 14 out of 17 members of the National Working Committee say they want Ude Okoye as the National Secretary because he’s the man nominated by the South East Zone to which the office of the National Secretary of the PDP was zoned. It was not zoned to Anyanwu. It was not zoned to anybody. It was zoned to the South East Zone.

The South East Zone nominated Anyanwu, but when he left his office and left the place vacant, the South East Zone said, we are going to fill the place now with another person. It is not the choice of Anyanwu to stay or leave. It is what the zone says. That’s where we are.

So, since everybody; all the major organs of the PDP are in tune with Ude Okoye as the National Secretary, PDP is speaking with one voice, PDP is united.

These are problems that are minor, brought to us by a headstrong man who doesn’t want to go when the divorce has already taken place.

There is this coalition/alliance that is building up for the 2027 elections, with people from PDP, former CPC, APC, and others. What is your take on this?

I am not a soothsayer. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but based on experience of the past, that coalition is dead on arrival because who is going to come out and say, ‘I’m stepping down for this one, I’m stepping down for that one.’ All of them want to be president. We shall see.

What we need to do is to strengthen PDP, to get PDP ready to win the next election. Any coalition is simply a metaphor for confusion. You know, that’s what’s going to happen. The coalition will not happen anyway. I guarantee you that. Let’s not be diverted from the main issue.

PDP is the only opposition party that can take APC out. Most of them doing havoc in APC now are people that were thrown away or who ran away from PDP.

The APC accommodated them because their National Chairman, Oshiomhole, at a time, said, ‘commit any crime, and come into APC and your crimes are forgiven.’

There is no coalition except PDP coming together, getting its members back. What happened to us in 2023? It was simply because we lost our Igbo votes. And when we talk about Igbo votes, we’re talking about Igbo votes in the whole of the five states of the South East. Talking about heavy Igbo votes, we talk about Lagos State, the most popular state in the country. Talking about Igbo votes, we talk about the Christian votes in North Central, and in the North-East.

The president is so tribalistic. Every senior position in the government is in Yoruba’s hand. Anybody who joins this terrible administration is himself an enemy of Nigeria.

So, what do you want? You want them to come back?  So, it is good riddance to bad rubbish is what I say about all those people leaving PDP and joining APC. It is good riddance to them.

The House of Representatives committee on constitution review has recommended 31 more states in addition to the 36 already existing. What are your views?

The House of Representatives has been a big disappointment. There is no original thinking there. There is no critical thinking. What are we going to do with 31 more states when we cannot manage the 36 plus Abuja that we have?

Out of the 36 states of the federation, only three or four are self-sustaining, all the others are bankrupt. They have no economy that can sustain them. So, when you have 31 more states, you have 31 more states of poverty.

So, we don’t need more states in Nigeria. Whatever we have now, we just need to have policies that will devolve power to the states as they are. Already, there are too many.

Devolve power to the states as they are, so that they can use their mineral resources, their natural resources as in a true federation to power the economy, so that they can pass laws in their states assembly, to have state security for themselves. That is what happens in a real federation, not creating more states.

The states we have need to be empowered. That is what we need, not more states that are going to be beggar states, dependent on the federal government, which itself is bankrupt.

Until we go back to the devolution of power to the states so that the states can be viable, we can’t make much progress. These 31 states will not be viable in any way. They will not be able to secure their borders. They will not be able to develop the economy. As our laws stand, we must change the laws. We must amend the constitution to give more powers to the states, and not create more states.

Tinubu has proposed a N54 trillion budget, before it was N49 trillion. What do you think?

We should ask Tinubu what he is doing. This is why we said the man is not an accountant. Where is he going to get money? He keeps borrowing and borrowing and has borrowed money to throw three generations of Nigerians into debt, and he is flying around in jets and yachts. This is an economy that is so bad. This is a president that has declared himself an enemy of the people; he wants to die in luxury and leave the whole country in poverty. That is what the budget is about. There is nothing that can save us except this party goes away and the next election is an opportunity.

Don’t let them give the impression that PDP will not be able to perform.

No matter what happens, the people of Nigeria will vote against this administration and the most powerful opposition, which is the PDP, will come into power by the grace of God for the sake of Nigeria and Nigerians.

But have Nigerians forgiven PDP because they said that the 16 years of PDP rule in Nigeria was also a disaster?

You know the saying that until you marry two wives, you will not know the better one. No matter what Nigerians want to say, now is the opportunity to compare and contrast. Look at the APC eight years, and the two years presently, that is 10 years now, and if this man manages to complete four years, which will be 12 years.

Compare the 10 years of administrations of Buhari and Tinubu with the years of Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan. 

No matter how bad we were during the days of the PDP, we had the highest GDP in Africa, higher than South Africa for the first time in history. Under Jonathan, you did not have this reactionary attitude whereby opposition is silenced, killed or imprisoned or harassed. You had good governance under the PDP. There is no government that is perfect anywhere in the world in any time in history. Compare the 16 years of PDP administration with the 10 years of this disaster.

We thought that Buhari was a disaster, now we have holocaust in government. This is the situation where are in; Nigerians know better, Nigerians have suffered. Poor people always suffer. The point is who can reduce the suffering, who can reduce the level of poverty?  That is all it’s about.

Under PDP administration, inflation was 12, 15, 18 per cent at the most, now is 33.5 per cent. The naira was not as strong as the dollar but it had never been as weak as it is now under Tinubu. What are we talking about?  For the 16 years of the PDP administration, you had nothing like these lopsided appointments.

Under Obasanjo, Yoruba people were complaining that he was not even taking care of them.  He said to them, ‘look I’m the president of Nigeria, and not a president of Yoruba land.’ What did we have under Buhari, the president of Fulani extraction; everybody appointed was Fulani Muslim. Under Tinubu, the people he is appointing are mostly Yoruba Muslim. You cannot compare the two.

We beg Nigerians to compare the two to know what both can do; what the PDP has done and what the APC has done. We will give APC 30 per cent and PDP will get 70 per cent pass.

The six regional development commissions have been completed, as the North Central Development Commissions has been approved.  Is this country going back to regional government because money has been allocated to all these development commissions?

In the first place, where is the money to fund them? We have just said that borrowed money is no money. What we need in Nigeria is not boasting that we have allocated this to that. Where is the money coming from? We are borrowing money to pay our debts; we are going borrowing money here and there. So, we are going in circles. All these things he is creating are not economically viable. Before you do anything, you must first generate the money; you must increase the revenue. That is why I said that the only thing to do is to give powers to the states so that they can use their resources to develop and not to wait for allocations from federal government, which can never be enough because our total dependent on oil is a disaster. It has failed us and it will never be enough and we need to generate more revenue.

In the states, God has given all sorts of minerals; we have gold, uranium, bauxites, gas, lithium, bitumen, etc and yet by the bogus 1999 constitution, states cannot extract minerals to develop their economy. Everything is in the exclusive list of the federal government.

A PDP president is going to restructure the country, which means the devolution of powers to the states, to make the states stronger so that they can use their resources to develop their economies and to protect themselves with a stronger security system. If you devolve power, it means that the federal government will not be calling all the shots as it is now, where every month the governors go to Abuja, cap in hand, begging for allocation. That has to stop and the next president of Nigeria that will be from the PDP will bring about this change that will help develop our economy and help to develop our security system by empowering the states, not by giving them hand-outs as we do now.

Economics analysts say the performance of the 2024 budget, which is the first full circle budget by Tinubu, was about 60 per cent. Until now, it was less than 35 per cent. Is it not an indication that the Tinubu administration is doing well?

The taste of the pudding is in the eating. It is not the figure that you bandy about and which you can change from now and then manipulate.  It is what is on ground. Unemployment increased under Tinubu, poverty increased under him, inflation rose to unimaginable level; under this administration, tax from everything, petrol, gas, electricity, etc has increased. Companies are folding up and leaving Nigeria under this administration. What is the meaning of 60 per cent performance of the budget? It is minus zero.

Vice President, Kashim Shettima said that people are coming from abroad to access our health services. You and I go to hospitals and see the health service that is in shambles. These people blatantly lie all the time. How can anybody say people are coming from abroad, even from America to use our health service? If our health service was so good, why do the president and other top government officials go abroad for treatment? And you are lying to us! I don’t know what Nigerians did to deserve such people as President, Vice President, Senate President, Speaker of House of Representatives. This was the same Vice President that was dancing the other day that the naira made 0.1 per cent increase, and that the national currency was coming back strong, and he was boasting that the naira would overtake the dollar.