Political temperature in Kogi State has been on the rise since the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced that the next governorship election of the state will take place on November 2, 2019. While things have been relatively quiet on the opposition front, except from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, where some members seem to be testing the waters, the same cannot be said of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, where some stakeholders recently raised the alarm in an open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, saying that the party will lose the election if the incumbent, Governor Yahaya Bello, gets its ticket for a second term.
The group, Kogi APC Stakeholders’ Forum, led by Alex Kadiri, a former Senator, listed the ‘sins’ of the governor that they think will stop Kogi people from voting for him for another tenure in the letter. In this interview, Senator Kadiri, spoke on why members of the Forum believe that Governor Bello is not deserving of a second term and why Buhari should intervene to ensure that the APC ticket did not go to him, among other issues
Recently, some elders from Kogi issued a statement practically asking President Buhari to stop Governor Yahaya Bello from running on the ticket of All Progressives Congress for a second term. Why was that appeal made to the president?
I am the chairman of the group that asked the president to stop Yahaya Bello. We are the APC stakeholders. We are the elders of the party. In our group are all the people who have run and won elections, as senators in Kogi before. Dino Melaye, who is even active in PDP now, was a member before he got angry and left for PDP.
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Many members of the House of Representatives, state assembly – the two former speakers – Clarence Olafemi and Abdullahi Bello – are members, but because of anger, Olafemi left for PDP. Bello got tired and with the tribal pressure on him – he is from the same local government with Yahaya Bello – he left. But that notwithstanding, we are members of the party and if we just keep quiet from now till the end, history will not judge us rightly. We need to talk. We need to speak truth to power that is what we are doing.
But why did the members of the group feel that they have to appeal to Buhari to practically stop the governor from having a second term, because that’s the essence of your demand?
If you read our publication, we took everybody down memory lane; how we have complained and the party set up a committee headed by Tony Momoh, a senior journalist with Barnabas Gemade, a former chairman of PDP, who was then in APC, John Shagaya, former minister of interior, who was also in APC before he died. And we went to them; I led the delegation. We spent the whole day at the party’s secretariat where the meeting took place and we reeled out all these catalogues of woes. They wrote their report, as a result of listening to us and listening to the governor.
As I am talking to you, I have not seen a copy of that report. Then we protested. And if you listened to John Oyegun when he was inaugurating the second panel, he said he was bending over backwards to appease us by setting up another reconciliation panel. This time around, it was headed by General Garba, a retired General from Niger State. Former Speaker, Patricia Etteh, was a member; Don Etiebet was a member and many others. We again met them. In fact, in the speech I made there, I told them that it was out of sheer respect for those on the panel that I came, because I know them on one on one basis.
They know who I am and I know who they are. It was out of respect for them that I attended because if I didn’t go, the other stakeholders would not go. I made that pointedly clear to them. We met at Ibeto Hotel in Gudu here in Abuja and we were there for close to five hours. In fact, it was from that meeting that Clarence Olafemi stormed out and later went to Kogi and joined PDP that evening because he couldn’t understand the utterances of some of the members of the panel. They felt that we were fighting Yahaya Bello because he was an Igbira man, which was a misconception.
I was the chairman of the group and I was making a presentation. To my right was seated Abdullahi Bello, a former Speaker, who is from Okene Local Government. To my left was Senator Ohiare from Adavi Local Government and all the others. I introduced them. I said in this room, I am about the only Igala – all the rest are from West and Central. And the people around me sitting by my side immediately are all from Yahaya Bello’s place.
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So, the thing has got nothing to do with tribe, please disabuse your mind. The man is not just doing well. He is killing our party and we are in this party because we want to win and win again. When Adams Oshiomhole came on the scene, we made the same effort. Everybody in the National Secretariat of APC, they are tired of Kogi’s case.
Not only did we meet Oshiomhole and his new team, but (Vice President) Osinbajo actually invited the stakeholders to a meeting. We were with Osinbajo in his house – 47 of us, till about 3:00am that night and we repeated the same thing. A governor can tell you that I have won all the seats at the election, but at what cost? So, what we are saying, we have said it at the party level three, four times. We have said it at the governmental level. I don’t want to include individual approaches to some of the Buhari people. We have met them.
But why do you think it has been difficult for the APC national secretariat to tackle the problem?
Corruption. That’s the answer to your question.
In what way?
You know we complained about our money. Have you been to Kogi?
Yes?
Okay, what’s your impression of the state capital? There is chart that we have, but we don’t want to publish it because if we did, they would stone Yahaya Bello on the streets. It has the income to all the local governments – 21 of them for the period he has been governor of Kogi State. I am not aware that N10 million has ever gone to any state.
After collecting the money, from Lokoja, they will give N3 million or N5 million to the local governments, as they decide in Government House. So, if you are from say, Yagba West and you hear that over N4 billion or N5 billion have been collected on your behalf in the last 38 months and you look around, you can’t see anything of N20 million, salaries are not paid, no physical development, schools are closed, so we believe that if we release this to the public there will be uproar in the state.
But why don’t you want to release it?
As chairman of the group, there are many things that I know, which I am sitting on. In fact, it came to a point about a month ago when I threatened that I was going to resign as a member of this Forum because people came here with photocopies of cheque books, how money are being misused. I said look, Kogi government has not complained that Mr. ABC has burgled our treasury. That means this money got to them from government. It was a willing donation, a willing gift. You can’t go and start scandalising people’s name.
But you cited corruption as the reason for the inability of national secretariat of APC to tackle the problems of Kogi chapter of the party. Are you saying the national secretariat is also benefitting from this corruption?
Well, I have not seen Yahaya Bello giving anybody at the national secretariat one naira. But the trouble is this – we want this party to grow, we want this party to survive. Why does he continue to do bad things and he is not cautioned? Where is our money?
But the governor has argued that he has been the only one holding the party together in the state. He said groups like yours now are just coming out because of the impending governorship election and you want to take control of the party.
You can only fool some people some of the time, you cannot fool all the people all the time. For example, APC, my party, says it has won all the state assembly seats in the last election. As a Nigerian, do you believe that is possible? How was the victory achieved? We need to interrogate ourselves; we need to speak truth to power. We need to be sincere to this country because this is the only country that we have. If we keep patching things, the day it will blow open – you saw the President of Sudan being carried in a truck like a cow? It can also happen in this country.
As a member, elder of the party and as a Knight of the Catholic Church, I do not believe that my party won 10 of those seats through proper and honest means. I was there; it is not that somebody heard and told me. I went home for the first election that was postponed. I went home for the second election that took place and I went home for the state assembly election. Ask anybody – I must be in my village to vote. So, these things happened in my presence.
Let me ask you one stupid question – in the booth where I voted, forget about other aspirants and candidates – between Atikuand Buhari, they have a total of 1,700 votes. During the state assembly election, all the votes put together was less than 75. There was violence, guns, shooting throughout the night and on the day of the election. Our people are poor and wretched; they can’t afford to buy panadol. If they shoot them, who is going to take them to the hospital? So, everybody stayed indoors.
There are also fears that the coming governorship election may be characterised by violence, do you also share that fear?
That’s what we are trying to stop. I told you right now – I could be an Imam, a Catholic or an Anglican. But I am talking from the perspective of humanity. If we allow what happened in Kogi during the state assembly elections to repeat itself, I don’t know how it will look like. And the people who will die are Kogi people – nobody from Katsina, or Osinbajo’s Ogun State or Adam Oshiomhole’s Edo State.
The people who will be shot and killed are Kogi people and that’s what we are trying to stop. The level of violence is too much. Kogi State is awash with AK47 rifles, pump action guns procured by the government. We published it. We are not afraid of being picked up by the police or DSS. Then, we will ask them, what is their function? They are supposed to see these things and report to government so that the government can mop up these guns.
But do you think that the President will listen and do what you asked him to do?
Well, if you don’t greet somebody, you won’t know whether he is deaf or not. We have opened the box; the government can close the box and keep it, and say after all, APC won in Kogi. Nobody can drive me out of APC; I am speaking the truth. This is truth to power and if what happened during the state assembly elections is attempted again, there will be so much bloodshed in Kogi that nobody would be able to control.
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The traditional ruler of Okene, who is also a cousin to the governor, said in an interview published some days ago that though the governor has deviated from who he knew him to be, he will still be appealing to people like you from the other parts of the state to give him a second chance. Are you saying you are not ready to heed the appeal?
I know His Royal Majesty, Ado Ibrahim, as a young man. I have been to his house to eat in Yaba, Lagos. That was long before he became the traditional ruler of Igbira people. He is somebody I know. I have been to his office in Lagos to sit and chat with him. He is not somebody, who will make a frivolous statement over any issue. In his capacity as the paramount ruler of Igbira people worldwide, nobody expects him to say anything different from what he has said – that he will appeal to other parts of the state to support his son. If I were in his shoes, I would do exactly the same thing.
He only added a caveat, that the Yahaya Bello he sees now is not the same Yahaya Bello he knew and supported in 2015. The trouble in Kogi has nothing to do with tribe. It is about the character of the person. I don’t believe that Yahaya Bello has the character to be the governor of a state. You cannot give what you don’t have. These are the issues.
The traditional ruler also said that the people leading the governor astray are mostly Igala people…
Again, I don’t care whether they are Igala people or Igbira people or Okun people or Koto people. The fact of the matter is you cannot give what you don’t have. If you are a stupid man, you can only surround yourself with stupid people. If you are a weakling, you can only surround yourself with weak people. If you a corrupt person, you can only surround yourself with corrupt people. I think that answers your question.
I don’t care who his subordinate staff are. The fact of the matter is none of them has shown me and most Kogi people that they have the ability to govern the state either collectively or individually. These are the issues. All they know is money, money, money and our people are poor and dispossessed left, right and centre. Imagine a civil servant, who has not been paid 20, 23 months and the night to the election, he is called and given N5,000.
Is that what happened during the last election?
That’s what I am telling you, whether you believe it or not. The people have been so pauperised that anything goes – they want to survive till the following day. Imagine you are a public servant in Kogi, your wife is also a public servant, your wife has not been paid, you have not been paid for 22 months and you have a house to run. Most of them who have cars have abandoned them.
Go to Lokoja; look at the faces of the people that you come across. These are the issues we are fighting. We are not fighting Yahaya Bello, as a person. Obviously, we are not fighting Igbira people, certainly not. I schooled at Okene and I will be the last human being to raise my tongue against an Igbira man because in my youth, I benefitted from them. Without the education and the training I got from Okene, I won’t be what I am today.
But the governor has said the inability to pay salaries promptly was as a result of the shortfall in federal allocation to pay the huge number of workers. You don’t believe that?
Read our publications and I can show you figures. They said the staff list is over bloated, so they did multiple screening. Before the screening, the total salary of Kogi was said to be N5.8 billion, which cannot be true anyway. I have since been told that the total salaries, gratuities and pensions of Kogi people is N2.8 billion. But over this period that we are talking about, Yahaya Bello has received N294 billion from the federation account. So, even without the screening, they could have been able to pay all these bills. Without the screening, they could have had, at least, N127 billion to do capital projects and pay overheads.
And since there are no such things, where is the money? That’s the issue. Yahaya Bello cannot say that he has been starved of money from the federation account. Kogi got exactly what was due to it at all times. In addition, they got bailout funds of N20 billion. They got Paris refunds first, second and third, which was N19 billion.
Then, the roads done by former Governor Ibrahim Idris, they got N11 billion for that. So, they got a total of N50 billion, in addition to the normal statutory allocations. After salaries have been paid, pensions have been paid, gratuities have been paid, Yahaya Bello have been sitting on, at least, N200 to N300 billion. The question we are asking is and if we are in a civilised country, these are questions the electorate will ask, where is our money?
You cannot answer them with bullets because you can’t kill all of us. By the time you killed 20, 30 people in Kogi State during an election because you want to win at all costs, the whole country will collapse. So, the answer to your question is that it is not true that Yahaya Bello does not have enough money to pay his bills. He should have in excess of N270 billion after paying bills.
But the governor, through his aides said he has been doing a number of projects, including a rice mill, which will soon be unveiled. As somebody conversant with Kogi State, don’t you see those projects?
You don’t need three days to tour Kogi. Go to the extreme ends of Kogi, ask yourself from what you see, if there is anywhere in the state where there is a project that you can put together and say, all these will cost N30m, N40m. You can write a good story for your newspaper because your newspapers are not read in only one place; the headquarters may be in Lagos. A good number of the readers also travel regularly and unfortunately for Kogi, almost all the people going to the East or West must pass through Lokoja.
So, there is nothing you can hide. In the state university, virtually all the staff have left. We have Youth Corps members teaching in the university in 2019 Nigeria. How does this country hope to progress? The most brilliant of the corps members probably would have a first class or 2:1; he is now teaching in the university to produce graduates – those who should be graduate assistants being supervised by another experienced person, but such people are all gone. What is this?
But if Buhari does not intervene directly, can’t the stakeholders work through the party structure to ensure that the right person gets the party’s ticket?
We don’t have any means; we are now between the devil and the deep sea. With the quantum of money and Yahaya’s wasteful appetite for public funds, no matter how you do it, except outrightly banning him from participating in the process – if you say direct primary, Yahaya would win because he has stationed his soldiers in all the local governments with guns and anytime they feel like, they will just shoot in the air and everybody will run into their rooms and they will walk away. No Kogi person want to die because of APC or PDP, I can assure you.
So, you want Akinwunmi Ambode’s treatment to be meted out on Yahaya Bello too?
Maybe Ambode’s example may not be the best. But what I am telling you is that Yahaya Bello alone does not form APC in Kogi. In any case, he wasn’t part of us when we did in the election. If Abubakar Audu (former governor of the state) hadn’t died, he would not be there. The story of APC in Kogi State is terrible. But let’s not go into all of that because it will wake up a lot of feelings and sentiments.
God made it possible for Yahaya Bello to become governor of Kogi. That’s why my people said that if water is destined for you to drink, no matter how fast the person carrying it is, it will not pass you. God made it possible for him and now, he is tempting God. He said he owns APC in Kogi, that he has delivered 25 seats to APC. Well, he is making Kogi a laughing stock that is all I know.
But apart from your appeal to Buhari, are you also reaching out to other party leaders?
Well, that letter you saw was written to Buhari but, of course, it was copied to the party’s national chairman, the National Leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the Vice President and Secretary to the Government of the Federation. What we are doing is nothing secret because anywhere this letter is going to, he has people he is paying every month to sabotage our efforts. We are aware.
And there is no way you can stop that?
The man is collecting N2 billion every month. If he decides to use the N2 billion to come and bribe in Abuja here, what can Alex Kadiri do? There is nothing I can do and that’s why we need to make it public, so that even those who are collecting money from him would at a point feel ashamed if they go to Kogi or pass through Kogi and see how the capital city is. But if the APC thinks that they now control Kogi and so, Yahaya Bello’s group should come out, many of us will have to be killed, including me, for him to win again.
And you say you cannot leave APC?
I am saying I cannot promote bad product. Yahaya Bello is a bad product and we all know this in Kogi State. It has nothing to do with his tribe.
You said you will not leave APC. What about other members?
I don’t know. I cannot read a man’s mind.
But is there any candidate that you or your group is supporting for the APC gubernatorial ticket now?
In my position as the chairman of this Forum, it will be stupid of me to start supporting one candidate.
I ask because the governor may say that’s why your group is trying to stop him from getting the ticket?
At his craziest moment, he can’t accuse me, Alex Kadiri, of that. He knows me. I think he knows what I stand for. There are many things he as a person will never accuse me of.
You complained about lack of development in Kogi. So, what do you think should be the pre-occupation of the next governor of the state?
The first preoccupation of any occupier of Lugard House, that is the governor of the state, is to be honest with Kogi people. In those days when we were small, they would say what is today’s Kogi was the powerhouse of the civil service of the North. We moved to Ilorin, they say, ‘oh, we are the power house. But look at now. We are almost like the Tuareg. You know there was a time they were in charge of West Africa, controlling everywhere from Mali. But today, anywhere you find them, especially in Nigeria, they are maiguards in every house.
That’s what Kogi people have been reduced to and I cannot accept it. So, the occupier of Government House, Lokoja, must be honest with Kogi people. Number two, he must come to that office through a free and fair election. Kogi people didn’t elect Yahaya Bello, so, he really didn’t owe us anything. Providence made it possible for him to come. But having come, he has wasted all that came to him through God’s intervention. Anybody who tries to smuggle himself into Government House, including that of Kogi, would have the same problem Yahaya Bello is facing – legitimacy.
He didn’t go to any place for one hour to say, ‘please, vote for me, my name is Yahaya Bello.’ Not one location. I hope you know that election has been done, collations were going on and if Audu had lived for another two hours, the results would have been announced and James Abiodun Faleke (Audu’s deputy governorship candidate) would have been our governor. But providence is something that all of us cannot control; something that all of us did not understand happened and Audu was denied.
Yahaya Bello just came in with the supplementary election of less than 4,000 votes. But why is he not conducting local government elections? He has tried the state assembly election; he won. So, why is he not conducting the local government elections?
He may still do so because some of his colleagues conducted the elections few months to the end of their tenures.
The man who has all the powers to win all the 25 seats in the state assembly – why can’t he conduct the local government elections? If I were him, after the state assembly elections, the following week, I would call for local government elections and use the same tactics to win. I am from Kogi, the people who will die in this process are Kogi indigenes and that’s why it hurts me that this kind of thing is taking place in 2019 in a country that is practising democracy. I wish my country well.
