His sprawling compound on Usuma Street, a highbrow area of Maitama in Abuja, on that fateful day when TheNiche team of Executive Editor/Editor, Oguwike Nwachuku, and Assistant Editor (North), Chuks Ehirim, visited, was a Mecca of sorts. Security men at the gate were busy frisking visitors and getting clearance from the big man before ushering them into the expansive compound where a very big house painted in white is seated. Entering into one of the living rooms, believed also to be visitors’ waiting room, the first thing that strikes you as a visitor is that many people are already seated, either on the sofa or on the floor, with the former governor seated as well and listening attentively to their tales.
Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa
A careful look around the compound revealed that virtually all the rooms were occupied by people who had visited Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa for one reason or another, most of them obviously in connection with favour. This is always the picture you get anytime you are in Bafarawa’s Abuja residence. We hear the situation is the same in his Sokoto home.
Last month, when the governor agreed to host TheNiche team, he spoke with the conviction that those who think he left the party he helped to found, the All Progressives Congress (APC), for the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ought to know that his political strategy transcends that of those criticising his move.
Bafarawa, who will be 60 years on October 4 and boasts of having paid his dues in politics, not only gave reasons for joining a party he once criticised with so much energy (the PDP), but said the confidence he has in his supporters in Sokoto State where he was in the saddle for eight years is non-negotiable.
His words: “I did not just join the PDP. It was my people from Sokoto State who told me to join the party, and they moved with me. So, there is nothing I am going to do in the party that I will do on my own without their input, and that can tell you the level of relationship we share.”
That brings us to the current politics in Sokoto where the governor, Aliyu Magatakarda Wamako, once deputy to Bafarawa, is in charge. Bafarawa believes Wamako does not respect him and that he has demonstrated that in so many actions he took against him ever since he left office in 2007.
He said, for instance, that less than two months after he left office, the Sokoto Attorney-General sent a petition to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), seeking investigation of his actions in office. Consequently, the EFCC arrested and questioned Bafarawa, took his passport, and in July 2008 asked a Federal High Court in Abuja not to release his passport, which he had requested to enable him travel to receive medical treatment abroad.
Bafarawa said the Sokoto commission of inquiry was set up by the Wamako administration to discredit him.
Subsequent events, particularly the one in October 2009, where Bafarawa’s convoy and Democratic Peoples Party (DPP) governorship candidate, Maigari Dingyadi, was attacked at the Sultan Muhammadu Maccido Institute for Islamic Studies in Sokoto, made Bafarawa to conclude that his former deputy did not mean well for him.
On his own, Dingyadi had alleged that the attackers were leaders of PDP street urchins (area boys) sent to assassinate him. Of course, Dingyadi could not have been talking about any other person than Wamako who reportedly defected to the PDP to use the federal might to hunt Bafarawa and his governorship candidate. Today, the hunter seems to be the hunted, as Bafarawa is now back to the same party where Wamako, few years ago, thought was his exclusive preserve.
It was the same month the Sokoto Commissioner for Justice said the state was about to prosecute Bafarawa and five others for alleged misappropriation of N2.9 billion. In December 2009, EFCC officials raided a meeting and arrested Bafarawa, accusing him of involvement in a N6 billion ($40 million) fraud from his time as governor of Sokoto from May 29, 1999 to May 29, 2007. Nonetheless, Bafarawa is still facing the charges against him.
The question on the lips of many Nigerians, including members of the opposition, is whether the APC chieftains, including Bafarawa who defected to the PDP, joined the latter after they cut some deals with both President Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP leadership. While the insinuation goes that money had exchanged hands and that promises of political patronage and appointments were dangled before the defectors, Bafarawa dismissed all that, saying: “I did not have any deal with Jonathan.”
He emphasised: “If I ever had a deal, it was with the people of Sokoto who advised me to join the PDP, and that was why when I moved, I did with my people. If anybody says he gave me anything or that I made any demand on him before defecting to the PDP, let the person feel free to say so. And if money was also paid into any account traced to me, let those who did feel free to name the bank and furnish the public with the details.”
He also maintained that he joined the PDP because he has seen semblance of internal democracy which seems to be lacking in the APC, going by his experience in his state where those who, like Wamako, joined the party afresh in the name of defecting governors were made to control the levers of the party, while those of them who founded the party and became national leaders are made to be subservient to the new members.
One Northerner Bafarawa has so much respect for and will not fail to wish well in his political journey is former Military Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari, who ran for the presidency on the platform of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) twice, and once on the ticket of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). However, Bafarawa thinks that Buhari is wasting his time in the APC, a reason he once advised him to join the PDP.
What does the former governor think about the clamour for return of power to the North which is gaining so much momentum?
“Power belongs to God and he gives it to whosoever he desires,” Bafarawa said, adding that no matter the degree of clamour for the control of power, if it does not have the approval of God, there is nothing anybody who is agitating for it can do.
It is on that score that Bafarawa says he is worried that those who call themselves politicians today should re-examine their roles.
His words: “As a career politician, if we play by the rules, I do not see why we should be afraid of the state of our democracy.
“After more than 14 years of return to democratic rule, I should think that we must have learnt certain things and the rules of the game. But that does not seem to be the case, going by what we see in political circles.”
Bafarawa says his political credential, which includes, but not limited to being a local government councillor in charge of education, speaks for him. In 1979, he said he unsuccessfully ran for election to the House of Representatives on the platform of the defunct Great Nigeria Peoples Party (GNPP); was a member of the National Constitutional Conference during the military rule of Sani Abacha (1994 to 1995); was a founding member of the United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP) in 1997 and the defunct All Peoples Party(APP) which later became the ANPP (1998).
In 1999, Bafarawa was elected governor of Sokoto on the platform of ANPP, and was re-elected in 2003. In March 2002, when a Sharia court in Sokoto freed a 35-year-old woman, Safiya Hussaini, who had been sentenced to death by stoning after being found guilty of adultery, and Nigeria’s then Justice Minister declared Sharia unconstitutional, Bafarawa was bold enough to say that the Sharia states would not adhere to the court’s declaration. As far as he was concerned, religion and morals go a long way in moulding every member of the society. Is it, therefore, by accident that the government under Bafarawa built over 70 mosques in different parts of Sokoto?
Bafarawa founded the DPP and became its presidential candidate during the 2007 general elections. As a presidential candidate, when he met with officials of the United States (U.S.) State Department in Washington, D.C., Bafarawa promised to scrap the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) if elected, describing the commission as “a conduit of corruption and waste”.
“Under my administration, the state made significant improvements in the quality of roads. Schools were upgraded, and enrolment greatly improved due to assurances that all pupils would be taught morals and Islamic religion. The water supply was improved through construction of boreholes,” he explained.
Notwithstanding that while he was governor, five separate petitions alleging abuse of office, money laundering and official corruption were written against him by individuals and corporate institutions, Bafarawa still has confidence in his followers in Sokoto.
For instance, it was said that in October 2006, a task force headed by EFCC chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, issued a report listing assets allegedly owned by 15 state governors who were serving their terms then and who had not declared such assets as required by law. Bafarawa was one of those accused of failing to declare a N200 million property in London which he allegedly acquired when he took office in 1999.
Is Bafarawa still interested in elective positions in the country, having participated in many in his political career?
“I am a politician; a career politician for that matter. That I am not running today does not mean I am not interested in those who are running. That is why I said those of us who are career politicians should not allow those who are not schooled in the art to determine how the game should be played,” he said.
Bafarawa believes that the nation’s electoral system and the institution responsible for elections in the country, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) ought to be strengthened to do the job in line with international best practices.
Said he: “Electoral reform is key to democratic practice, and both government and INEC ought to function with that consciousness; otherwise our own democracy will not grow.”
It is on that score that he thinks that the on-going national conference delegates have the opportunity to discuss issues that will not only strengthen the political unity of Nigeria, but provide the platform for our democracy to be rooted on a sound footing.
Talking to TheNiche on (in)security in the country, Bafarawa feels that what is going on in the North is not acceptable and that it requires the support of everyone to ensure that the greatest threat to the peace and unity of the country today, Boko Haram, is not only stamped out, but that the country is made safe for Nigerians to live in, regardless of where they choose to reside to eke out a living.