Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain and former Transport Minister Hon. Ibrahim Isah Bio contested for the governorship in Kwara State in 2011. He spoke with EMMANUEL OLADESU on the crisis in the party and how it has affected the Kwara Chapter
Senator Bukola Saraki is the leader of the aggrieved members of the Peoples Democratic Party. Are you with him in that boat?
I am not with him and I am not going to be with the new PDP. I belong to the PDP and I don’t believe in the struggle or the ideals of the new PDP. I’m an ardent follower of Dr. Abubakar Olusola Saraki, the great Waziri of Ilorin, and for the last 20 years, I have been very close to Baba Saraki (may his soul rest in peace). I believe in his leadership because it is genuine and transparent. You could see the zeal in what he was doing and you could see him being a good philanthropist, kind and focused.
By 1998, I was one of the people liaising for Kwara State for those people who wanted to be in the PDP. But shortly after, I was almost neck deep in the PDP when we realised that Baba Saraki was going to join All Peoples Party (APP). So, most of us left the PDP and followed him to the APP. Unfortunately, in 1999, they denied him the presidential ticket in Kaduna and gave it to Ogbonnaya Onu, if you can recall, and it metamorphosed to Chief Olu Falae/ Shinkafi ticket. But Baba Saraki did not revolt in Kaduna. He pleaded with us to stay calm rather than being violent. He left in the night to avoid violence. These are good qualities of a leader. In politics, you don’t win all the time. You lose some time and at other times you gain. That is the kind of philosophy I believe and agree with.
But the present leadership of Bukola Saraki that we have is about the politics of elimination, politics of coercion and politics of me first before others. It’s no more politics of carrying people along.
Are you faulting the style of the new PDP?
When they came up with the issue of the new PDP, I believed it was ill-timed, ill-conceived and very selfish. In every organisation, there are supposed to be grievances and misunderstanding; there are supposed to be some sort of disaffection. But you don’t tear an organisation because you are not getting your issues addressed. There are structured ways of addressing grievances in any organisation, including your house. If your child is aggrieved, he will go and tell his mother that Daddy didn’t pay my school fees or Daddy didn’t do my shoe, not that the boy will just get rid of you. I think they have taken are wrong because there are better ways they could have expressed their grievances and they could have been heard.
Again, those people that are complaining, most of them have presidential ambitions. I know the governor of Niger State, Babangida Aliyu, has a presidential ambition. It is not a secret that Sule Lamido has presidential ambition. It is not a secret that Dr. Bukola Saraki has presidential ambition; neither is it a secret that Rabiu Kwankwaso has a presidential ambition and they believe the best way to go about this is to, first of all, get rid of President Goodluck Jonathan ,who is the current President, and the coast will be clear for them.
If you want the party to survive and you want the Presidency to be honoured as the highest authority in the country, then, people should respect that office and negotiate. But in any case, whether we like it or not, President Jonathan is already there. 2015 is the hand of God. Who knows who will be alive in 2015? Who knows what will happen in 2015? You sit down with him and say Mr. President; you have already gone more than half way. If the constitution allows you to go for a second term, so be it; then, we can renegotiate. After the Southsouth has gone, let it come back to the North. But for people to say they must tear the party or disgrace the President, I don’t buy it and I don’t believe it’s the right thing to do. I don’t think I should belong to that kind of arrangement. Even, in the school, there are ways of addressing grievances. In your family, there are ways of addressing grievances. The same goes for a political organisation.
You were a close ally of late Olusola Saraki and Governor Bukola Saraki. Did he not take you into confidence on the agitations?
Regrettably, I don’t think Bukola Saraki trusts me as much as Baba Saraki did. I have personal issues, which I’m not ready to discuss at this moment because I’ve followed Bukola Saraki and I’ve come to a conclusion that this is a man who does not trust me the way Baba trusted me. I tried to belong, but invariably, I found out that I wasn’t fitting into his system. So, I stayed back. For instance, way back in 2003, I was in the House of Reps when Baba Saraki said I should leave the House of Reps. He initially promised that I was going to the Senate. But later he said, please, can you come back to serve the people because I don’t want the kind of political infringement I had with late Lawal. That is why people unanimously agreed that Dr. Saraki should bring Bukola on board to be the next Governor so that he wouldn’t have crisis with any other Governor and he said he wanted somebody with experience and whom he trusts to come and handle the House of Assembly and I accepted. I left the House of Reps and became the Speaker of Kwara Assembly for six years. But the same Baba who told me that if by the grace of God governorship comes to my area, he was grooming me up later said he needed to give me national exposure. That was why he asked me to be Minister. Before the 2011 election, I sat down together with Bukola and I said, can I put in, if it is the wish of God to succeed you. He said go ahead. I bought the form. But later, Bukola Saraki denied that he ever asked me to buy the form.
I left, flagged off my campaign and I asked all Kwarans to elect me as governor. It was the mother of all campaigns, only for Bukola Saraki to call me around 2.00 am on the night of the primaries and said he had decided to zone to Kwara South and give it to Abdufattah Ahmed. I took it with faith. After all, it’s not everything that one wishes that one would get. But while I expected Bukola to have called me and said okay, it’s not everything you look for that you get, and sooth the balm of all the injuries he has caused me, he continued to treat me like a cancerous part of the body.
Apart from that, he promised to refund my campaign money. But up till today, he has not and it has been very well known in Kwara State that anybody close to me in Kwara has never been given any appointment, whether as SA or even a Commissioner or an Assistant. Even, the ward chairman in my place, anybody close to me, they make sure he is eliminated. So, I decided that let me stay aloof and watch. So, that is the difference between’s Baba’s leadership and Dr Bukola Saraki. Bukola Saraki’s leadership is the leadership of annihilation; break them and extinct them. If Baba offends you, he will call you and one way or the other sooth you and make you feel that you are important and you go ahead fighting a common cause for the party.
If the Baraje faction leaves the PDP, do you think it will spell doom for the party?
Let me confess to you that the loyalty Baba Saraki commanded for 42 years, I don’t think Bukola Saraki has the capacity and wherewithal to command that kind of loyalty and support of the people. Well meaning people, well meaning Kwarans and well meaning politicians are not happy with the events in Kwara. For some of us, we just stayed aside and said let’s watch. For instance, look at thelocal government election that took place in Offa. Everybody saw it and it is still in the internet. The APC had about 11,000 votes and PDP had about 4,000 votes. Then, they went and changed it overnight and announced the PDP with 25,000 and made the APC 20,000 votes. That’s not the quality of good leadership and that is not a democratic culture in the state. People are aggrieved and people are not happy with that kind of thing. The last local government election that took place sometimes on the 26th of October was a kangaroo election where they bought the SDP and one party called Labour Party and no other party had a candidate in the whole of the 15 Local Governments in the State, either as a Councilor or a Chairman. The beauty of democracy is let the people have their say, and then the majority will have their way. But when you cajole the people, you oppress the people and you use state machinery and you think you are a good leader that people will follow, you just watch and see. People are fed up with the kind of system we are practicing. I believe PDP is the party that everybody wants to follow.
The major grievance of the ‘G-7 Governors’ of the PDP is that there was a certain agreement with President Jonathan not to re-contest. Are you are aware of such agreement?
The way the seven governors are going, if there was actually a written agreement, they would have published it by now. Commonsense would have prevailed on them by now to produce that agreement to the press and to Nigerians.
One of the issues that the G-7 Governors are talking about is power shift to the North. Should power shift to the North in 2015?
Power shift or party arrangement or zoning arrangement, either agreement with Jonathan, those are based on moral understanding and political ethics. But the issue of legality and constitutional power to contest, nobody can take that one from you. The only person who can say okay power should shift to the North is, if Jonathan is not interested. But if he is interested, he has the rights and the Constitution says he should contest, if he so desires. So, the issue of power shift, zoning and rotation doesn’t arise, unless we remove the legal issue. But when the man says he is interested, it has overridden every other thing.
it is the main thing that the President is trying to fix and I admire it a lot.
One of the reasons Nigerians are against Jonathan’s President is the issue of insecurity. Secondly, is the issue of corruption. I remember there was a time he said some Directors in Abuja have more houses than Dangote. People are worried that not much is being done to curtail this. You have seen the man accused of pension scam. The man is still hiding and the police have been unable to arrest him, even after declaring him wanted?
Let me talk on security first. Security issue is a very complex issue. For instance, who would have believed that the al-Quaida that Bin Laden started will now come and engulf the whole world today. Bin Laden is long gone, but we still have elements of Al-Quaida which had metamorphosed into Boko Haram, Taliban and all sorts of things. The security challenge we have with Boko Haram in the North-Eastern part of the country, I think the President has tried to address the issue as a human being who does not have the monopoly of wisdom. First of all, he opened the window for dialogue and called all of the Boko Haram members to put down their arms, just the way they handled the Niger Delta issue and that they will give them amnesty. That is a leadership that wants to resolve an issue. That is dangling the carrot. Then he set up a Committee led by Hon. Minister of Special Duties, Barrister Turaki to go round the whole place and try to get the Boko Haram to come to dialogue. That is an attempt. Then when all those ones failed, he imposed curfew, declared state of emergency and then the soldiers have been asked to address the insecurity which is on-going.
You can agree with me that since the last five or six months, we’ve been sleeping well in Abuja. There is relative calm in Kaduna now and there is relative calm in Kano as well. In the past, we were not even safe in Abuja. We had at least three attacks. A military barrack was attacked, the Police Force Headquarters was attacked and the UN was attacked. Thisday was attacked in Abuja. But within the last six months, I don’t think Boko Haram has been able to attack Abuja and Kaduna. So, these are the progress being made in my own assessment. You can see America using Drones to kill Taliban daily. But it has not come to that level in Nigeria. Even the people in the North have come to agree that these things are no more religious issues. I don’t believe a Muslim will slaughter another human being like a ram and be happy. I believe that there are more undertones, which is predominantly the issue of unemployment and people have been left aggrieved for long. They say an idle man is a devil’s workshop. They didn’t emanate or start with Jonathan. They are things that have been there over the years and apparently we are seeing the overflow now and he is doing his best in addressing them.
The issue of corruption, you will agree with me that corruption has become so endemic in Nigeria. It has almost become our way of life. In our individual homes, we all witness corruption. If you send your brother to go and buy petrol, seven of them will buy petrol of N7,000 and tell you it is N10,000. If care is not taken, you go to school, you find teachers probating marks and sleeping with students and students ready to buy ties and shirts for lecturers just to get marks. Corruption is not only in government. Corruption has eaten deep down in the fabrics of our moral existence in this country and it is going to take a long time. I believe the religious leaders must intervene from the mosques and the churches for people to develop moral righteousness. It’s not an issue of carrot and stick that will address Nigeria’s corruption because it has gone deeper than that. It’s not just the ones you see in government because there is corruption everywhere. Today for instance, I came back from Lagos and by the time you come down, somebody who opened the booth for you is expecting you to give him gratification. By the time somebody weighs your clothes and luggage, he is expecting you to give him gratification. So, it has become our way of life. It’s a national malaise and it cuts across even in our homes. If you ask your boy to go and buy you bread, if you have a balance, he will not give you until you ask. It’s a sort of corruption. In as much as I’m not going to hold forth for President because he holds the ace, corruption should be tackled vertically and horizontally and both at government level, religious level, in our homes and at the village level. So, I will ask Mr. President to take a more serious stand against corruption so that he will be adjudged to have done his own bit while in office, just like I’m appealing to all Nigerians to do their own bit both in the house, in the communities, even in the churches and mosques.
ENDS.
