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•APC’s failure gave birth to opposition coalition
A public affairs analyst and Convener of the Reset Lagos Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Adetokunbo Pearse, has said that the coalition that has adopted the African Democratic Congress (ADC), as its platform for the 2027 election, comprises desperate and confused politicians, who are so angry because they are no more in power.
He scolded those in the PDP, but working for other parties.
In an interview with VINCENT KALU, Pearse, a member of the 2023 PDP National Presidential Campaign Council, noted that the reason the coalition and others are regrouping to take over in 2027 is because the administration of Bola Tinubu in the last two years has been a failure.
What’s your position on the coalition that has adopted the African Democratic Congress (ADC) as its platform for the 2027 general elections?
When you say coalition, is it the individuals coming together? The only real opposition to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2027 is the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) because it is an organised and well-structured coordinated political party. The only coalition we see now is the African Democratic Congress (ADC), which doesn’t seem to be forming. Big names; mainly people who had been in office before, either in APC or PDP and are not happy are the ones going into ADC. The party itself is not getting any traction. The Labour Party when it was a big opposition under Peter Obi in 2023 had a function before, they had one or two governors, two House of Representatives or a senator in the past and so was organised to a point. So, when Obi got there, his influence and the fact that he had a solid base in the South-East, he had a Christian support in the north, and the youth support generally in the country, gave him momentum. That was a party in existence, but this ADC, this coalition is just a bunch of confusion. I don’t see anything going on with it. The members are not even registered. Atiku Abubakar, who sensibly can be said to be the leader of the coalition, does not even have a party card in ADC. Some people in ADC are claiming that they are not members of their party. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) today will say it recognises them as officers of the party, and then tomorrow, it will say it doesn’t. Now, we hear that one of the leaders of the party, Nasir El-rufai is talking about going to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and all sorts of rubbish going on. So, if they continue like this, there will be no opposition to Bola Ahmed Tinubu and APC, except the PDP.
But the PDP is not playing the role of an opposition party?
The issue is very badly misunderstood. The PDP is playing the part of the opposition, as well as it could. What else can the PDP do except to focus on exposing the shortcomings of the APC, and then prepare itself to run against it?
Opposition to the APC is everywhere. Sowore is talking. Labour unions are talking. Civil society groups are talking. Atiku and his people have been talking for ages while he was in PDP. Now that he’s not in PDP, they are talking from ADC. LP is complaining. So, what else do people want?
The opposition that people talk about is similar to what they had under Lai Muhammad, which made the APC a criminal enterprise because all they did was to lie, falsify and threaten people.
If you remember, when these same people led by Rotimi Amaechi, Bola Tinubu and El-rufai were not in government, they focused on attacking Jonathan. They said that if they did not win the 2015 election, they would set up a parallel government.
They fought, and created all sorts of havoc. They brought in Boko Haram to the north in order to destabilise Goodluck Jonathan. That was opposition. If that is the kind of opposition people are looking for, we will not give it to them in the PDP. We are an organised, legitimate, law-abiding political organisation. We are doing the best we can. You will see when the election comes.
This coalition is just a bunch of desperate and confused people who are so angry that they are not about fighting Tinubu to improve the quality of life in Nigeria. They are about getting into power.
Is it Rotimi Amaechi that will say he wants to improve Nigeria? They had the opportunities, what did they do? What are their records? PDP is a viable opposition party. We had some turbulence along the way, which we have resolved.
On May 27, they did not want the National Executive Council (NEC), which is the highest organ of the party, to meet to take certain decisions on the way forward for the party. Wike, who is working against the party; working for Tinubu to destabilise the PDP tried everything he could to stop us from having our way forward, from becoming what you people are looking for as an organised political opposition. But what happened on May 27? He locked us out of our buildings so that we would not have the meeting. Did we not have our meeting? We had a very successful NEC meeting. We are a viable opposition. Now, we have settled the date for our convention. Everything is in place.
Some people are in the PDP but are saying they would remain there and work for either the APC or the coalition. What does this mean? Why are they not suspended or removed from the PDP?
It is a mark of wickedness, recklessness, irresponsibility; desperation on the part of those people. We cannot go and arrest them. We cannot cut off their heads. We cannot take them to court if they say they want to behave in this way.
So, let the people, the citizens of Nigeria judge. Whatever they say they want to do, they are free to do it. It’s a free democracy, but they will not succeed because what they are doing is bad for the country, is bad for the people, and is irresponsible. And so for PDP, it is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of adherence to democracy. It is a sign of respect for self-individual expression in a democracy. That doesn’t mean anything. If your wife is married to you, and she says she’s not going to work to have children for you, but she still says she’s your wife. And yet she says she’s not even interested in the marriage. She’s married to somebody else.
But she’s still claiming to be your wife. What do you do? Okay, you have divorced her, but whenever they have a family meeting, she still comes to the family meeting because she has children for you. Are you going to kill her?
All this is propaganda by the APC and they are masters of it. They used it to destabilise and to dislodge Goodluck Jonathan. We will not allow them to deceive Nigerians and dislodge us.
We are going to continue as a party to move forward steadily. Anybody who says he wants to go, fine. Look at the defections. If they say they want to take over Rivers State, good, we shall see.
That is what they will say. That is their mission, but our mission is to make sure they don’t succeed. All of it right now is a mere talk. Actions speak louder than words. You will see in the next election. What happened in this by-election? We maintained our stand wherever we were strong.
APC won where she was strong. Labour is now going nowhere, ADC is going nowhere. So, we are building. Party in government naturally uses their position and incumbency to win as many places as they could. PDP came second. So, who is the party in Nigeria? After APC now, it’s PDP. So all these talks show they’re afraid of the PDP; so afraid, deadly afraid of the PDP knowing that we are growing gradually, coming strong, becoming stronger every day.
For the recent by-election, you said the party in power used their power of incumbency to do what they did to retain their position. Won’t this power of incumbency play out in 2027?
What do you do about that as an opposition party, except to ready yourself to fight for it? We are going to defeat the APC in 2027 at the presidency. We are going to win a number of states; we are going to win more senate seats and more House of Representatives than we have now; more state Assembly seats. But we have to defend our votes with INEC. This APC government, starting with Buhari, has bastardised INEC; corrupted INEC. The mantra of Tinubu, the president right now, about election is to grab it, snatch it, and run away with the ballot. So, when you are dealing with such a man… and you are talking about opposition, what doer we do? We are doing our best. Using the word loosely, we are dealing with a very terrifying political organisation led by a very terrible authoritarian, dictatorial leader.
So we are waiting to see what we’ll do with the election. We know they’re going to try to rig the election as they’ve been rigging every election in Edo, Ondo states, using INEC. The chairman of INEC was appointed by the president, all the resident commissioners of INEC were appointed by the president, and he is using them intentionally to destabilise the elections. So, we are going to fight for it. That’s all we can do.
And we are going to carry Nigerians along to fight with us to see if we have won the election, we have won the election. Now, we are going to take the mandate in 2027, and that’s why we are building steadily. There is nothing to worry about. Slow and steady wins the race, and that is what PDP is doing right now.
A Federal High Court in Canada recently declared the APC and the PDP terrorist organisations. So what’s your reaction to that?
The choice of terminology by the Canadian court, I think it is wrong, and it is unacceptable as a description of the PDP and the APC. What the Canadian court could have said was that under Buhari, because of the way he related with Boko Haram, and the fact that before he became president, he said that war against Boko Haram was war against the North.
And the amnesty he gave to terrorists, Boko Haram terrorists, all made his administration very suspicious, and he had too much tendency toward sympathising with terrorists. You cannot just qualify a whole political party. What about under Jonathan? Was PDP a terrorist organisation? Did he snatch ballot boxes? Did he terrorise people? It was a period in which there were no political prisoners in the country. He was doing everything to fight Boko Haram, but some people who are alleged to be sympathetic towards terrorism and terrorists resisted him.
There should be individual issue. The gentleman who applied for asylum in Canada is an individual, and he should have been dealt with as such. The fact that he was involved in the Buhari administration makes him a suspect, but to say that the two political parties are terrorist organisations is wrong. A terrorist organisation is one that has its constitution, its objectives, to topple governments, to kill people, to attack innocent people for its own objective, to take over governments by force of arms if need be.
The PDP and the APC are not terrorist organisations. Anybody can call you what they want, but we know that it is wrong, it is reckless, and it is irresponsible on the part of that Canadian court. And by the way, it is not the Canadian government, but one court that said it.
The PDP holds its convention in November 15 and 16 at Ibadan. Is it not supposed to be in Abuja?
No, why is it supposed to be Abuja? You determine where the party holds its convention. Our party first decided that they were going to do it in Kano in August of this year, and then the National Working Committee and the National Executive Committee, which is the highest organ of the party, met and decided that they were changing it to Ibadan in November. That’s their decision; it’s not supposed to be anywhere; it is supposed to be wherever they decide that it should hold. They have their reasons for doing so – financial, security, logistically and so on.
The rating of the Tinubu government seems to be soaring. Recently, the DG of World Trade Organisation, and also former Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonji-Iweala, applauded the Tinubu’s reforms. What is your take on this?
The Tinubu administration is a master of media manipulation. If you read what the woman said; she never said that everything was fine. She said, you’re going along this way, but that the monetary system is different from the economy that affects people’s lives. She said it, and she came out later to defend what she said, that the monetary system is in order, but there are still a lot of things to do to impress, to apply, to affect good lifestyle for the people; to improve the quality of life for the people. So it’s not a one-deal issue.
By the way, when the IMF and the World Bank told Nigeria to remove fuel subsidy, it was within a context. They never said, just remove subsidy anyhow without planning. And they never gave you a time limit to remove subsidy. They also said, as you remove subsidy, you have to do certain things. In the first place, you have to improve your revenue source. You have to develop your economy.
Secondly, you have to fight corruption in the oil industry, where you have removed subsidy for oil. These are things you have to do simultaneously. It’s not one or the other. But Tinubu will focus on one and say, Okonji-Iweala has rated them highly.
When I’m hungry , I’m not unemployed, then who is the woman or the IMF or the World Bank to tell me that everything is fine when I know that nothing is working in Nigeria? So, let us put it in context. Okonji-Iweala is not God; IMF is not God, World Bank is not God. They have not even said that they were. It is the government that is manipulating the information to suit itself, to make itself look good.
The reality is that the woman never said all is well with the economy in Nigeria. She is repeating what the IMF that sends her to come and talk is saying: ‘Yes, you have removed subsidy, and yes, you have devalued the currency, and you are moving in the right direction for doing that, but the consequences of what you have done have been offset by your inability to develop the economy.’ When you remove subsidy, you are damaging your economy. The fact of the matter is you have to subsidise different sectors in the society. You have to subsidise health. Do they not subsidise health, transportation, education, oil in the developed countries? They do.
Therefore, for you to have good governance you have to subsidise all of these areas. They just told to remove subsidy. Yes, you removed subsidy, but you have to cushion the removal somewhere else. So, if you don’t stop the wastage and the theft and the corruption in the oil industry, you cannot remove subsidy. You remove subsidy simultaneously as you are making those corrections. Also, when you say you are devaluing your currency, you are doing it to make your exports cheaper, affordable; so that the whole world will be buying everything you are producing. That is why you devalue your currency, to make your goods cheaper for the buyer. The problem in Nigeria is that you devalue the currency, you make it cheaper, but you are not producing anything to sell.
Do you see the point? This is where we get it wrong. You cannot do one thing and not do the other. If you devalue your currency, you must activate your economy. We have lithium in some parts of Nigeria. We have gas. Enugu sector is the ninth largest deposit of gas in the world. The Ondo sector is the third largest deposit of bitumen in the world. Lithium is in Kaduna, Kwara and all over Nigeria.
We are not tapping; we are not developing all these industries. Therefore, our economy is still a mono-economy dependent on crude oil. And the crude oil itself is not produced at a maximum because there’s so much theft, so much wastage, and so much corruption in the industry. Look at all the refineries that he promised to set up. If you don’t have a refinery and you are selling your crude abroad for cheap, then buying it back expensively.
We pray to God that we have a president who understands what needs to be done and does it. That is the issue. Okonji-Iweala did not say we should kill ourselves. Things have not improved and she has not said it; she has actually come out to debunk all that stuff that she said everything is well. She didn’t say it. She has qualified what she said; that you cannot say the monetary system is good whereas you have not taken care of the other aspects that you must take care of, which is to develop your economy.
What will determine the way that the 2027 elections will go?
The way things are. I have understood the reason Atiku, Rotimi Amaechi, all these people are so eager to set up a coalition. It is because they know that any organised group, any organised political party now is likely to defeat Tinubu in 2027, because of the woeful, disastrous economic performance, disastrous security performance, disastrous way of governing, and bad governance, and the cry of Nigerians in the last two years.
It has been bad governance, wastage of money, they keep borrowing money; we owe heavily, and we are not seeing anything for it.
In other words, the administration of Bola Tinubu in the last two years has been a failure. It is even worse than Buhari that we thought was the most disastrous we’ve ever had. This one has put an exclamation mark on it.
Therefore, everybody knows that APC cannot win the next election technically, legally. Therefore, all that remains now is to protect our votes. The PDP, after it has had its elective convention in November, to elect a substantive national chairman and a new national working committee – from chairman to secretary, to auditor, to publicity secretary, once they are in place, we now have a date for our primaries for president. Trust me, once all of that is in place, the party is ready to win the next election, because the Nigerian people will not vote for this APC government again. This is the way it’s likely to go. The PDP will win the election, and then we will have to defend our votes.
What informed the PDP into zoning its presidential candidate to the South?
What happened was that in the last election, 2023, there was a hue and cry from the party and the general view in the country that the presidency should have been in the South, especially because we had already elected a northerner, Dr Ayu, as the national chairman.
According to the Constitution, and in fact, backed by the general viewpoints in Nigeria, you cannot have a presidential candidate from the North and a national chairman from the North.
For the sake of balance and equity, you had to separate the two. In the last 2023 election, we had elected Ayu from North Central. He was supposed to step down according to the verbal agreement they had, and according to our Constitution that once a northerner had been elected as the presidential candidate, which he, himself, Ayu agreed to on video, on tape, on record, that he would step down.
But, he didn’t step down, which created the confusion and the conflict that led to people abandoning Atiku.
