The former spokesperson for the Atiku Abubakar Presidential Campaign Organisation and national chairmanship aspirant of the Peoples Democratic Party, Segun Showunmi speaks to OLUFEMI ADEDIRAN about the significance of the visit of Atiku to former President Muhammadu Buhari in Daura, Katsina State, among other issues
Some people have said the visit of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and other Peoples Democratic Party chieftains to former President Muhammadu Buhari was part of the ploy of the North to get power back in 2027. What is your opinion about this?
There is no way you will describe the Federal Republic of Nigeria – the leadership, political, and governance structure of this country, including even the popularity that you will not identify former President Muhammadu Buhari as one of the territorial commanders of this country. So, if people visit him, that visit is appropriate; that visit is merited. Most leaders in the nation speak too frequently, but President Muhammadu Buhari has mastered the art of speaking sparingly. When you have done all the things he has done, seen all the things he has seen and you are still able to talk sparingly, then the words have very significant weight.
Therefore, if anybody wants to plan the future of this country, and it considers it the right thing to do; to go and pay homage, to consult, to seek his opinion, visit and check on his welfare, I will consider the person wise. It is the nature of thinkers to reflect deeply above the decibels of the noise around them so that they either hear clearly or see clearly. I think what Atiku Abubakar has done with Buhari is good.
I congratulate Atiku for going to visit his elder brother. Our leaders are sometimes victimised by their followers. Our expectations and our arguments can sometimes be a burden for our leaders, and that burden is sometimes heavy; it sometimes hamstrings them and prevents them from moving. So, I’m happy that Atiku was able to rise above the kind of opinions that society will normally hold because they don’t belong to the same political party, but anybody who wants to be president must desire to be the president of the entire Nigeria, and not just president of his household or his tribe or his political party.
Do you think that northern politicians are preparing to unseat Tinubu in 2027?
What I know for a fact is that anybody who loves Nigeria will think very deeply about the present circumstance Nigeria is in and what should be the way out even for the future. Buhari is not a conspirator; that is not in his nature. He doesn’t join people in conspiring, to be planning against people. That is not him. He is as straightforward as a knife. So, if anybody is going to him looking for a conspiracy, the person may be disappointed.
The reason is that I have a feeling that Buhari may have no choice but to return the favour that President Bola Tinubu did to him in 2019. In the build-up to 2015, all the leaders were on the same page with Bola Tinubu and Buhari, to make Buhari President at that time. By 2019, all of them had left that agenda, they had gone on to the PDP agenda, Bola Tinubu did not move, even when President Buhari was a little bit ill, and people felt it was a good time for people to dump him, but Tinubu did not move. He stood by him (Buhari) to help him achieve 2019.
Without prejudice, I know Buhari very well, and that is going to be weighing very heavily on his mind. Will it now be time for him to stand by Bola Tinubu or will he dump him? I know that at the back of Buhari’s mind, he will consider what is in the best interest of Nigeria. I don’t want anybody to link any politics to this visit, and I don’t want anybody to imagine that there is any crisis between Buhari and President Bola Tinubu, but I also don’t want anybody, especially President Bola Tinubu, to sit in the Villa with his friends and be making unrealistic assumptions as to how 2027 will look like.
If they have done well with the economy, the Nigerian people will tell them; if they have done well with insecurity, the Nigerian people will tell them. If they have done well with inflation, the Nigerian people will tell them. If they have done well with the cost of living, the Nigerian people will tell them. If they have done well with poverty alleviation, the Nigerian people will tell them. If they have done well with debt in the country, the Nigerian people will tell them, and in any case, what the future holds is in the hands of God, but if you underrate the influence of Muhammadu Buhari in the rural North, especially, in the rural North-West, you are a joker.
Going by the policies of President Bola Tinubu’s government, will you say he is the best option for Nigeria?
The problem with Tinubu is that you can see whatever he is trying to do, but the major challenge he has is the composition of his cabinet. Any leader who wants to rule a nation like ours and bring on board a cabinet that is not balanced is going to find out that such a cabinet is what is going to ensure that a large number of people do not connect with his government. The business of ministers is to be the ambassadors of the cabinet everywhere, including where they operate.
But when you set up a cabinet that is not balanced, what you are going to have is that in areas where people should be feeling you, feeling your policies, feeling your goodwill, they will not have people that they can reach or they can touch. This administration has devalued the currency so much that their previous savings have been destroyed. For example, when a man keeps maybe N1m in his account believing that he has $10,000 and suddenly his N1m now amounts to little or nothing, do you know what you have done to him?
Tinubu’s government has very little empathy for the people. Any government that does not have empathy is the only government that can be sitting down for more than one year and has not increased workers’ salaries, knowing full well that you have impacted them with inflation, you have impacted them with the cost of transportation, you have impacted them with the cost of fuel, and you have impacted them with currency devaluation. If you did all that to them if you had empathy, you don’t need one year before you come up with something to ameliorate a bit, but one year has passed, and we are still talking about it.
These days we see governors abandoning their states and frequently going to Abuja to either see the President or to other places that have nothing to do with the growth of their states. What do you think about this?
We all collectively made governance to become so worthless; we must find a way to take governance back to being a serious business. When we make governance a serious business, you will see that the governors will sit down and administer their domains well because they will understand that they have to be around and available for their people. Governors are on sabbatical in Nigeria and it is because there are no consequences. The fundamentals of our economy and the challenges of our people do not give room for governors to be playing about; they are having it too easy.
The PDP has been plagued by a protracted crisis, leading to its losing elections. Do you agree with some people who believe that the party is cursed?
I think that the party is not cursed; I think that it is a question of people understanding that the PDP is the only democratic party in the country. A democratic party will have this type of issues they are dealing with. There will be freedom of speech, freedom of agitation, there will be freedom of expression, but you will also notice that there is a firm measured step that the authority takes.
The Peoples Democratic Party, the present National Working Committee is still very firmly in charge of the party. All the important steps that they have to take, like they have to hold congresses, they will do so. All the extant laws of how they have to announce and advertise, they will do it. In any organisation in the world, it is only the rules that they can apply. Once they are applying the rules and they are not breaking the rules, I don’t have any problem with them, because they were legitimately put in place to serve.
In 2023, some governors on the platform of the PDP worked against the party’s presidential candidate and no punitive action has been taken against them. Don’t you think this may repeat itself in 2027?
You know that 2023 did not just start in 2023. The year 2023 started before 2015. In the build-up to 2015, this was how five people and some others gathered to go and use themselves to support the presidency of the APC and Muhammadu Bihari; they called themselves the nPDP (New Peoples Democratic Party) then. Now, by 2023, this was how some other people too decided that they were going to support the presidency of Bola Tinubu; they called themselves G-5. I’m praying to God that even if it is karma, let that karma end in 2023 because assuming 2023 was payback time, are you people going to use 2027 for another repeat of payback time?
I have asked them to let me be the national chairman of this party because I understand the fundamental issues; I know the players and they also know me. I have been very consistent in trying to tell them that a political party must reform itself from the inside. For you to reform a political party, you will reform it from the inside, and reforming does not mean you are trying to influence who will be the leader or not.
Reforming the party means that you are instilling a new change of way of doing things, telling everybody in the society that something different is happening here. That is the kind of deep cleaning that the PDP needs to be able to get to where we want to take it to.
Do you support the creation of state police?
The complication of a state police system is that the arguments are mainly pigeonholed in two locations. Those of us who believe that Nigeria is due and ripe for state police believe so because you cannot have an excuse while people are dying and your excuse will be that you are afraid of what the governors will do with new authority. It is in the implementation and the way the Act will be written and the kind of things that they will be allowed that will determine whether anybody can abuse anything.
If you are not afraid of governors abusing money that you are giving them; you are not afraid of governors interfering with local government funds, is it the thing that will now allow the governors to do the work that they are meant to do that you will be afraid of? So, I do not share that view, the advantages of having state police far outweigh the disadvantages.
One of the advantages is that you can recruit your police from within, which means that they will know the terrain, which will then mean that they will be protecting their brothers and sisters, which will then mean that what you have written in the constitution as the responsibility of the governor – protection of lives and property, we have given them the instrument to do that. To think that you can do a central command in Abuja that will help you to look at community police and all the other variants is absolute nonsense.
The Chairman of the PDP in Ogun State, Sikirulaih Ogundele, recently blamed the governorship candidate of the party, Ladi Adebutu, for the party’s loss in 2023. Do you also agree with this?
Those who know too much tend to see things from a different perspective from those of us who know very little. From the little that I know, Ladi Adebutu and PDP performed very well in the last election. Adebutu demonstrated his ability to be elected in the last election, even if we did not honour and regard him before. We did more than enough in the last election to honour and regard him.
I think the position of the chairman of the party, Sikiruliah Ogundele that the party should be more liberal and accessible is that he is just waking up to his responsibilities. Had he been alive to his responsibilities, he would not have been saying what he is saying now, because there is no part in our constitution that says that a big man, a financier, a candidate will override the extant law of the party.
