HOW TINUBU CAN MOVE NIGERIA FORWARD –UK-based Dr Philip Idaewor, chairman, Forum of APC Diaspora Chairmen

United Kingdom-based Dr Philip Idaewor who is also the chairman, Forum of APC Diaspora Chairmen was a presidential aspirant on the platform of his party in the 2023 election. He, however, pulled out of the presidential race after the N100 million price for the presidential ticket was announced. The APC chieftain spoke to Akani Alaka on why he pulled out of the contest for the APC presidential ticket, the conduct of the 2023 elections and how the administration of President-elect, Bola Tinubu can turn Nigeria around.

 

You were one of the presidential aspirants of the All Progressives Congress for the 2023 election. But in the end, you abandoned your aspiration and did not even buy the ticket to the contest. What happened?  

We decided to put our hat in the ring by going for the party’s ticket and we put our message of rebooting Nigeria out because we believe that Nigeria needs complete rebooting.

What do I mean by that? If you have a political system that is not robust enough to deal with the challenges of the society, that system needs to be looked at critically. And a bold, courageous leader should take steps to ensure that such a political system is done away with, revamped or made to align with the desires of the citizens for a better life.

Every human being in life wants a better life, to live in peace, to be in a position where they can pursue legitimate sources of livelihood, provide for their families and take care of those around them. Yes, we commonly say that all fingers are not equal, so in every society, you can have the very rich and the very poor. But every government must ensure that the environment is such that every single person would have the opportunity to better their lives.

So, when we speak about rebooting Nigeria, we are speaking about these realities of our country’s political system. It’s clear to me and my team that the reason why Nigeria is not moving forward is because our political system has not and is not speaking to our nationhood. Nigerians still do not feel they can claim ownership of their country. And this is because our political system is not speaking to the realities of the lives that Nigerians are living.

Whether Nigerians in the Diaspora or Nigerians in Nigeria, we all face similar challenges of being called Nigerians. After all, we are born into that geographic space. So, it is our opinion that the starting point should be to deal with the political structures, and issues that are working against Nigeria becoming the great country that it should be.

So, in our campaign, we were vigorous in putting out this message. But once the cost of the ticket was announced – N100 million to buy the form and for the expression of interest – we sat down and discussed extensively. The question was even if we had the money, the mere decision to go that route spoke against our conviction for a country that wants to move forward.

You consider the N100 million too high…

Once you set that kind of high price for tickets across the board, what you are essentially saying is that unless you are super rich, you can’t run for a political office in Nigeria.

The second part is our political parties’ institutions – if there is anything like that because essentially I believe we don’t have political parties. Our political parties are such that they only exist to make money from political aspirants and that fuels corruption.

If you look at countries that have been able to move away from poverty-stricken status to developing status, they are countries where the political party systems are so structured that the members of the political parties feel that they own those political parties because they contribute to ensuring that those parties exist. The political parties in those countries don’t exist because the few very rich individuals who are holding political parties are funding such parties.

We cannot continue that way because it means even the most corrupt persons who have made money by crooked means can use that money to take over and dominate a political party. So, we saw that it is not in the interest of our political conviction or even in the interest of Nigeria for us to even seek such money to buy a ticket and the decision was that I should step back and see who will emerge and see how best we could support our party. That was essentially what happened. But we are still there, we haven’t demolished our structures, we haven’t given up. We just have to look for ways of contributing our voice to pushing our message out hoping that somebody in office will listen and do what is right for our country.

You attended the primary in Abuja despite that. What was your view about how the primary was held and the candidate produced by the party? 

Again, your question spoke to the issues I have just spoken about. In a political primary, you are going to have all sorts of soured drawings, because it is gladiatorial – a battle so to say. For me, all participants used the arsenal of their convictions, all the arsenals at their disposal to try and win that ticket. Asiwaju won because he outsmarted or outplayed the others. And I think we shouldn’t try to demonise him based on the fact that he won that ticket. It’s an intra-party activity. The people who could vote, the people who controlled the voting process, every candidate needed to reach, romance them and whosoever has the upper hand should be supported. But again, it speaks to the issues I raised earlier – the dysfunctionality of our political parties and I said at the moment, we don’t have political parties in Nigeria. In my view, what we have are assemblages of politicians who are using the name of political parties as special purpose vehicles. Political parties should be embedded foundationally in ideology, owned by the citizens whether you talked about Communist China, Capitalist America, or social democratic countries in Europe. In Nigeria, as it is in most African countries today, political parties are owned by a few and you cannot have development in that kind of scenario.

The election has been held and your party still won the presidency. But what’s your impression about the election? 

Very sad – The conduct of our politicians during the election, to say the least, was nothing inspiring. But again, it is the environment in which they are operating. All in all, I lay the blame for every complaint and every outcome that is negative at the feet of INEC. I don’t blame any of the candidates because if INEC with the humongous amount of money that was released to it did its job, Asiwaju’s victory will not be in a place where it is being challenged and made mockery of by the opposition.

As I said earlier, in a political contest such as we have in Nigeria, candidates will have to look at ways of winning the election. That’s why it’s a contest. So, simply put, Asiwaju drove his campaign with a strategy that is multi-pronged like the other candidates.

But he had the upper hand, so he was declared the winner. How INEC concluded by declaring Asiwaju the winner, you cannot blame Asiwaju for it. My view is that it was the duty and it remains the duty, the responsibility of INEC to ensure that whatever result it was going to announce is completely and totally coherent with the voice of the Nigerian people as spelt out at the polling units.

That INEC failed in that single responsibility is something that every Nigerian, whether you are for Asiwaju or you are for the opposition, should be upset about. The government did not deny INEC the means to prosecute this project. Over N300 billion was spent by INEC and we still came out with all the multiple issues that people are complaining about. That is not the kind of Nigeria that we should be aspiring to have. We held elections in the UK recently and there was nothing like the disruptions of the voting process. People went about their businesses. People went to work, you didn’t see a shooting of any sort going on in the UK, no traffic disruption, and nobody was arrested or killed. That’s what a political system should be aspiring to be.

But people say Nigeria is still a young democracy…

When people say,  ‘Oh, Nigeria is a young democracy unlike the UK,’  it should make every Nigerian very upset and unhappy. People saying such things are patronising Nigerians. They are speaking down on Nigeria. They are saying that Nigeria cannot learn from the best places around the world. There is nothing unique or special about what the UK was able to do.

Indeed, on the second day,  the UK was investigating reports that there were people who intended to vote but could not vote because the system is in place to ensure that nobody is prevented from voting whether because they went to work or for other reasons.

Every single person who intended to vote must be allowed to vote. So, they are already investigating those isolated issues of complaints. As Nigerians, we should not allow people to patronise us or tell us that we can’t do things right. We do have the capacity, we have the expertise.

Even back home in Nigeria, millions of young Nigerians are versatile and can make the system work. That is one of the biggest blessings that God has given that country.

So, why are few individuals wasting these blessings that have been given to our country and a lot of us are not willing to speak out against it? So, for me, I celebrate Asiwaju’s victory, but I am completely appalled by the handling of the elections by INEC. INEC is fully responsible for any kind of complaints that are coming through, not the candidates.

The candidates’ responsibility was to go out and campaign, work hard, reach out to their multiple supporters across the country, and deploy every asset at their disposal legitimately to win the election. You cannot blame a candidate for fighting to win an election.

The umpire must ensure that every single candidate operates by the rules and you can take the referee, and the linesmen on the football pitch as examples.

The players want to win. So, sometimes, they pretend that they have been fouled in the penalty box and we see that every week. But the referee must make sure that he looked at it. If the man is pretending to have been fouled and he is not, they penalise him for either diving or for pretending and seeking to deceive the referee. The referee must do that and that is also exactly the duty of INEC.

But some Nigerians have argued that there is no way free and fair elections can be conducted in Nigeria if politicians do not change their attitude of winning at all costs. The politicians are the ones that instigate violence and get their supporters or thugs to disrupt voting at the strongholds of their opponents as was witnessed in some parts of the country, including in Lagos during the election…

How many polling units where there were clear evidence, video evidence of voters’ suppression has INEC cancelled? How many people were arrested and have been sent to jail?

How many families of individuals who lost their lives have been compensated? How many security agents who got involved in all of these have been arrested, prosecuted and sent to jail?

How many INEC staff who have been caught on camera compromising the system have been arrested and sent to jail? How many polling units were uploaded as INEC promised on the IRev as INEC promised before the results were announced? Every society is bound to operate by rules and regulations.

You and I come from local communities. In our local communities, if you have a rascally child, maybe a thief, if the community decides to come together and ‘say from today if anyone steals in this community, we will take action,’ you know once that announcement is made that nonsense will stop. The stealing child will either stop what he is doing or the parents will ask him to leave the community because the community will do something about it.

That’s how rules operate. There are no countries where you don’t have politicians who want to compromise the system. The reasons politicians in the West -US, North America, Europe or China -the reasons they do not dare compromise the system is because they know that the operational side of the system -the police, the electoral body- are working.

And if you attempt to compromise the system, they will get you punished, regardless of how highly placed you are. We are human beings and I can assure you, I have travelled around the world a bit. Human beings are all the same. Nigerians are not different in any particular way from others. Yes, we have our attributes unique to us. Things that we like, the capacity to be outgoing and to be bold, but when it comes to bad behaviour, it is not unique to Nigeria.

The only reason others cannot and will not dare do it is because they know that they will be caught in 80 per cent of the cases. And no matter how you are highly placed, you will go to court, you will be punished. Boris Johnson, for just dancing at a party during COVID, taking some money to renovate his house, what happened to him? He lost his job.

And they are still investigating him. They haven’t left him. Imagine if Boris Johnson was a Nigerian president, senator, governor or local government chairperson. Do you think that that will happen? So, it is the system. The system is dysfunctional.

And that’s why I said our campaign focus was on rebooting Nigeria. Our operational mode and political system need to be quickly reconfigured so that we will have a system that ensures that our civil service, the judiciary, and the security services work.

Systems are blind to personality worship because what we have in Nigeria today is a cult worship of personality. We have a cult of worship of personality in our politics. We need to put a system in place that applies to individuals, which will protect the system and protect the country. That will ensure that it is Nigeria first and it should be Nigeria first.

That’s what we should be looking at. When we have that, I can assure you that Nigeria will transit from where she is now to a country that is working, where the citizens will enjoy the best of all that God has given to them within the shortest possible time. It shouldn’t take a lifetime to make Nigeria work for all of us.

So, how confident are you that President-elect Bola Tinubu can do this or at least set Nigeria on this part of making Nigeria work? 

Asiwaju is a very courageous man and I think he is faced with enormous tasks. How he starts will determine what will happen in his government. If Asiwaju agrees that Nigeria needs to be restructured, that, for me, will be a breakthrough for our country.

That’s number one. Two, if Asiwaju will ensure that on the back of his vast experiences of travelling around the world that he will put Nigeria first, then, he will succeed.

If he sets out to actualise these two things, what will happen is that Nigeria will position herself to lead the West African sub-region at least. And that means Nigerians will have not just the huge Nigerian market, but also the West African space as a market.

The third is human resource nurturing. It follows what I said about putting Nigeria first. It means the Nigerian person will be given a new sense of his or her Nigerianness. What do I mean by that? There is no reason why our educational systems and our healthcare systems should not work optimally to make the Nigerian person feel protected to be a Nigerian and, therefore, when you tell Nigerians to do their best for the country, they will be encouraged from the word go to do that. We should move away from the idea of monetizing everything. Rather, we should socialise the services that will make life better for Nigerians. Education and healthcare:

These are the two critical factors that any serious government should try to ensure that they put all their vigours to bring in expert leadership, and aggressively stamp out every notion of monetisation and corruption. That’s because whether you are rich or poor, you want your children to go to school, you will fall sick and you want to be treated, and therefore, these are the two important areas of life for our country cannot afford to compromise on. Asiwaju is a very bold person. All he needs is to be willing and not allow himself to be captured by the vultures or those we call the cabals in Nigeria.

Some people have said that the election in which we have the three major presidential candidates coming from the three major ethnic groups in the country further divided Nigerians along ethnic and religious lines. Do you agree with that and what do you think the president-elect should do to remedy the situation?

I completely disagree with that. I don’t think that the candidates from wherever they came from are the reasons Nigerians have become divided. I don’t agree with that at all. Where our candidates came from has nothing to do with the current state of ethnic and religious divisions that we are witnessing in Nigeria. I aggressively campaigned for our current president and I worked very hard at every point in time to support him, not because I was expecting anything from the government.

I and my colleagues here in the UK spent our resources, and time to project him and support his government, not just because we belong to the same party, but because of our passionate love for Nigeria. Unfortunately, President Buhari is substantially responsible for the present state of division that we have in our country. I think President Buhari makes religion and ethnicity central issues in our politics. Look, the hate and anger against the ethnic Fulani people, has it ever been this big?

It’s obvious. Nigerians did not suddenly wake up and become angry with the Fulani people and that is the most unfortunate thing because the majority of the Fulani people in Nigeria today are absolutely good people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with all that has happened.

A few individuals have done it and they have endangered Nigerians who happen to come from the same ethnic group as the President. That cannot be right and I think if we are not willing to speak out against this, we are not being sincere to ourselves. On the issue of religion, when was it that Nigerians became so divided along religious lines? It was when PMB came and again, it is by not listening to the fears that Nigerians were expressing along this line.

He wasn’t listening. So, whenever a new appointment was announced, people began to check whether the person is a Christian or a Muslim. Why was that? Because the president shows a consistent pattern of doing so, even when Nigerians were crying that they are not happy, do something about this. What is so difficult in ensuring that your country that has lived through four or five decades of cohabitation is steered in the right direction through national cohesion, unity and nationhood?

After all, power is ephemeral. That you are president today does not mean that you will be president for life. And you didn’t become president by yourself. People believed in you and they fought and worked very hard to ensure that you became president because they believe that you are going to do the country good. Many of us who worked for you did so, not because necessarily, we wanted to leave where we are to be part of the government.

We just wanted a country that works, so that if I came home and I said,’ I’m in Abuja, let’s catch up’, you will not say ‘I don’t move around at night because I’m worried about security.’ I can move around at any time I wish to move around. I should not get into my car and I am travelling from Lagos to Osogbo and I’m worried that along the road, I will get kidnapped and when it is announced that I am kidnapped, the story will be ‘Dr. Idakwo kidnapped by Fulani herdsmen.’

What kind of a country is that? And the president simply kept mute and will not come out to speak to these challenges, these fears of Nigerians. Of course, a good number of the kidnappers were not Fulani people. But the president allowed the Fulani people to be profiled because he wasn’t speaking to these issues, to the challenges. He wasn’t speaking, engaging Nigerians to say, ‘look, we have arrested Mr A, we have arrested Mr B, Mr A has been prosecuted and sent to jail, Mr B has been sent to jail, the properties acquired by Mr A from banditry have been seized by the government and whatever he has acquired that cannot be seized will be destroyed.’

You just don’t need your subordinates to come out to speak, especially when the fingers are being pointed at you. You need to be with the people. You need to be seen by the people that you are with them. So, I honestly will not blame Asiwaju, and neither will I blame Atiku or Peter Obi. It was not their responsibility, they were candidates of their parties, they were campaigning to win elections and in a political space that is as fluid as the Nigerian political space, people are going to use every instrument, every possible action they can deploy to try and win the election. The responsibility lies with the state to ensure that anyone who crosses the line is restrained.

What is your advice to Tinubu now on how to be different then?  

In the Nigerian home, there are two big elephants and they are the elephants of religion and ethnicity. Tinubu needs to be able to wrestle these two elephants to the ground and slaughter them.

Even with his Muslim-Muslim ticket which many believed has also contributed to the problem?

The Muslim-Muslim ticket. I wasn’t happy with that to be honest because I feel that he should have been more sensitive to the religious dimension, particularly, the way the country is at the moment. But I can see the angle he was coming from. He wants to win an election and you know he calculated that if I picked a Northern Christian, it is unlikely that the Northern Muslims who are in the majority will vote for me. So, Asiwaju wants to win an election, he makes a tactical, strategic move which I think should help assuage the people.

He didn’t go for the people that everyone is pointing fingers at as being responsible for Nigeria’s problems. He went for a Kanuri man, showing that he thought about it carefully. I think what he does and how he does it in terms of engaging with the Nigerian people in the first year of his tenure will tell a lot about how he will end up. It’s not just about appointments because when it comes to appointments into political offices, you know that even at this time, people are doing anything possible under the sun- those who are hustlers to get appointed into his government – the good, the bad and the ugly. But he needs to be careful in the choices he made from the minute, little choices to the big ones because of the religious sensitivity of the times – if I see a press statement released on behalf of the president-elect and it is signed by a Muslim, I probably would say, ‘here we go again, he is surrounding himself with Muslims.’ That’s as low as for a press statement. These are the little things he needs to be mindful of at this point. Does that mean that he should tiptoe and walk on eggshells? The answer is no.

How can he move Nigeria forward? 

My view is that if the president-elect wants Nigeria to move forward, he should be definite and clear about restructuring the country. It’s extremely important. Nigeria must be restructured politically for equity and to set the country on the path to nationhood.

We need to have a balanced federation to give us a more balanced, unified union, every nationality in Nigeria needs to have a sense of ownership; a sense that they are respected- large or small – both the majority and the minority ethnic groups.

All of us as Nigerians need to have a sense of belonging that we are equally respected as Nigerians and, in my opinion, the starting point to achieving that is the political restructuring of Nigeria and you don’t need to spend a humongous amount to do it. Documents are there.

There is the PRONACO document, there is Jonathan’s National Conference document, and there is the APC Committee led by Governor El-Rufai document. All of these are there and all he needs to do is to bring them out, issue a white paper and subject the white papers to referendum all over the country.

Number two, the Nigerian civil service needs to be made functional. At the moment, it is so dysfunctional. The last time I was in Nigeria, I went to the Federal Secretariat and, honestly, I was angry. The state of disrepair of the buildings where our civil servants work – if you enter the offices, you will be wondering, ‘how do you expect the best from these people if you place them in this kind of rooms?’ We need to value our civil servants, but we also need to streamline the civil service. We need our best hands in the civil service, delivering services to the country.

And the only way you can do that is when you, first of all, make the environment suitable and you get the best hands in place. All those people who are hangers-on, who are not supposed to be there, you weed them out. Streamline the civil service and ensure that the civil service becomes an agile technology-driven, backed service that is working in the best interest of the people. Three, Nigeria’s data management process must be streamlined.

Nigeria is one country where everything you want to do, they will take your fingerprint. How is that supposed to be the norm? And yet, we have an agency of government that is supposed to be responsible for the management of Nigeria’s database system. All Nigerians are supposed to have a national identity card; we have been talking about this for God knows how long. What is making it impossible? We need to have our database transparently and digitally driven in place. It will help in our census, our national planning, healthcare, education and all sorts of things. Until and unless we have this in place, you cannot begin to improve. These are some of the things that I would think that the president-elect should give attention to. They are foundational, but in the bottom line, they are the base upon which every other thing you want to do will be built.