A former Political Adviser to ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, Akin Osuntokun, in this interview with FRIDAY OLOKOR, says President Muhammadu Buhari will be more vindictive if he is re-elected. Excerpts:
On Saturday, Nigeria will go to the polls once again to elect a president. What are your fears about the elections?
My fear is the incumbent President(Muhammadu Buhari) and his associates. They will be desperate and panicky. The most significant revelation in that respect is the statement by Kaduna State Governor, (Ahmad Nasir el-Rufai) about the international community. That is a very volatile statement and what it implies is very grievous. They are not preparing for the other outcome. The more the option of losing gets real, the more panicky and desperate they get. It looks like an element of going for broke. When you put yourself in a position in which you are prepared to become a pariah in the international community, that is an indication of desperation and a desperate person is a dangerous person.
It is very tragic to think that is the exact opposite of what his predecessor, (Goodluck) Jonathan did, when he elevated himself and showed him (Buhari) the best standards of democracy. He called his opponent before even all the results were released. We cannot over-emphasise what President Jonathan did in 2015. He stabilised a potentially very volatile political environment. It brought calm to the country. It gave the incoming government a stable and solid base to apply themselves to governance and what have they made of themselves? They have proved themselves unworthy of that kind of gesture and spent most of their time in escapism and criminalising Jonathan in all imaginable ways.
I am not aware of many projects that this President has inaugurated, but there are three that stand out; the development at the Abuja Airport and the Port Harcourt Airport and the Abuja-Kaduna rail. These were projects that Jonathan paid for before he left, and yet this President has the effrontery to tell you that ‘they were just stealing money, they didn’t do anything,’ In all indices of assessment, this present government has taken Nigeria backward in almost all areas: economic regression, corruption as rated by all credible international organisations, insecurity localised in the North-East but which has spread to Kaduna and Katsina to the point of the governor of Katsina State crying out that he can no longer even guarantee the safety of the Government House.
Are you expecting a repeat of 1984?
That was military dictatorship. Up till 1998 when Gen. Sani Abacha died, the politics and Presidency of Nigeria was like a plain yard of the North. The hegemony they had exerted was reinforced in 1966. Don’t forget they wanted to secede but they didn’t.
The so-called northern hegemony of civilians and the military said that they were going to remain in Nigeria on their own terms and their terms of permanent domination. We will be unfair if we are attributing the shortcomings of Buhari to the North. From my own random investigation, I am sure that the majority of the northern elites are not really with him. There is something like mob democracy, so he is able now to appeal to the base sentiments of the northern masses, ‘that is our leader, this is the man, we versus them’; so, once he attains the leadership of that kind of chauvinistic ethnic base, the other leaders are being put on the spot. If you now come out to criticise them, they will accuse you of being a sellout or a traitor. You shouldn’t mistake the silence of many of these people as consent or collaboration with Buhari in whatever agenda he is prosecuting. President Buhari and the so-called cabal, have not demonstrated what I will call enlightened self- interest. They are prone to internal squabbles. The Director-General of the DSS and the EFCC chairman work directly with the President. This President kept on nominating Ibrahim Magu to the Senate for confirmation; the DG of the DSS under him was the one providing evidence why he should not be confirmed. So again this is a kind of dysfunctional administration that you have. Your own the DG of the DSS, answerable to you, goes to the Senate to provide an evidence to propose that the person you, his principal, has nominated should not be honoured. So we are going to have more of this. There is a lot of this in the way they treat Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo like a glorified houseboy.
Punch
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