Ahmad Rufai Alkali is the National Chairman of the newly formed New Nigeria Peoples Party. In this interview with BENEDICT NWACHUKWU, the former Presidential Adviser on Political Affairs and one time National Publicity Secretary of the People’s Democratic Party asserts that Nigeria needs a new direction. He argues that the country of today is not the country inherited from the founding fathers. He argues that Nigeria’s problems are peculiar because they are self-made and so need someone who will make her leap forward and not just move forward. Excerpts:
When will the New Nigeria Peoples Party conduct its presidential primaries?
In line with the guidelines of the Independent National Electoral Commission and the Electoral Act and our own constitution, the NNPP is doing everything systematically. We have done the House of Assembly primaries as well as the House of Representatives primaries and we are now getting set for the senate, governorship and presidential primaries which are going to take place on June 8, 2022. We as a party are guided by the law, the constitution and all the essential ingredients required in the issue of primaries. We are aware that Nigerians are not happy, we are aware that Nigerians are disenchanted, and within most of the political parties, there is indeed a consensus that things should not be allowed to continue this way. There is also a consensus that the country is drifting and we should do everything humanly possible to bring back our country, rescue the nation and defend our people. Therefore, we are methodical in what we are doing; we are not flippant and we are not taking Nigerians for granted.
During the sale of forms, we were mindful of the situation on the ground in the country and we did not come out openly to tell Nigerians that the leadership of the nation was for sale to the highest bidder. Whenever we talk about providing a level playing field for political actors, we believe that the best way is to give everybody in the country the opportunity to participate, to be counted and be relevant. This is our country and all of us will benefit if the country is in peace and stability and of course, we will lose if the political class continues in its recklessness, selfishness, and divisiveness and that is what has put us where we are today. So, I can tell you that we are mindful of the pain the people are going through. That is a long time ago, we anticipated that a time would come and some of the leading political parties at that time because of their fixation on power alone would keep on making a series of mistakes. Some of them have made several mistakes and errors of judgment and definitely, we need a new direction.
The NNPP, as you know, is a national movement. It is not a regional party, it’s not an ethnic party and you cannot bring religious sentiments here, nobody will listen to you because we believe that this country deserves the best leadership and every part of this country can produce good leaders, every part of this country can produce people who can run the country. But it is only when you come out to lead that people will begin to analyze and assess you; so for us, we are comfortable with the situation we have on the ground now because we have a leader in the person of Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso who has served as a two-time governor of Kano State, former Minister of Defence, a senator and former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has served in various capacities. He was one of the people who galvanized this movement and today, him along with other colleagues of his and associates nationwide, including me, have become the rallying point to salvage our nation.
“What I know for sure is that Nigerians have made up their minds, they want to move away from where we are, and I want to repeat myself, anybody who says he is happy with what is happening today is either he is not a Nigerian, may not have been living on the surface of earth or a major beneficiary of the crisis”
It is obvious you followed the primaries of the PDP and its outcome, how do you assess that convention and how would the outcome affect the NNPP?
I don’t think it is within my schedule to comment on the convention of another political party because I was not invited to the convention, so I don’t know what issues played out in the background to arrive at the outcome. What is important is that they have produced a person whom they say is their flag bearer, we also are going to produce our own flag bearer so that Nigerians can make their decisions. In fact, Nigerians have made up their minds, it’s a question of time for them to make that all-important statement.
The flag bearer of your party as it were will come from the North West, which zone will the party be looking at to galvanize support for the party?
I am surprised at that question, why are we always talking of someone coming from the North or the East or the West. If you look at the person coming, he is a Nigerian first and foremost and look at his antecedents, look at his background and that is also why we are making mistakes because we keep on looking at people from this regionalist and ethnic perspectives, we keep on missing it, because as I said earlier, any part of this country, every community can produce leaders. If you look at the history of Nigerian leaders, there are those who emerged from very small communities and they made an impact in this country, so what is important is that the NNPP is all-inclusive and open to everybody and in whatever we are doing, we ensure that everything is going to be balanced, everybody would be carried along, but certain strategic decisions we are going to take about who comes and who becomes what, when and how, is not a matter for now and not a matter for the media. But what we know for sure is that part of the reasons people are angry is the sense of exclusiveness. This is what we are talking about, why should people be excluded from the process? Anybody who feels he should stand for an election should be allowed but ultimately, it is the collective will of the people that will decide who is going to be the leader of this country. But ours is to offer our best, someone who is going to be a unifying force for the country, somebody who will sustain the momentum for this national movement, to reinvent our country so that we cannot only move forward but leap forward because sometimes when you have a big gully in front of you, you need to leap so that we pass what has become a huge threat to our system.
This particular danger that is before us, maybe some know of it while others don’t know, but any section of this country that feels excluded from the political process will always have reasons to be angry which could manifest in different forms ad that is why I said that from the name of our party, we need a new Nigeria. And when we talk of a new Nigeria, I am talking of the country where you can travel from any part of the country even at night without any fear, I am sure that in the 70s, you can drive from Maiduguri up to Lagos day and night, from Yola to Sokoto, from Kano to Enugu. Who can take that risk today? Is it a country for instance where universities cannot function and can be closed down for months running and nobody is talking? Is it the country we inherited where a pregnant woman in labour does not have where to go for assistance? Where somebody can graduate with a good degree but nobody can guarantee him any job? Is it the country where the media is not even free to practice? Media practitioners now censor themselves. Is it a country where people are printing flags, printing currencies and setting up militias, creating republics in a Republic, where people are living in fear of their fellow countrymen? This is not the country we inherited from our forefathers. Our problems are peculiar because they are self-imposed, they are not coming from any foreign army but we are not at peace with ourselves. Who will want to invest his money in a place that is crisis-prone? Nobody will ever do that. So we are dealing with critical issues and not apportion blame on who is at fault or not, whatever happened, something has gone wrong and it is our duty to fix it.
When Peter Obi left the PDP, there were pictures in social media about his relationship with the NNPP and the national leader of the party. Was there any communication with Peter Obi and what went wrong with that arrangement?
Well, I don’t know but first and foremost, I have great respect for Peter Obi, I have had the opportunity to work with him very closely, and I believe he is a man of substance but people make their choices, and I don’t challenge anybody for making any choice, especially a political choice. If you look at the sequence of events, it was not as if he was looking for a place to go to, look at it after about five days after leaving the PDP, we heard of his membership of the Labour Party even when we didn’t hear about the purchase of forms and screening, he is now the candidate, which means already he had a plan and that plan didn’t happen overnight. In any case, every political party is always in talks with other political leaders. No political party worth its salt will close its doors to others, you can’t. Without demeaning anybody, even the fisherman and the potato farmer in the village, they are very important to us.
They are leaders, they make choices and we cannot blame him because he must have his reasons. When I left the PDP in 2018 with the likes of Prof. Jerry Gana, Prof. Tunde Adeniran, Shehu Gaban and many others, we went to the Social Democratic Party and that time the SDP was somehow and some people were asking why we did so, but we moved, we had our reasons of leaving the PDP for the SDP and when I did my little assessment of the SDP and realized again that it was just a bus stop and not the terminus, I then moved on.
Is the NNPP thinking of collaborating with other political parties outside the APC and the PDP, coming together with the view of taking Nigeria back to the people? Or do you think that standing alone any of these parties can win the presidential election?
I think it is common in the history of this country that alliances are formed either before or after elections. It is even more common under a parliamentary system of government where parties join hands to form a government. So, the political parties may require a kind of alliance either before or immediately after the elections. What I know for sure is that Nigerians have made up their minds, they want to move away from where we are, and I want to repeat myself, anybody who says he is happy with what is happening today is either he is not a Nigerian, may not have been living on the surface of earth or a major beneficiary of the crisis. This is not about politics, but stating it the way it is, therefore talking to groups and individuals are all part of the political process. Everybody is important because this is a national project, when there is a fire in the house; you don’t say somebody should not bring a bucket of water to quench it because you don’t like his face, after putting off the fire, you can then decide on what to do with them.
You said Nigeria is so endowed that any community can produce a quality leader. You also said that it doesn’t matter where somebody comes from. Given the agitations in the country, the marginalisation and exclusion we all know, don’t you think that it’s safer to say come, give us direction since you said you can give us direction. Secondly, your party’s national leader in 2015 was among those that left PDP and joined APC because they said power must return to the North. The PDP Candidate now, Atiku Abubakar, also left PDP and joined APC for the same reason. How do we reconcile that with the present don’t talk about the zoning policy?
We didn’t bring the word zoning. It’s your own word. None of us talked about zoning. First and foremost, as I said, there are only three ways to get power. One is inherited power. It’s the traditional way, the monarchy, the aristocracy where people inherit power.
The other one is by force through conquest, through war or through a coup d’état which is an aberration. The third one is people confer on you their power. You didn’t inherit it; you didn’t get it by force or war. People themselves willingly conferred it on you. When you get that power that people willingly conferred on you it is a legitimate authority given to you and they will accept your leadership.
But people will not confer authority on you except if you show them you have the potential for leadership that when they give you this authority they will be safe, they will be accommodated, some of their wishes will be fulfilled, and they will not regret giving you this opportunity. So people have to come forward to show that yes they have the quality for this leadership and in doing that you have to also go through diplomacy, negotiations, compromises, accommodations, through reconciliation, and you find out that it will be done even without raising their voices. But if you take your gun and put it on a voter and say you must vote for me, he will say I will not vote for you. There’s no way, for example, you threaten a political group and you want that group to support you. You must show that when they give you the opportunity they are safe. Remember, politicians are human beings.
“Anybody who is aiming for power be it at the local level, the community level, must show the people he has the ability, so by the time he emerges as a leader, everybody will say this is a leader”
So, what is your view on zoning?
What I am saying here is, first and foremost, in the Nigerian Constitution there is nothing like zoning. The principle of zoning or the idea of zoning came in 1995 during the Abacha era, during the Constitution Conference. There were three agitations. One was about the zoning of positions to the point that they wanted to create zonal structures with authorities. Although this did not succeed at least the zonal structures had emerged but they were not given governance status. Today, even though we talk about zones, those zones don’t have governors, they don’t have assemblies. Then the second one was they said rotations. They want power rotation. I have been arguing as a political scientist, that because of the selfishness of political elites, each one of them cannot command national acceptance, therefore what people are against at one level is what they are calling for at another level. They said they don’t want a quota system, they don’t want cut off points for admission of students, and they don’t want federal character but when it comes to political offices they want them to be zoned. So, whatever the case may be the zoning issue came up and it was somehow accepted between north and south.
The next one they brought up in 1995 was the federal character issue because while some political leaders complained they were excluded from power, some other people in some parts of the nation complained their people do not have a place in the civil service, that whatever you want to share you must share it equally. All these were done in good faith because a number of Nigerian Constitution has gone through this always because you have argument and debates and that is very healthy and we move forward. So, it is only the political parties that will decide whether they want this zoning in their constitution or not. So, if a political party puts zoning in its constitution, then they should abide by the zoning principle even if not politically or legally but morally. Now as in the New Nigeria People’s Party, we are in the process of reviewing our constitution. We can look at everything, when we finally approve it we can apply it but as we are here now, the moving force is not about zoning or not zoning, every Nigerian must be part of the national movement, carried along because you may even give somebody the presidency but if the other part do not feel comfortable, the government will not work as much as possible because of this unnecessary issue.
Therefore, we must argue that our political elites must sacrifice for the people. You say you want this or that, whatever you want, in other countries people prepare for leadership many years ahead. Not in one year, not in two years, not in 10 years. Some prepare for 20 years, 30 years ahead and by the time they emerge then people will look at them and say these people are prepared for leadership but some people will wait until the last minute and by the time they look at their pockets they see they have N100 million to purchase forms and then when they are told they have no chances they say okay I sacrifice the N100 million and go back home and begin to tell their wives that what they did was the correct thing. I don’t think that is the way to get power in this country.
