The spokesman for the Northern Elders’ Forum (NEF), Prof. Ango Abdullahi, believes that whether or not President Muhammadu Buhari returns to office after his medical vacation, the presidency must remain in the North in 2019.The former Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, speaks on power sharing in Nigeria in this interview with IBRAHEEM MUSA
The All Progressives Congress (APC)- led administration at the federal level will soon be two years in office and the Northern Elders’ Forum (NEF) played a very significant role in bringing this government to power. In your assessment of this government, was your expectation about this administration misplaced?
Well, this is a very tricky question. First, it is open to debate, particularly if you consider that there are people in the party called APC, who believe that it was entirely their own solo efforts that brought about their victory in the last election.
They never understood or believed that other people played roles, in some cases, more significant than the so-called party members, in bringing about their success in the 2015 elections.
The position that we took in the Northern Elders Forum was very clear; that the North has been cheated in the last 15 years, since the emergence of the so-called civilian regime.
And all the things that have successively followed, kept pointing in the direction that the North was being marginalised in so many ways.
And to a large extent, we saw that that trend was likely to continue, and that was why we set up ourselves into a very formidable, active, political group with the sole purpose of ensuring that northern interests, wherever they are, are protected.
That was how we came to the scene and took the position, particularly when we saw that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stacked everything they did against the interest of the North.
It did so particularly in the area of power sharing and it wanted to continue in that direction.
That was why we really stood up and fought against their intentions and with the will of God and the wishes of the people of this country, we succeeded.
What some of the people, who perhaps think that it is their efforts, or it was Buhari’s efforts alone that brought about APC’s victory ought to remember is that Buhari had been seeking to be president for 12 years but failed.
So, what happened this time? These are the things that we are saying that happened. Some people, who might not necessarily be card carrying members of APC and so on, were behind the efforts that eventually dislodged the government of PDP, not only at the federal level, but in most states of the federation.
But some people are saying that even this government has not really treated northerners fairly. For example, its policy on importation of used cars has affected the source of the livelihood of most northerners…
Well, you asked whether our optimism was misplaced in terms of what we were expecting from this administration.
To be fair and to be truly honest, I will say that yes, our expectations have been far above what we saw on ground. Meaning that what we expected from this government in terms of equity and justice to the North have not materialised up till now.
Will the Northern Elders’ Forum still support APC or Buhari in 2019?
Those of you who have been following my interviews, speaking for Northern Elders Forum in the last five years or so, each time I was asked: ‘Which party do you belong to?’ I used to tell people that we have no party.
Our party is the North. When I was asked, who our candidate was, I said we had no candidate. I used to say that the only candidate that we will support will be a candidate of northern extraction by any party.
Any party that presents a candidate of northern extraction will be our candidate. It happened at the time that the PDP swore that Goodluck Jonathan was its candidate.
And the only party that was around to give us a candidate of northern extraction happened to be APC. We didn’t have to be members of APC to support that candidate.
But given the caliber of members of your forum, why are you not insisting on merit instead of just regional consideration in supporting a presidential candidate?
We will support a northerner and in this particular case, you have to follow the argument that led us to that position. I was one of the 10 people who signed on the dotted lines for the formation of PDP. Others were Abubakar Rimi and Solomon Lar. We were at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) together for us to sign for the existence of a party called PDP.
I was also an active participant in the drafting of the party’s constitution. And the party’s constitution was very clear; that there will be power sharing between northern and southern Nigeria.
At the beginning, it was argued who was going to start and eventually we conceded that the South should start. This was what brought about Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s first four years and then another four years; eight years. So, the logic there was that yes, the South had run eight years of governance and the North will take at least the same number of years. As you could remember, Obasanjo even tried to manipulate the constitution, for him to go beyond the eight years.
We had to fight against that for him to drop the idea.
And when he eventually decided that a northerner will replace him, he was the one who single-handedly, picked Umaru Yar’adua, but he spent only three years and died. So, on the basis of power sharing, in terms of time, we spent three years out of the eight that we were entitled to.
So, commonsense would have dictated that the PDP would ask who is going to be next on the line from the northern part of the country to at least run the next tenure of four years as one year had been lost to the vice president under the constitution, but they did not.
The party, including Obasanjo turned its back on something that everybody knew was true. Shamelessly, Obasanjo denied that there was no such agreement. While we see this as the fault of PDP as a party, most of the fault laid with the northern governors at the time.
They ought to have defended the interest of their people, but they did not.
They sold out for Jonathan to continue after Yar’adua died. He spent a year as president and completed the term and in 2011, he was supposed to give way for a northern candidate, they didn’t work for that. Instead, they supported him to run for another term and this was against the interest of the North. And what happened again, after even that one, these people had the guts to face the North and tell us that Jonathan will run for election in 2015.
This was what infuriated some of us. We decided to fight tooth and nail to make sure that this didn’t happen. So, it wasn’t on the basis of either believing in a party or an individual candidate, but believing that the North should have fair treatment and whoever that northerner is, would have had our backing, whether he was coming from Benue or Sokoto or wherever. It happened that it was Buhari, who got the ticket to run under the auspices of APC.
The APC is not necessarily our party, it is just that they provided the kind of material that we thought we should support.
The President is presently on medical vacation; what will the North do should he fail to return to his position on medical ground?
The first consideration is that the North will abide by the rule of law; the rule of law here means the constitution of the republic. The constitutional provision says that in the event that the president dies in office or becomes incapacitated for one reason or the other and cannot perform the duties of his office, he will be succeeded by the vice president.
In this case, we don’t know where God keeps the life of anyone of us. We agree that President Buhari is sick and seeking medical attention, but no one is in a position to say at what point he is going to recover fully and come back to office.
If the worst case scenario happens, and Buhari is not back on seat, the constitution is very clear that the vice president takes over.
And what we then expect is that he will take that tenure to its logical end and from there, the politics of power sharing will take precedence over anything else.
Are you saying that the politics of power sharing will take precedence over even the constitution?
No! The constitution does not say that in 2019, Ango Abdullahi cannot contest for president or you cannot contest. Anybody can contest. The point I am making about power sharing is that: Was the North fairly treated, if in 2011, someone insisted on running for president in spite of the power sharing agreement? The North was not fairly treated. If the unexpected happens, we will be back to our position that the North should be treated equitably and fairly and we expect that another northern candidate will emerge as presidential candidate on the platform of APC.
Are you expecting this to just happen or you are working on a Plan B, should the unexpected happen?
I gave an interview a few days ago about those who are wishing Buhari dead. If some people will start rushing with their CVs and seeking to be Vice Presidents, they are the ones who are wishing Buhari dead. I’m not one of those people. But, what I am saying is that we are waiting for God’s wish to take its course but our preference is that Buhari should get well and resume work. This is our first wish. If on the other hand, our first wish is not granted by the Almighty God, then we will rely on the rule of law as provided in the constitution up to 2019, then politics resumes afresh.
Can you mention the names of some of those angling to become vice president?
You are a journalist and part of your profession is investigation. Go and do some investigative journalism and you will be able to fish out some of those, who are rushing to submit CVs for the position of vice president.
Are they serving governors, ministers or members of the so-called cabal?
Go and find out as a journalist. I will not be your source of information in this case.
Another northern elder statesman has tackled you on this…
Who is that?
Alhaji Tanko Yakasai warned Acting President Yemi Osinbajo to be wary of people like you and others in the Northern Elders Forum…
I accept that Tanko Yakasai is an old man but old men don’t necessarily become elders. There is a difference between an elder statesman and an old man.
Let’s leave the semantics. Yakasai said that Acting President Osinbajo should be careful with the antics of the Northern Elders Forum…
The point that Tanko Yakasai is making is simply that Northern Elders Forum defeated Northern Elders Council (NEC). Northern Elders Council was set up by the Jonathan administration with the special encouragement by then Vice President Namadi Sambo.
Their job was to do the dirty job of the re-election of Jonathan and we defeated them.
That is why they are still very angry. If anybody who thinks otherwise, the facts are very clear that Tanko Yakasai and his group worked for the re-election of Jonathan and I thought I saw his name amongst those people who collected money from the arms fund.
And those were the people who shared money to make sure that Jonathan was re-elected.
Up till now, some of these monies are being discovered in houses and so on. So, if he is warning whoever is going to take charge in the absence of Buhari, he is just recalling his experience with Northern Elder Forum, when they tried to shortchange the people of Northern Nigeria.
But Yakasai said that the money that was given to him was to sensitise traditional rulers in order to ensure a peaceful election and not to campaign for Jonathan…
I am a traditional ruler and I didn’t see him in my house. I am a traditional ruler with people behind me and if traditional rulers were to share what Tanko Yakasai collected, I should have been one of them. But if he has any evidence that he has been at my doorstep to drop money given to him, then he is welcome to say when and where.
Given the uncertainty over the president’s health, do northerners trust the Acting President to be fair to them?
We trust the law and the supreme law of this country is the constitution. And one will expect whoever sits there, at the apex of executive governance, should pay particular attention to what the constitution says in terms of his duties and treatment of different parts of the country.
Whatever the case maybe, he would be judged by whether he has done what is expected of him or not. For example, when Buhari came on board, although I am not privy to his administration, I am not one of his advisers or anything, but you could hear the noise that was made about his skewed appointments in favour of the North.
They forgot that only a few months earlier, check the list of all executive appointments in this country, 95 per cent of appointments in the public service excluded northerners.
Nobody remembered that. But when just two northerners are appointed, people will start shouting marginalisation and skewed appointments. You can see the bias and blackmail in newspaper reports and comments.
And we are saying that we are not satisfied with what Buhari has done in terms of equity and justice for the North.
We are still being cheated in spite of the fact that we have a president of northern extraction.
For example, if you look at both the 2016 and 2017 budgets, if you combine capital and recurrent expenditures for both years, the North took roughly 30 per cent despite the fact that everybody knows that even if it is by one per cent, the North is more populated than the South. Even in terms of land mass, the North constitutes 75 per cent of the land mass of this country.
And land mass determines how much a project will cost.
Projects that have been on ground, which are very crucial to the North have been abandoned. Take for example the Mambila Power Project, the dredging of River Niger, the Ajaokuta Steel and so on.
Of course you can also blame past northern leaders, who were in power when these projects were just brushed aside.
When the railway line that we have are not working, they are saying that a new one should be built from Calabar to Lagos, when the Kano-Lagos one is not working and the Port Harcourt- Maiduguri one is also not working.
Of course, he handed over these key ministries to non northerners and they don’t feel shy of looking after themselves first before the North, even if it is on second thoughts.
What manner of man is Osinbajo?
I don’t know him.
Can you trust him?
I don’t know him, so I cannot take a position on whether I should trust him or not.
What of from what you hear?
I am not a hearsay man, I want to see things for myself.
