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Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal in this interview, reminisces on his time in office and and life outside the trappings of huge public office. In this interview, he spoke on various issues.
You were instrumental in the formation of government in Adamawa State in the 2019 elections; you even went against someone running on your party’s ticket asking him to concede defeat after the elections; what are your thoughts on that government now?
I don’t have any thought on this government, it is only about six or so months in office of a four year term, so it is too short to make any informed opinion.
My political philosophy and stand is never adversarial, just because someone is not in my party, does not mean I would just attack and criticise them. Just because APC lost power does not mean, we should go out attacking PDP not knowing what they did that is wrong.
We will pray for them just as the Bible directs that we should pray for our leaders and hope they do well but if they dont, nothing will stop us from pointing it out to them and we hope they will listen and learn and do well if they are really a government after the welfare of the people of Adamawa state.
My thinking is that as a state, we must have objectives and we must have goals and the plans to get us to where our objectives are.
As a people, we must have something like a development plan such that it does not matter who is in government, we will pursue that plan and ensure our people have social cohesion and economic development they need to live a descent lives. That I think is the function of government, to create an enabling environment for our people to prosper.
It doesn’t matter who is it that is in power but if we all agree that this is our goal, then we should all assist that government to achieve the goal.
You prophetically told APC leading into the 2019 elections, that they will lose power in Adamawa State and it happened, how are you feeling about the ongoing efforts to unite the party, what is your take on it?
What really transpired during the elections? As I have told you earlier, my theory of involvement in politics is for the social cohesion of our people and their economic development, so that our people will live a prosperous, safe and secure lives in their environment in a manner that makes them feel comfortable to go about their daily activities in a free and fair manner.
I am not a person that would close his eyes and keep his mouth shut when the people we put in place cannot deliver on the job, I will protest, even if it is an APC government, or a party that I am the national chairman.
I expect people in the party to follow the party’s manifestos and do the thing we all agreed should be done.
The understanding is that having been lucky to be successful to win elections under the flag of the party, we should be able to live and do as the party prescribes.
The basis for running on the party’s flag is that one must have subscribed to the party’s goals and objectives and especially the leaders; they should adhere to it, if they digress from that, we will try to bring them back but when they resist, then we will declare war on them.
You are all aware that historically, they didn’t like my protest, I am sure you were at the stakeholders meeting one time when I tried to talk and point out certain things for my party members but they didn’t let me talk; now if you don’t allow me talk, how do you know that I have my own views different from yours?
When they didn’t allow us to express our own views, we said then we are not together then, everyone can go his own way, I have my own PVC which does not say which person or party I must vote for.
It’s a personal choice, I have my choice and some people that are sympathetic to my views would always go towards where I am going, the overall effect is that we may lose elections.
On the people going about that they want to unite the party, unity is a good thing anywhere because whether you are in a political party, your farm, organisations, or anything other thing else, if you are not united, you can’t go far, you will not be able to achieve your goals or have peace, and we all want peace whether in PDP or APC or any other place.
If there is disharmony in any of these two large political parties in the country, then it affects everyone of us, like the Bible says if your hand is woulded, your leg cannot say it does not care because every part feels it, because the parties have members across the country and people sympathetic to their views that may lean in the direction of these parties.
So, I encourage any organisation that seeks to make peace but when peace is pursued, it must be on the basis that everyone understands it to be clear and altruistic. You don’t go out seeking peace when your motives are suspected by the person with whom you want to seek peace.
When they came to me about it, I asked why are we trying to get peace and be united? There was no good response, the answer was that they want to harmonise the party to have peace and move forward. So, I asked again, move forward to where and do what? What do we do with the political party that is peaceful and everyone has forgiven one another, where do we go from there?
No concrete answer, someone said there is local government elections coming. So, in my usual frank nature, I told them that all of you were alive when we were in government; the party in power always wins about 97 percent of local government elections in Nigeria; all state governments always win ninety seven or more of all local government elections and we don’t expect it to be different this time.
Nobody will give me a satisfactory answer. There will be local government elections and people will contest and whether or not we will have a satisfactory answer from the Fintiri-led government, and I have some candidates in my political platform that I must support financially and politically. But I would have to pray and fast for the government to acknowledge this result.
I know that there are some local governments in the state that if we stand for elections, APC should win but whether this government will recognize it as such is another issue because all over the country, political parties in power have always won local government elections one hundred percent.
Looking back at your time as SGF, would you say you have found peace personally since you left the office?
Let me explain something to you, many people who hold political office in Nigeria or have been in government, usually developed the tendency that government cannot go on without them; I never had that in me.
When you are out, that is when you find out that all the “gra-gra” you are doing is nothing and you were just killing yourself for nothing.
In Nigeria, from my experience of appointment as the SGF, the same day you have an appointment into an office, there will be a petition from someone who thinks he should be the one that should be appointed into the office; they immediately begin to work to undermine your office and maybe, have the chance to get into the office.
It is a job that no one really appreciates what you have done or how well you do them. Even the “Danfo driver”, immediately he hires a conductor, the conductor’s primary task is to undermine the driver, so that he can take over and the driver’s main goal is to buy a new bus and dump his master’s own, so it is a practical lesson. So, I was never under the illusion that I was indespensable.
So, when I was SGF, this is how my life was; I wake up in the morning and pray and commit my day into God’s hands, read my Bible and supporting verses and by eight o’clock, I am in the office. In the evening, when I am at home, I pray, I have done my best today, anywhere I have failed you, forgive me.
Sometimes, I remember something important that I should have done but didn’t;I just console myself, I look up to God and say to him, “well, I don commit everything into your hands nah” and that’s all, I don’t kill myself. So, my mind is very clear about what I do in the office and how I live, so, I never had any illusion that I was indespensable in office.
So, I left the office, not that I was really benefitting anything in it, because before I took the office, I was a very successful IT consultant and I was running very successful multi-million naira projects.
This project they call GISMIS that everybody is very proud about in government, the single treasury account project, were my projects. I designed it from the scratch, saw to its implementation to the end and as soon as I became SGF, I resigned and was paid handsomely for it during it’s implementation.
I have done quite a number of successful projects, some were international and others local. I was also a project management consultant; I was a change management consultant, organisations going through change hire us, to help them throught the process of change successfully and sustainably. I was a business analysis consultant, I was running this successfully and happily too.
And of course, I was also nurturing my farm. I started the farm as a result of my wedding, people donated cows to me and I ended up with about 15 cows after the wedding.
I started breeding them and by the time I was the SGF, I had close to 200 cows. So, I started farming because of those cows, knowing full well that the remnant would take care of the animals. I grow soya beans.
Last year, I produced 2000 bags of maize; they are not profitable, most of it, I used for feed for my livestock. I have pigs that sell for two hundred thousand naira, about three hundred sheep, about the same number of goats; it is very profitable because I oversee it and I am back to my consultancy job. So, life has been very very good to me.
With 2023 elections around the corner, how do you view the candidacy of your friend, Ahmed Bola Tinuba who was credited with your nomination as SGF, are you divided between Professor Osinbajo who you described as a fine gentleman and Bola Tinubu and do you think there will be power rotation at all in 2023?
To be clear, Tinubu did not nominate me for SGF but he strongly supported my nomination.
That was what brought me trouble; some people feel I should not say, my mother brought me up in such a way that if someone does any good to me, I have to say thank you and point it out that this person has done such a very good thing to me.
Quite a number of people must have contributed to it but Bola Tinubu in particular convinced me to accept the job. I don’t know what the job was or how the job would be then. I went to the Facebook in order to try to understand what is the job of the SGF. I went to their website and tried to understand what the job of the SGF was, but it was very sketchy and I could not understand.
But Bola convinced me and said you can do it. The truth that nobody wants to hear was that I left government as a principal engineer, on level 12. At that level, you are not an executive, no one minutes file to you and you don’t minute file to anyone, because it was not an office job, it was a field job.
I told Bola Tinubu, I cannot be an SGF, I have never minuted file to anyone; he said to me BD you can do it, you are intelligent, you are fearless, hardworking and incorruptible and your contribution to the emergence of this government was huge.
And it is not only because of yourself but because of your qualities, you will do good to a lot of people, so don’t be selfish, don’t worry about these things, you will pick up.
Let me tell you a joke, when I went to the office of the SGF newly, I was finishing one biro a day, because when a file is minuted to me, I would be writing big grammar and notes.
I confided in Senator Ngige and said my hands are hurting from too much writing, so he advised me saying don’t do that, just write either treat, noted, approved, treat and revert and by the time I left office, a biro was lasting up to two months.
Ngige told me that this treat and revert is a means of control, so that when you give the order for approval and the person does something else, you can reverse it. So, I picked up on the job like Tinubu said.
It was a wonderful place; I was helping people and the office of the SGF, when I was there, was much about addressing petitions. There were people who spent some good number of years in office and were evicted unfairly; such people would write petition, the attorney general would order their reinstatement but the parastatal would refuse, the Head of service would order for the persons return but it would not go through, those were my interest.
I even had a petition that Obalande belongs to the Igbo and I quickly minuted it to the governor and said treat, so when I met the governor, I asked him whether he has seen my letter? You can run into funny things like that.
One of the things I enjoyed doing then was to enforce those things. The attorney general has ordered that the man be reinstated, who are you to stop it; is it your father’s property, I would demand. And I have the kind of character to enforce that.
These are the kind of things that give me satisfaction. Someone would come with a proposal to implement projects for government, people would come around that they have executed some jobs for government 15 years ago and have not been paid; from a business point of view, I understand that this is calamituous, after expending your money and not being paid; I would call the revelant ministry, so these are the jobs we do and these are the things that bring satisfaction to me; besides that, there was nothing.
I was not someone that was drunk with power or liked people worshipping me. In fact, one of the things I hated when I was SGF was that convoy.
Thirty policemen would be following me, I tried to reduce them but the system would not allow me. When they come to your house for lunch, they eat jollof rice, those who don’t want it would request for other kinds of meals and take some juice to wash it down and my wife would not complain because my wife is that kind of woman.
I didn’t see the benefits, you can see the few of them there, what they cook I eat with them.
When people want to see me, I give them appointment by 7pm and I always want attention for my wife and children.
So, about 2023, I am not God and am not a prophet. The background for my involvement in politics is Buhari. I joined politics with the belief that if he becomes the president, things will be good for the country, sincerely, that was my belief.
I went to military school, so I am familiar with the ways of the military; we know our officers, our heroes, so Buhari was one of mine. I felt he would be a good president.
Then we had the Petroleum Trust Fund to confirm my belief and by the grace of God, he has become and the constitution allows for two terms only. In 2003 we lost, 2007, we lost, 2011 we lost and 2015, and 2019, we won.
So in theory, all my political ambitions have been achieved. Along the line, I have sponsored candidates, whether for local government elections, House of reps, across the country, largely because I am a city man.
But significantly that phase is over, whether Buhari likes it or not by 2023, he would have to go back to Daura and face his cows the way I am facing mine.
Bola is my friend, Buhari is not my friend as many people say; Buhari is my big boss, the social standing between us is huge, and age too.
By the time Buhari was the minister of Petroleum, the governor of North East region, I was just a young man probably, in secondary school or so, but it is not so with Bola Tinubu; he is a good man. My friendship with him has enabled me to know him well enough and I can confidently tell Nigerians, he would make a good president, other issues not withstanding.
Bola Tinubu would make a good modern president because internet and these Yahoo boys have made being president complicated.
It seems to me that Nigerians by convention have agreed that there should be power rotation.
But I have my own theory of rotation; I am a Kilba man, a Christian from Adamawa State. I am not going to be satisfied that the position that a Christian would vie for is the vice and in the North we cannot even contest for vice presidency. We seemed to have been obliterated from the narrative completely. The convention is that the South would produce a president but it is still left to them to sort it out whether it be from the South West, South South and South East.
In the South, they have done it quite successfully, where the South South has produced, the South West has produced but in the North, it is not in their vocabulary that a Christian should be given the turn of the North whenever it is the turn of the North to produce a candidate.
It is not going to be right that everytime the North is mentioned, it would have to be Hausa, Fulani, Kanuri, that is allowed to contest and that it must be a Muslim; that is not right to me, we will not accept that state of things.
We will not allow the state of things where every time we come to Adamawa, the place of the Christian is a deputy, or when you are in Kaduna, the only office you can aspire to is the deputy or when you are in Benue, the only office a Muslim can aspire to is a deputy governor, if he is lucky.
I don’t know what Bola would do as a strategy if he gets the ticket; I want him to get the ticket as a friend no matter what people say; kill me if you want, I believe he is capable of making a difference.
What about the South East Presidency Claims for 2023?
It is not for me to say; the onus lies with them to look at their strategy and present credible people for Nigerians to begin to evaluate them.
How were they outmaneuvered by the South South for Jonathan to emerge? How were they beaten to the presidency by the Obasanjo, these are the things they should look into.
Let me explain something to you, when we were campaigning at a particular point in time, we were receiving insults from some Igbo youths who were generally hurling insults on other Nigerians calling them names, parasites, monkeys, and it was working well because we were getting much sympathy and it was working against them, etc. All those kind of careless and ungaurded utterances against other people’s core self esteem, wane down the sympathy other Nigerians who think the Igbo deserve the presidency, so they have to rethink their strategy.
If there are people that go about saying the Igbo should not be president, I am not one of them. I have met and know several Igbo who should be president but they have to package themselves well.
So, what is your take on the 2020 Budget?
This government will leave a legacy of working infrastructure, so this budget will address this issue.
So, it is not on whether or not the government should borrow but why it should borrow. Our roads here in Adamawa, Numan to Gombe, Yola to Mubi, Mubi to Gwoza, it would be better to borrow and implement these projects than not.
I think we are not asking the right questions or looking at the right place, our search light should not be always on federal government, but on the state government who take away over forty percent of the national resources monthly.
The question should be, what have they been doing in the state, concerning jobs, or contributing to the national development and growth?
