Kassim Afegbua is one of the spokespersons of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Campaign Organisation. In this interview with Akanni Alaka, he spoke on the forthcoming general elections, poverty in the country, chances of the presidential candidate of his party, Atiku Abubakar, and the fear of the opposition, among others.
The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP has been campaigning across the country for the presidential election, which is now barely a few days away. From what you have been seeing on the fields, how bright are the chances of your presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar?
Our chances are very, very bright. In fact, we are the party to beat in this election. Our chances are very bright in the sense that Nigerians have come to realise that APC is a distributor of poverty, hunger, deprivations and a promoter in very ingenious manner of nepotism, cronyism, selective amnesia and hypocrisy of the highest order. People have come to tell us and we can see that Nigerians are hungry. There is poverty of unimaginable level in the land. We see it when we go for campaigns.
People are crying to us just like Rotimi Amaechi said in that leaked audio tape. Everybody is crying because life has never been this difficult. The statistics are obvious – go to market and ask for the price, rural, local or urban and ask for the price of a tuber of yam. If you go to exclusive stores, you will get one tuber of yam for N1000; before it used to be N400 there. In a typical village market, you buy a tuber of yam for like N600, five tubers of yam are N3000; before it used to be N1,500.
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A basket of tomatoes is N1,800 compared to N400 it used to be in 2015. A basket of onions that used to be N500, N400 is now N1,300, N1,500, depending g on the size of the onions. So, there is nothing that you are going to use to convince Nigerians that this government has not distributed hunger, poverty.
The rate of kidnapping in the country explained away that there is so much poverty in the land, so people have to devise other heinous means to survive. The rate of suicide is high, the rate of murder is high because people are tired of living and the value of life has become so cheap under this administration.
And the president will tell you that ‘the number of people that they killed in Zamfara is even more than the number of people they killed in Plateau. How can you be comparing the number of bloodshed, as the president? That kind of reckless statement helps to tell the inner workings of the Buhari government. They don’t care about human life.
But contrary to your assertions, the APC still seems to have a big support across the country, especially looking at the huge crowd that have been attending their campaign rallies?
Devil has followers, or are you not aware? Most likely, devil followers may even be more.
What APC members are saying is that the crowds at their campaign rallies are bigger than yours and this indicates that they are going to win the election.
It’s not even about the crowd. We are talking about the quality of the crowd and what you are going to tell them you have achieved in the last three and a half years? That’s the issue. When a government can no longer market hope, hopelessness sets it. That’s what we are saying. The government can no longer market hope to Nigerians. So, APC can have their crowds everywhere – hired crowds, paid crowds and pay them N2,000, N3,000. People are hungry; they will collect the money and run around for people to see.
And it is also like a tourism to them – they want to see the man who has been so wicked to them because there have been situations when the crowd became riotous – look at the one in Jos – hoodlums took over the place and that’s another conformation that the APC government has not be able to give security of lives and property. The president was reportedly smuggled out of the stadium.
Is it not that the crowd is so much because they adore the president and want to see him, as the presidency argued in a statement released after the Plateau campaign rally?
When they say hoodlums, it defines the quality of the audience. Persons who are well behaved will not become riotous to the point that the president will not be able to address them. When they became uncontrollable, it means that they are not happy with the system.
But the killings and widespread poverty you are talking about did not start under the Buhari government, as some members of the APC have been arguing?
It didn’t start under the Buhari government, but Nigerians spoke in 2015 that they needed a change because they saw an APC as a new platform that will provide paradigm shift from what used to be to a new thinking and away from the failures of the past. Now, they got the power and they became helpless and unimaginative in thinking and could not rationalise any positive policy initiative that can address these issues.
When Femi Adesina (Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity) was asked this same question, he was comparing the figures between the APC and the PDP as if they are competing. You are comparing the number of deaths – ‘3000 died in PDP’s time, we are just approaching 2,800, we are not there yet,’ as if you are aspiring to get to that ridiculous situation. We are saying that the government that preached change – it said it is going to use three months – it is in the manifesto of APC – to deal with Boko Haram and flush them out, that it is going to carry out restructuring of the country within six months, that it is going to provide jobs, reduce the price of fuel – and all of these, you have not achieved anyone.
That is massive failure. Pump price of petrol went from N85 to N145. You said anybody talking about subsidy is a fraudster – the President said it. It was captured on tape. But today, we are paying subsidy. That means that president is a fraudster.
On their own side, they argued that if PDP had repaired the refineries in the 16 years it was in power, there will be no need for the country to be importing refined petroleum products and be benchmarking the selling price against the exchange rate of the dollar, which is the reason for the jerk up of the pump price?
PDP gave 16 licences out for modular refineries. Dangote’s new refinery in Lagos was a PDP licence, not APC. Nigerian refineries were working at a certain level, but not at optimal level under PDP. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo attempted selling them, but the sales were later reversed for political reasons by the succeeding government.
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Every government has its own temperament and approach. But now that the refineries are not working, you that preached change, what happened that in four years, you have not been able to repair them? One would have thought that by now, you would have done the turnaround maintenance of the refineries and they would have been working at optimal level. But that is not the case.
We are still importing fuel and rather than having different companies doing that, only NNPC is importing fuel now. The NNPC is both the regulator, the importer, doing everything. And that is why we are saying that it is time for the NNPC to be unbundled and people don’t seem to understand. All the frauds, whatever, illicit spending and so on, are gotten from the NNPC.
But there have been outcries over revelations by the PDP presidential candidate that he is going to sell off NNPC. The fear is that he will sell the company which is a national asset to his friends and cronies?
People should understand that leadership and governance is a serious business. Government should not have a hand in the running of businesses. It is like that in contemporary economies. Business platforms will not do well if they are under the control of government. The workers will display so much I don’t care attitude because it is under the control of government. Go to Federal Secretariat and look at their toilets and see how rotten and unkempt they are – it’s either there is no water or the hand of the flushers have broken, just go there – that’s the mentality of the public service. But in the private sector, you will see a lot of seriousness because the motive is to drive it to succeed so that you can make profit. Look at Transcorp Hilton. It was built by former military President Ibrahim Babangida. It was privatised under the Obasanjo/Atiku government.
But today, you can Google it – Transcorp Hilton, Abuja is the highest profit making hotel in all the Hilton family all over the world. It has maintained that record for three years because it was handed over to private individuals and now they have transformed it. Now, even if you park your vehicle beyond 20 minutes, you will pay.
So, you have an option of not going there or going there. There is a lot of things that the country will benefit from a government that is able to do the right privatisation to the right people and create the right atmosphere for the businesses to thrive and succeed. If you feel that that particular asset is not giving the desired productivity, why not sell? The question is now, who are they selling to? Are they Nigerians? They are going to be Nigerians. Transcorp was sold to Nigerians.
It’s believed that President Buhari will get most of his votes from the North, especially the North-east and the North-west.
That was before, not now.
But the governors across the two regions have been promising that the president will get over 90 per cent of the votes in their states?
They can only promise. But if they don’t rig, we will beat Buhari in the North-west clearly. We will take over Sokoto, Kaduna, Katsina, Jigawa – you need to go to these states and see the level of poverty. We will take over Kano, whether he (the president) likes it or not because people are suffering.
You can see his (Buhari’s) attitude to Ganduje’s alleged bribery scandal and with that alone, the people are so angry and bitter – they are saying a man who is preaching integrity is looking the other way and is fighting other people because they are not supporting him. You heard Oshiomhole when he said in Benin that anybody who joined APC has become ‘born again’ and that the sins are forgiven.
So, APC is a party of sins without sinners. But we cannot continue to go on in this way. Nigerians are now more conscious with the advent of the social media and online platforms where people now interrogate issues and all that. Even if you look at the demography of the voting population, you will see that the people are wiser now.
So, that notion that ‘traditionally, there are 12 million votes for Buhari’ is not possible this time around. Now, he (Buhari) is contesting against a fellow Northerner, a Fulani, a Northern Muslim – all these worked against Jonathan in 2015. But this time around, a Muslim is contesting against him, a Northerner is contesting against him, a Fulani man – a titled one for that matter – Waziri of Adamawa, is contesting against him. It is going to be fight to finish.
For us, we are going to win because Nigerians don’t want to continue with hunger and poverty. The president has not been able to recreate his farm to be creative, even to buy the presidential form of N45 million, he had to go and start begging people, according to him. Though we know that is just a political gimmick.
The PDP has been making allegations of the plot to rig the election, even asking one of the national commissioners of INEC to resign because of the role she was assigned to play at the collation centre for the presidential election. Given the fact that elections are mostly rigged at the polling units, is the PDP not just shouting wolf when there is none?
No, when election gets to the collation point where they used Internet to transmit the figures, they can manipulate the figures and all of that because computer is all about garbage in; garbage out.
But PDP agents will also be there to monitor what is being put in.
Our agents will not be there. INEC has said they will not allow people come into their situation room. Our agents will be in the open hall.
But your agents will be in the states where the results will be coming from.
It is not about the states. Our agents will be at the states, at every polling unit; they will watch the collation of the results. But the final outcome will come from the INEC chairman and they can declare anything.
But all of us will be watching what is going on television stations, as it happened in 2015?
Okay, did you watch when a particular professor said he couldn’t even see his own figures?
That professor was from a PDP state?
It doesn’t matter. The issue is that when the results are coming, the ICT unit of INEC will be in an inner room, which they called the Situation Room. That is where this woman is expected to be because it is her responsibility to make sure that everything is intact when they are coming to announce the results. What of if they decide to shut down the ICT Unit that day and say that it is faulty?
What will we do? So, we don’t want to give room for excuses and that is why we are saying that Amina Zakari, given her consanguine relationship with the president – whether by blood or marriage – shouldn’t preside over her uncle’s election. They are related hook, line and sinker and to that extent, she should recuse herself. In law, when judges see that their position will conflict with the interest of the parties in the case, they hand off and give way to other judges. It is that simple. Amina Zakari is not the only INEC commissioner with capacity to provide logistics support to the collation centre.
If INEC gives in to the request, will that not be like taking instruction from PDP, which is just one of the over 90 parties we have now?
It is not taking instruction from PDP. INEC can take instruction from us, from the APC and from other political parties because INEC is at the behest of the political parties. PDP is the biggest of the political parties, and 61 political parties are in support of this.
INEC said even with the Electoral Act in place now, it can still conduct free and fair election, that it doesn’t need the new electoral act to conduct a credible election?
It is not about INEC. We, the participants in the election which INEC is going to supervise must give our endorsements that yes, we are fine with what you are doing. But if we are not fine, you have to retune, rejig and re-asses yourself to come up with a position that is seen by everybody who is a stakeholder to be free, fair and credible. If it is not seen like that we will begin to raise queries.
What is the greatest fear of the PDP about this 2019 election?
Our biggest fear is the use and misuse of the security apparatus – the police and the army.
