Former presidential candidate and chieftain of the All progressives Congress (APC) Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim reflects on 63 years of independence and how government can tackle the challenges of development with the support of Nigerians. Excerpts by EMMANUEL OLADESU.
Nigeria is 63. What are your reflections?
Before Independence and in the First Republic, political parties and campaigns were based on ideology. Chief Obafemi Awolowo talked about federalism and not rotation of the presidency. Now people do not talk about programmes and values. What they talk about is ‘it’s our turn.’
There should be talks about federalism, not rotation of the presidency because they are not exactly the same. Federalism is about decentralisation of power to the major components of society.
Those components could be Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba, it does not really matter. It’s just a a structural arrangement about balance of power, rotation of presidency or rotation of power is not federalism.
Despite our level of education now we have created a society where every issue has to be looked at from: Is it pro-North or pro-South? Pro-Christian or pro-Muslim?
We have more professors now than we had in 1965 but the people of those eras despite their limited access to education are more forthright, more patriotic and more educated than present day Nigerians in terms of national value.
As a people, we need to reset our thinking. There is no major development in history without a period of ideological preparation on a mass scale.
Before independence, all the papers said the same thing. Whether it was Tribune or Macaulay’s paper or Zik’s paper, although Zik was working with Macaulay; the ideals that were promoted were the same
Even in European history, there was a period of darkness. The period when they were preparing for the industrial revolution was called renaissance.
This should be our period of renaissance where we promote the best in our values and discuss them on a mass scale. This should be a period when we inspire mass consciousness, not the worst in us. Enough of bringing the worst in us to the front burner.
Emotionalism and what is news about us is now driven by the most audacious of evil that lives among us. We need to shift a bit.
That way we can also redefine mass social value and consciousness. The people of Nigeria desperately need to come together. Without this on a mass scale, it will be difficult to have a progressive leadership.
Where and how did Nigeria get it wrong in terms of leadership?
There was a coup, not just a coup but a coup in the government. After the military coup Nigeria started regressing. The tadie of national development was arrested. Since then nothing fundamental has been added.
What is the way forward?
All of us who subscribe to progress must give leadership to whatever community we are in, and drive these values in our communication.
Whether you are an editor or headmaster or a clergyman, you are a leader at your own level. We must take it as a responsibility.
First, there must be a change inside us at those levels to subscribe to higher national values.
Two, we must have electoral reform, leaders should not be chosen by their warchest, and the electoral process must be transparent.
It must not just be free, it must also be fair because that is what is called transparency as prescribed in the constitution of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. Let’s deal with those issues now. and put it behind us so people will know that there is a process that assures a fair competition, and elections will not be like war because if you fail an election in a process that is overwhelmingly not transparent, people will find it easy to come to terms with defeat.
However, when something is shady even if it is fair, there will be a problem because you cannot convince anybody that something hasn’t happened. That is what transparency is all about, it is not a legal issue.
So, we have to deal with electoral reforms so that we don’t extinguish the hope of our young people who really want a better country. These two issues: Definition of electoral values and national reforms are important issues right now.
How do we address the loss of confidence in INEC with youths refusing to be hired as ad-hoc staff for the November 11 Kogi, Bayelsa, and Imo governorship polls?
That is why there is a need to reconstitute INEC. The same INEC cannot get young people to serve as ad-hoc staff. INEC has a lot of work to do. Evil was done in the 2022, 2023 election process. They have done so much violence to this country in that process. They raised the hope of the people, particularly young people who are first time voters, and told them they will do some things but at the end of the day, unapologetically and without any communication, they just discarded everything.
I am not saying that the All Progressives Congress, APC, didn’t win the election. There was a structural problem with the opposition. One of the structural problems is that the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, is divided into three parts. The Labour Party, LP, and Obi were part of it. Musa Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP, was part of it and Atiku’s mainstream PDP emerged.
All those votes were from the same party. You also had about four or five governors who belonged to then Rivers Governor Nyesom Wike’s faction. If you add those factions to the governors who supported Tinubu, you had like 28 governors with resources and all. It is very difficult for 28 governors out of 36 to be supporting somebody and the person will lose.
In fact, the size of votes that those 28 governors produced at the end of the day was less than 40 per cent. As a matter of fact, it is a disappointment because the result didn’t match the level of structural and organisational support.
It shows how unpopular the APC has become. Otherwise if you have 28 governors, you should have a landslide victory. However, it is a measure of how angry Nigerians are with the APC as a party; that is why even with the support of 28 governors, they struggled to have less than 40 per cent of the votes. There was a structural problem with the way the opposition organised itself before the elections.
Origins of PDP
I was there at the foundation of the PDP. I was director at the secretariat with Professor Jerry Gana, who was the National Secretary. We had meetings and nobody was taken for granted.
At the foundation, we had people, like 20 of them, who were qualified to be President. Chief Bola Ige was one of those before he walked out of the initiative and went to start another party.
Chief Ayo Adebanjo was one of the representatives of Afenifere in the meeting we used to have with Professor Jerry Gana in 1998.
We had people like Alhaji Adamu Ciroma, Chief Sunday Awoniyi, Professor Iya Abubakar, Jim Nwobodo, who later came into the scope.
All these people were qualified to be President. There is not a single one of them in terms of their stature, depth, history that you can compare to any presidential material right now.
They were well brought up, they had the CV and you cannot challenge their educational training. You also know the schools they went to and at what time. You knew their political tutelage and under who.
Nevertheless, all of them subsumed their political ambitions and formed one party. After the local government elections on December 5, 1998, the PDP had two-third of the seats in Nigeria as a political association and it wasn’t anybody’s money that led to that.
Most of the rich Abacha politicians were in the All Peoples Party, APP even though Dr Olusola Saraki (Bukola Saraki’s father) could not win convincingly in Kwara, his party had less than 40 per cent of the votes in the local government elections.
The PDP had 33 per cent of the votes. Afenifere or AD had 19 per cent of the votes. I delivered PDP to my local government, and we won our councils.
The PDP was not like an oloye party. All the people who had money were in Abacha’s party, APP then. They had plenty of money and Nigerians disgraced them at the polls. While we (PDP) had two-third, Afenifere won the South-West. That was how this Republic was formed, and I was in the centre of it.
We need to go back to those values, we need consensus views. Like I said, there was a structural problem in the opposition, which made it easy for them to lose but INEC should have neatly done its job by adhering to the guidelines. If they said it would be published, it should have been published. We also don’t need mutilated results.
When it comes to this kind of thing and the emotion is high, it is very difficult to convince anybody that the election wasn’t rigged. Whether the Supreme Court validates the election of our President, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, isn’t the issue. The issue is that confidence should be restored.
Don’t you think the judiciary is complicit in all of these things?
Lawyers and the judiciary adjudicate based on law and evidence. As it is, the law puts a burden on the petitioner who isn’t responsible for the conduct of the election. If the other party (INEC) withholds information and evidence, definitely there will not be any evidence to prove irregularities except the judges decide to go outside the evidence and law. It is always very difficult except in exceptional cases for the one who is declared winner in an election to lose in court. That is why I have said the onus of proof, which is also the recommendation of the Justice Mohammed Uwais report, must be on INEC because they are the custodian of all the evidence in the conduct of election.
INEC should come and justify that it has done it well in accordance with the law. That will be a different jurisprudence. It is very important that we do that reform.
In 1998, we and some members of the civil society gave INEC its name. It was the National Electoral Commission, NECON, before. The position paper which was signed by myself, Pascal Bafyau and Dan Nwanyanwu, which was delivered the night Abacha died was that, the recruitment into INEC should be advertised and the judicial service commission should do the selection.
I still maintain that the president should not be the one constituting the INEC management. The INEC chairman and management should be held responsible for the task as a commission. We asked that INEC money should be by first line charge, they adopted that and INEC has been getting money like that.
They have a lot of money but they are not independent. They are only independent in having money which sometimes cannot be accounted for.
We need to correct all those anomalies and have an efficient, robust and competent INEC that won’t say there is technology failure.
Nigeria is a cyber power. Nigeria has the seventh largest internet users in the world. We have a lot of high level cyber security professionals. My in-law who is from Ekiti but based in Canada is a cyber security expert.
I have some young boys who have worked with me and they are cyber security experts too. We have them all over the world doing very well.
INEC has too much money. When I travelled the last time, I asked one of the guys to give me a paper on some immediate steps for cyber security. In fact, the budget they proposed for the whole Nigeria is less than 1/20 of what INEC was given to conduct the election.
I have the paper with me. There is no excuse for their failure. It was deliberate incompetence. Nobody should have been rewarded for such. Most of the time, there is no punishment for wrongdoing. In recent times, we only reward people who fail and punish those who have integrity. We have to depart from that practice.
