•Those defecting are retired politicians
•Good governance will reduce defections
In this interview, the lawyer, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who is optimistic about rebuilding Nigeria and restoring hope to all Nigerians, speaks on the wave of defections in the country saying that good governance will prevent politicians from jumping ship. Excerpts:
What is your take on the wave of defections into the APC fold and the reasons why they are defecting?
The causes are well known, they are preventable and the solution is good governance.
The so-called defections are sometimes coming out of the closet for people claiming to be opposition because they have been compulsorily retired into opposition, not by choice. When you choose to be in opposition by choice, you have access to the ruling party but you just don’t agree with them, and the reasons for that are well articulated which has to do with the interest of the Nigerian people. There is zero-risk of you defecting unless those fundamental disagreements or problems have now been eliminated.
Everybody in Nigeria will know that poverty is no longer there, that insecurity is no longer there, corruption and poor ethics that have dominated our politics have now changed, anything other than that, you will find out that people who missed the bus of the ruling party tend to wait at the bus stop of opposition until the next bus comes and then they hop along.
There is nothing new. Many of them are being kept in waiting for the dramatisation of resurgence by the ruling party. They just keep them somewhere so that when the time comes, they will use them to demoralise the opposition. That is why we are careful about people who come to us to say they are in opposition.
You sound like you have no intention of moving to another party but we have seen politicians defect even as they claim that the problems they talked about are being addressed and that’s why they defected.
They don’t have any burden because they don’t have to believe in what they are saying. They just say it for the moment. I joined the SDP when I was 19 years old in 1991 in the days leading to the election of the late MKO Abiola. At that time, it was even the late Musa Yar’Adua, the late Adamu Ciroma who was in NRC, Atiku Abubakar, Abiola came and Babagana Kingibe was to run with him after he was chairman of the party.
I joined because of the late Lateef Jakande in Lagos. I haven’t joined any other political party since that time. I don’t see any reason why I will join any other one because the party is well-positioned to solve the problems of Nigeria. When the late Abiola came with his farewell to poverty, that was 1992 leading to 1993.
It is still valid today, farewell to poverty. If you pick Abiola’s programme and you want to implement them, it is just unfortunate that none of the problems have been fixed, rather, more problems have been added. That was why in 2023 when I came, 30 years later, we did farewell to poverty and insecurity. The guidelines are there. No change of government is going to solve the problems without change of ideas, methodologies and culture.
The idea is that someone can receive a call from the State House or anywhere and become enraptured by photography with the president and say there is a new epiphany, it is their politics. If the president drops out tomorrow, they will also change their mind and go somewhere.
Those ones have their role in politics and that’s not the kind of role we want to play.
From the May Day address of the President on June 12, do you see the defection in his speech as a political strength?
You have to give President Tinubu an A1 in politics. The only problem he has with the A1 is that he tends to have F9 in governance. So how is he going to graduate into any substantive legacy? That is a problem because the A1 politics is that he knows the political class very well, he knows what moves and motivates them, and he knows how to recruit them, sometimes retrench them, retire them and reengage them because he knows what they want.
But I wish he knew what Nigerian people want which is basic services, stability, and security.
He doesn’t need to have many people defecting to his party. If he cannot save lives in Benue, Plateau and many parts of the country, then he has failed. The problem with that speech is forgetting the fact he was at the National Assembly in front of politicians, supposed to give accountability to Nigerians. Therefore, I am not sure that Nigerians are as informed of the defections as the president appears to be in that speech. The politicians who are now waxing albums for the president featuring the Senate President as the solo singer, and they are singing the choruses, that music is only for their ears because the rumbling in the stomach of Nigerians will not let them hear the music of the National Assembly.
So that podium belongs to the Nigerian people and it is their issues which ought to be reported there. The idea that we will assume that the political fortune of the president and his political party and his co-travellers will be the whole essence of the four-year term is most unfortunate.
What you do with politics is that you compete well and I respect that the president can compete well but if you manage to get the power somehow, controversially, at that moment, politics ends. Then, you want to give service to the Nigerian people. You want to manage the diversity of the country very well. You want to obey the Constitution and execute the enforcement of other arms of government, obeying the Constitution. You want to manage the economy. The only skill you have in the management of the economy is the economisation of truth which is basically what they do, rather than manage the economy.
What we want to do differently is focus the entire politics on the welfare of the people. There will be less controversy if we address the issue of whether people are hungry or not, how many of them have good housing, are we investing in education as we should? Are we investing in healthcare as we should? Do we have the basic infrastructure for modern business and modern governance? Are we able to make a complete telephone call without dropping?
Aren’t you seeing yourself as a lone voice because the thinking about opposition in Nigeria is that it is in disarray? Are these principles of yours supported by your party which welcomes defectors to your party?
The principles that we have in the SDP do not only belong to me, they belong to the SDP. These are manifestoes written when I was a teenager and they belong to the Nigerian people because they are found in Chapter 2 of the Nigerian Constitution, so it’s not something I am inventing, I might have been a good advocate of it and sincerely believe in it but it belongs to the party.
Now the leadership of the parties has dual roles to play. They want those of us in the party to promote this ideology of the party, they also want to have an open door policy to allow people to come to the party. Among those who are coming now, some might have intentions other than ideological and people-oriented, they will discover that because the SDP bus is well rooted.
Some who came for transactional purposes, trying to hijack a vehicle, discovered that this party exists in reality. We believe that many people you find in politics are following the bandwagon as they are doing what they think works.
So this lone voice, if he keeps resonating, people will discover that this is the right way, moreso that the house is already crowded on the government side as they don’t have the window to look at the other people anymore because all the problems of Nigeria are assembled inside their political party. Unless politics starts to work for the ordinary person, there is a limit to how many people want to turn into billionaires overnight.
So what we are doing on our side is that we do not want to say everybody outside the party now is automatically not ideological, not principled.
No, we are saying when you come in and how you interact with us will let us know whether you have come for principles or you have come to destabilise the party, we have supreme confidence in the membership of our party that they are ideologically rooted.
I have supreme confidence in the leadership of the party that the leadership of the party believes in the party, for that reason, if anyone comes to the party, he will have to blend in or have to move on.
It appears the public is fed up with the situation of things and the opposition which you are part of is also failing the public which is why the president can ignore the opposition if he wants.
The assumption that President Tinubu has is that the people are marginal to politics, that if you capture institutions and politicians, then there is no opposition but the real opposition is coming from the people.
There are problems with those who want to turn career politicians to opposition, you are going to have a problem because it’s only when they are dropped off from the list of ministers, board appointments, that is the only time they remember that they need to make this noise so that they can be brought back.
It’s like you are referring to a specific person.
No, no. It’s a general culture which has been there for ages and that is why you see many of them say I will never do this, the next page, they are doing it. The reason is that the real opposition is from the Nigerian people.
I will let you know that the country needs serious surgery, neurosurgery in particular to be able to solve the problems we have now.
To do that, the first thing a surgeon does is to sanitize himself because if you don’t do it, you will infect the patient. We must sanitize the opposition first to know who is in the opposition or who is in opposition by convenience. So, it is not everyone calling himself opposition today who prays in the morning and says I want to be in opposition.
If we do that and then allow the party to belong to the Nigerian people, we are not searching for big men with money, to come and dominate the party but we are letting the people contribute to the party. That is what we are doing, Maybe a lot of it is outside the view of the press.
What we are trying to do is quite fundamental such that when President Tinubu and all the paper castle he is building are blown away by the tide of time, he will realise that even in his old age, he needs a government that works. When he is out of power, he needs a deepened democracy and the rule of law.
What we are building requires time and that’s why we tend to attract young people who are not desperate to be in power within two weeks, who are ready to do the work, who are ready to grind and build a structure.