A FOUNDATION member of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Isyaku Ibrahim, told Mohammed Abubakar in Abuja that lack of discipline is responsible for the rot in the party. Excerpts:
HOW would you describe the situation in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ahead of the 2011 general elections?
We are in an unfortunate situation. We created the problems for ourselves in the sense that any political party that has no discipline within its structure is bound to have this kind of confusion and crisis. The confusion started when President Goodluck Jonathan came in. Initially, everybody welcomed Jonathan’s ascendancy to the presidency. We thought that Jonathan was going to unite the PDP, but because he had his agenda, it became very clear that he was not interested in uniting the party. In the first place, he could not respect the policy of the party on zoning, which is enshrined in its party’s constitution. The principle of zoning or rotation is contained in Article 7 (2) (c) of the PDP constitution. While claiming that he is the leader of the party, one would have thought that he would respect the constitution of the party on zoning. He knew that the North was supposed to hold the position of president for eight years, and that the eight years will end in 2015. After that, our southern brothers, either South-South or South East, would have their turn. But he has decided not to wait for 2015. This has brought the confusion we are seeing today in the party.
Jonathan is pursuing a personal agenda. He decided to bring in Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo as the National Chairman of the PDP to replace Prince Vincent Ogbulafor. But unfortunately, he was unable to ask Nwodo to call for a mini convention to ratify his appointment as National Chairman, so that he can operate legally. Up till this moment, Nwodo has not faced the convention to ratify his appointment, knowing that the constitution of the party provides that you could only become a National Chairman through the convention. Maybe, Jonathan and Nwodo do not want to go to the convention for fear of defeat in the event of other people also contesting the position. This again is part of the confusion. In the PDP, we seem to be disintegrating; we do not respect the rule of law, we do not respect our party constitution, let alone the constitution of the country. When a party does not respect its constitution, it is bound to have the confusion that we are seeing in the party today.
Secondly, as we are preparing for an election with many people aspiring to occupy various elective positions, there is bound to be a level of anxiety and confusion. In the party, some group of people decided to call themselves the northern consensus advocates; this has added to the confusion. In a democracy, when you use consensus, that means you are not democratic again, it is a few people who now sat down to agree on issues because they share the same opinion on that issue. So we are watching the PDP.
A group of people in the party attracted other people and came out with an individual they call the northern consensus candidate, who will seek to be the party’s presidential candidate. The four presidential aspirants who were screened alongside the consensus candidate are members of the PDP, but in the PDP constitution, there is no Article, which says that a group of people could constitute themselves into a group to nominate or pick up a presidential aspirant on behalf of the party. This is another cause of the confusion going on and we are watching. Mallam Adamu Ciroma with eight people gathered and called themselves a consensus committee of the north, but not a consensus committee of the PDP, and debated the suitability or otherwise of four presidential aspirants. And without recognising that there are others who might come out, these people recognised only four aspirants and reached an agreement. Has anybody bothered to challenge this agreement to know from where this consensus committee derived its authority? They don’t have the mandate of the people of the North; it is a committee of nine people, the North has a population of about 75 million to 80 million. If we are talking about democracy, we cannot have a group of nine people arrogating to themselves the status of leaders of the North as a whole or the PDP in the North in particular because the PDP has 16 out of the 19 states in the North. We are still assessing a situation where only nine people will sit down to say they are selecting a presidential candidate for the PDP. They have added to the confusion because there is no discipline. That, to me is the problem we are having at the moment and until we are able to decisively deal with the situation, within the due process of democracy, the confusion will deteriorate because people are just doing what pleases them.
You are certain that the idea of a consensus candidate is alien to our democracy…
Consensus is a conspiracy against democracy. It has to do with a selection of an agreeable person in the midst of several contenders for something.
Between the northern consensus candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and President Goodluck Jonathan, whom would you vote for?
Of the two, none can save Nigeria. Jonathan is a lawbreaker by not respecting zoning and rotation as enshrined in Article Seven of the PDP. A man who can’t respect party laws will not obey the nation’s laws.
As for Atiku, he has started on a wrong footing by saying he is a consensus aspirant. Democracy has no place for that kind of thing.
You have a discomfort with the consensus arrangement despite the fact that the four presidential aspirants willingly submitted themselves to the Committee screening panel...
Are we saying that the three others decided willingly? There is a due process to be followed for the party primaries. In the North, there are 19 states, but 16 states are controlled by the PDP. Can any of the aspirants say that he has gone round the 16 states to seek the peoples’ mandate during the elections or the delegates’ mandate during the party convention? Did any of them cover the 16 states of the North? The committee just sat in Abuja, because they are big people, and we, the rest of the North are their subjects, and they decided for us because they don’t believe in democracy. If they believe in democracy they know the due process.
Do you think the confusion you talked about is the reason the National Assembly wanted to insert a clause in the Electoral Act that would have made them members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of their respective parties?
It means that we are practicing anarchy and not a parliamentary procedure of democracy. The National Assembly members ought to know that they are representatives of the people of Nigeria and cannot play partisan politics. You cannot bring your party affairs into things you are supposed to make for the Nigerian people. If you have any problem within your party, take it to your party. But it is not democratic enough for them to decide that because they want to be members of the NEC of their parties they should now make it a constitutional matter. They know that it is not right; they don’t need to be told if they believe in democracy and they believe in parliamentary procedure, they should not have suggested anything like that at all. So I am thoroughly disappointed with their behaviour. Anyway, they have seen reason and expunged that controversial clause from the Electoral Act.
How would you compare party politics in the Second Republic with parties in this dispensation?
I am a politician of the First Republic. I was a Secretary of NEPU in the Western region from 1958 to 1960 before I went to the Soviet Union. However, in the Second Republic, Nigerians gathered to form the National Party of Nigeria (NPN); the NPN was not a sectional party. We articulated our programmes and we practiced the presidential system of government in truth. Once a candidate was elected president and is sworn in, he immediately became the president of Nigeria and not a president of the NPN or any section. His job is to conduct the affairs of the government of Nigeria and not the affairs of the party. We made sure the party operated and we had our programmes, which we sold to Nigerians.
We have to be reminding the people in government of the promise they made to Nigerians and how Nigerians gave them the responsibility by electing them. In the Second Republic, there was discipline and there was division of labour; everybody knew his role, and the party men did not interfere with the work of the people in government, and vice versa. There was a working understanding that made us work well. Former president, Alhaji Shehu Shagari understood the principles of separation of powers; there was no interference with the legislature or judiciary. That was why when Shagari had a bill, he made sure that he went out to lobby so that the bill could be passed. The concept of separation of powers worked smoothly because there was a clear understanding between the party and the people in government. And that was why when we held either the National Executive Committee or National Working Committee meeting, the late Chief Adisa Akinloye, as the national chairman of the party automatically presided. But what brought about the confusion we are witnessing today came during the administration of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. The former president wanted to appropriate more powers for himself and failed to understand that in a presidential system, the president is the leader of the country, he is the president of the country and not the president of the party. He didn’t understand the clear workings of the presidential system of government. At a time, I was convinced he was mixing up the presidential system of government with the parliamentary system of government. In the West Minister parliamentary system of government, a leader of the party becomes automatically the Prime Minister, because during the debate, he is the PM and he is questioned about the affairs of government. Obasanjo as president must have picked that up as he claimed that he was the leader of the PDP; that was the beginning of our confusion. And that is the confusion, which Jonathan inherited, claiming that he is a leader of the party. They should know that in a presidential system, a president is not elected to become a leader of the party; he is elected to lead the country, not a partisan party. Therefore, the party has to be supreme, but he created this confusion and that is what is going on at the moment.
Were things different during the three years of the late President Musa Umaru Yar’Adua?
The late President Umaru Yar’Adua was a product of a political system and therefore understood politics; his father participated in the First Republic parliamentary system of government rising to become a minister in the government of the late Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. He understood that when he was elected president as Umaru Yar’Adua, he was a president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and not for PDP. That was the reason he gradually tried to get away from the confusion of the party. Actually, things were different; there was not much confusion during his time in the party. But because Jonathan came with his own agenda, he wanted to use the position as the so-called leader of the party to manipulate and install himself and that is why the problem has endured.
During Obasanjo’s regime, he made sure that he manipulated state governors to become his stooges, which in our constitution is an aberration. In the constitution, the governors are only answerable to their respective states; they are not answerable to the president. The only area where they can be together is when they attend the National Security Council meeting. At that time, each governor has to report about the security situation in his state. Otherwise, the governors are independent; they are only answerable to their state houses of assembly. If the governors understood the substance of power, they should have nothing to do with Abuja. But because Obasanjo was able to manipulate them, they became scared. They thought that Obasanjo had more powers than they thought. They knew however that he had the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and because they did not understand the substance of power, Obasanjo was harassing them with the EFCC. In the first place, they should not be answerable to the EFCC, they were state governors, elected by their people, if there was any financial misappropriation, it is their state houses of assembly that should take action by either impeaching them or otherwise. But because they submitted themselves, they were always seen in Abuja. And this time around, because they don’t know their powers, they should know that they have nothing to do with Jonathan or any president for that matter.
Comment on the cost of maintaining the institutions of government
I don’t have facts about the Executive, because I don’t know much about them. But I know something about the National Assembly. First, the members are supposed to know their role, they are to make laws for the rest of the country, and if somebody is going to make laws for the people of this country, that person has to discipline himself to show that he is a person of high moral integrity, and can be trusted to make laws for good governance. It is most unfortunate what we are witnessing now.
After the statement by the governor of the Central Bank, we got to learn more about the federal lawmakers. They know what is exactly due to them, but yet they decided to allocate to themselves that huge amount of money. How can a member of the House of Representatives earn, according to the revelations, a staggering N10 million a month, whereas our national minimum wage, for which the citizens of this country are fighting for, is N18,000 per month. The ordinary man on the street goes to same market with the federal lawmakers, ministers, Permanent Secretaries and people in the executive arm of government. The ordinary workers are subjected to a minimum wage of N18,000 as the federal lawmakers claim that there is no money. And yet, the national economy is subjected to catering for the federal lawmaker and coughing N10 million a month for him and his family. It is very unfortunate. Are members of the National Assembly not asking themselves if they are actually representing the ordinary Nigerians who are now demanding for that N18,000? Are these the same people that elected them into the parliament? They claim that it is too much, and it is too much for the economy to sustain but with their monthly salaries, many of them can keep afloat some ministries or small organisations. It is sad. In other countries, they would have been forced to pay that money back.
Is this a policy of the ruling party, which is also the dominant party in the National Assembly?
The PDP has disgraced itself by not issuing a statement to condemn the excesses of the legislators. If there were discipline in the PDP, the party should have demanded that its members in the National Assembly, who have been collecting that kind of money, should return the monies to the treasury. Senators and members of House of Representatives should refund all the monies they have illegally collected as salary. It amounts to actual looting of the national treasury; we cannot condone that. The PDP would have gone on to say that any member who fails to return the money should be denied the party’s ticket. But the party has not said anything as strong as that. This means that the party condones this kind of corruption while at the same time they will tell us that they want to fight corruption. How can they fight corruption? Another sad aspect is that even the other parties, the opposition parties have not shown the courage to strongly condemn this kind of thing. They can say that this kind of thing cannot be allowed. It is sad for Nigeria; it is very unfortunate. I still condemn the PDP as a party because it has not come out to clarify this situation and for the governor of the Central Bank, I can only say in my humble way that I will keep praying for him and I hope some young Nigerians with a great vision who love their country would have the same courage in their respective position wherever they find themselves to emulate the CBN governor, Lamido Sanusi.
What are your expectations from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on the 2011 elections?
In the first place, there is a lot of confusion, which is beyond my comprehension. And if the political parties, especially the PDP, are not able to put their acts together, then we should forget the 2011 general elections. I don’t see the possibility of conducting an election under this kind of confusion. The chairman of INEC Prof. Attahiru Jega is a very decent person, but Jega cannot work without cooperation from the political parties, and the parties must discipline their members to believe in internal democracy. If they believe in democracy, the exercise will be very peaceful. But because we don’t believe in democracy, that is why we have this level of confusion. And that is why the members of the National Assembly would want to be automatic members of the NEC of their parties, because the easiest way of making money in this country is to go into politics. They all can just sit down and allocate to themselves the kind of salary that they like, and after that, they want to remain there perpetually. At this point, it is no more democracy; it has become an institution where they can do whatever they want.
Why have you remained in the PDP after remaining one of its most astute critics at the risk of being punished for anti party activities?
Maybe it is the benefit for some of us who have the opportunity to have gone to Europe and seen how they play politics. In Britain, they have one parliamentarian; he is a Labour MP, but he maintains his independent views about his role in the party. Even when he became a minister, sometimes whenever he is talking, the Prime Minister would tell him, ‘you are talking like a leader of opposition’ but he was a minister in the Labour government.
I am not in politics for my personal interests or gains. I am in politics for the larger interest of our people, Nigerians. God has given me the opportunity and the courage to speak my mind; I am an independent person when it comes to making my humble contribution in politics. Nigeria is a great country, and I am lucky to be a Nigerian; I love my country, and I have to air my views, as strongly as I can articulate them and because our founding leaders left good legacies for us, we have to follow their footsteps. They were honest, upright and were not in politics to make money, but they were in politics to serve. No one talks about money if one is discussing with my mentor, Mallam Aminu Kano. That is the legacy he left; he was a very independent, upright person, so it is always my dream to be like him.
Source:http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/
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