National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), LAI MOHAMMED, in this interview with Assistant Politics Editor, DANIEL KANU, speaks on the party’s determination to wrest power from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the centre in 2015, accusing President Goodluck Jonathan of not being sincere with the on-going national confab…
Your party, sometime ago, came out with what it called roadmap for a new Nigeria. Is the document really feasible, especially as the PDP has dismissed it as an empty boast?
Lai Mohammed
Anybody who will do a critical survey on any state controlled by the APC will know that it is not an empty boast. If you go to Osun State today, they have started one meal a day in our schools. With that single act, about 3,000 cooks have been employed. We did promise in our roadmap that we will make sure that on assumption of office, each state would employ 20,000 individuals on condition that they possess a minimum of school certificate and they are ready to take further vocational or technical training. What is empty about that? Governor Rauf Aregbesola employed 3,000 youths in Osun. He did not make noise about it. He did not take them to stadium to die; he employed them quietly and they have been working. Over 10,000 were employed in Oyo. So, why or how is it an empty boast? Under the type of imperfect federalism that we are practising today, 54 per cent of all federal revenue goes to the federal government, and the 36 states put together share just 28 per cent. What it means is that on the average, none of them gets up to one per cent. So you could imagine what is going to happen if APC is at the centre. If you look at our roadmap, you will see what we intend to do starting from job creation, fighting corruption to agriculture, education to health, infrastructure etc. People ask me how we are going to get the money or where we are going to get the money from. The answer is very simple: where does the federal government get the money they are stealing from? I want Nigerians to understand what we are talking about.
Where did they get the ‘missing’ $20 billion they are stealing from? With $20 billion, we can have 20,000 megawatts of electricity at $1 million per megawatt. We can have 20,000 kilometres of roads at $1 million per kilometre. We can build 1,666 modern hospitals in Nigeria with that money. It is equivalent of what Lagos State will earn in 27 years, and Ogun State in 72 years, from federal allocation. It can pay 166,000 teachers for 50 years. For instance, one of the things we promised in our roadmap is that we would pay N5,000 monthly to 25 million most vulnerable Nigerians. Already, the widows, the elderly etc., in two of our states are being paid to assist them. So, there is nothing there that is magic; it is about how do you stop corruption, how do you tackle corruption effectively? If you look at the kind of money that has been missing since 1999, it will shock; you and if you put such money to proper use, this country will not be the same again. But you ask yourself, where did all the money go to? If you block all the leakages, we can do a lot for the people. The people should look at our roadmap not from a jaundiced view or that it is not possible. People have forgotten that in this same Nigeria before the advent or discovery of oil, state governments built infrastructure, federal government built infrastructure. Cocoa House was built not with the proceeds of oil. The first stadium was built not with oil proceeds, neither was the Western Nigeria Television (WNTV), Western Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (WNBC) built from oil proceeds. We prosecuted the civil war for three years without borrowing one penny; it is the quality of leadership. The greatest resource a country can have is not natural; it is human, prudence. The richest countries in the world today are not the ones that are most endowed with natural resources. Japan has no natural resource, just like some other countries, and they are doing very well. So, it is about
human beings. That is why in our roadmap, we talked of: How does it create jobs? How does it benefit the youths, the masses, etc?
A roadmap is not a budget; it is your commitments, like your contracts, your commitment to the people of Nigeria on what you are going to do when you are in power.
Again, the economy of 30 or 40 years ago is quite different from the economy of today. Could you imagine the infrastructure we had 30 years ago, like the roads that were built? In 1983, you could go from Lagos to Ibadan in one hour because the roads were fairly good. Today, it will take you hours to get to Ibadan, that is if you do not sleep on the way. If you want to talk about facts and figures, you must even have access to how much the government gets and how much it spends. A government we have is one that cannot tell us how much it spent on subsidy; a government that can spend $8.7 billion on subsidy without appropriation. It is difficult for you to now give accurate figures of what you will want to do differently when you get into power.
Do you have faith in the on-going national conference?
I think we have made our position very clear. As a political party, we do not believe in this national conference and we have given our reasons because we know that the convener is not sincere about it. Second, it is nothing but a diversion strategy, just to divert our attention from the mounting corruption, incompetence of leadership, security challenge. Our own idea of national conference is one in which those that will go there will be elected by the people and whatever they say there is what those who have elected them are saying too. But today, we have an assembly where about 60 per cent of the members were nominated by the government, and those who were not nominated by the government at the federal level were nominated by representing associations, ethnic groups, religious groups, and you ask: by what method? We said at the beginning that if we want to have a national conference which the outcome must be submitted to Nigerians for a referendum, but
the President said no; that it will be submitted to the National Assembly, and we said that is a constitution amendment. Of course, today, he is trying to smuggle referendum into it, and you can see the way things are going there. So, as a political party, we find out that nothing has changed to make us shift our position; but when modalities came out and they asked governors to nominate their people and the fact that our governors are governors of the people and not for APC, we allowed them to make their nominations.
How would you react to insinuations that there is no internal democracy in APC?
The truth is that some people don’t understand how you function and they come to a conclusion that there is no internal democracy. What is internal democracy? It is determined basically by the constitution of that party. Political party is like a club. When you are coming to join the club, there is a presumption that if you are going to be a member of the club, you are going to abide by its law. If your club says you can’t be president of the club unless you stay for five years, you can’t come in and, let’s say in your year one or after two years, you say you are so popular and want to become the president. It is not done that way. Will you now accuse the party of lack of internal democracy? Now, for those who are accusing APC of lack of internal democracy, has APC conducted any election, any convention, any congress that will align to that allegation? No. It is the hang-over that some people have always had from Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) that they are transferring to APC. And even in our days in ACN, there was nothing like that. I keep telling them that they are mistaking discipline for lack of internal democracy. This was a party with only one governor to six governors and to 16 governors today because of the cohesion in the party, and someone is still saying there is no internal democracy. I can assure you that there is no party that has internal democracy like our party, APC.
Critics say your party is aggregation of strange bedfellows and that it is only a matter of time for confusion to set in. How would you react to it?
Isn’t Nigeria as a whole an amalgamation of strange bedfellows? What makes the APC amalgamation of strange bedfellows? Is it because of the historic compromise that we have made if Nigeria must be salvaged? Is it because ACN, CPC, ANPP agreed to put their political and historical rivalries and differences aside and came together to dislodge the PDP and save Nigeria from endless drift? We want to create one party that will be strong enough to throw out the PDP and give our people a better alternative, a better government. Is that what makes us an amalgamation of strange bedfellows? Less than four years down the line, the democrats and conservatives formed a coalition government in UK. There is a point in time in the history of a nation when the leaders will make a directional change to move their country forward. The truth is that some people don’t understand why, and they are intimidated by it. They first said the merger will not take place, that we will never agree on a common name, that we will never agree on a common logo, that we cannot have a convention; but all that has now come to pass. We are now a party with 16 governors, almost the majority in the House of Representatives.
So you are optimistic that APC will dismantle the PDP come 2015?
I am very optimistic, but it goes beyond optimism, if we must salvage this country. I don’t think this country will stomach the PDP any longer. It is not about APC; it is about Nigeria.
