Barrister Festus Keyamo (SAN) is the spokesman of the Muhammadu Buhari Campaign Organisation. In this interview with AYO ESAN in Abuja, he speaks on sundry issues concerning President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration in the last three-and-half years and the February 2019 presidential elections.Excerpts:
President Muhammadu Buhari is gearing up for a second term in office. As his campaign spokesman, how will you rate his performance in the last three and half years?
Within what have been made available to him with which to operate, the president has exceeded the expectations. However if you want to judge him by World Standard, by the best standard, he will still have very much to do. However, why we must judge him by comparative analysis and not the best standard available in the world right now is that we are faced with situation where it is those people who ruined our economy , it is those people under whose watch Boko Haram, farmers- herders clashes got some kind of foothold, germinated and exploded, those people under whose watch all these things happened are the ones telling us that they want to come back. They are the same people, so with that, it is important we judged him on comparative analysis. I will not be a sycophant and sit down here and say that by the best standard available in the world, we are there yet. I will not be fool enough to say so. So you have asked a general question and I have given you a general answer but I know you expect me to go to specifics
Yes. Let’s have the specifics….
Okay. On corruption, we have make progress on the anti- corruption war, and the promise made, you must know what we have achieved so far. I have said before and I will say it over and over again and I would not be tired to say so that there is no government in the history of Nigeria, none ever, that has gone after those who have stolen our common wealth, that has gone after those who have taken what belonged to all of us as much as this government. And the great testimony to this is the amount of recovery that have been made because these are tangible things you can point to. As I speak with you, 407 mansions have been confiscated from those who looted the economy. Out of the 407 mansions, about one hundred and something of them are now on permanent forfeiture. Two hundred and something of them are still on interim forfeiture. Permanent forfeiture means that they are now with the government and the Nigerian people. Out of that, we have about two hundred and fifty something or sixty something high automobiles. We are not talking of Keke NAPEP, Toyota cars and all that, we are talking of high machines. Two hundred and something of these have been confiscated by the government. Filing stations have been confiscated by the Federal Government and more and more like that. Prosecution of high profile former governors have been achieved and these high profile former governors are members of the ruling party. So, it answered two questions. It answered that the anti -corruption war is going on well and that it is not targeted at the opposition or selected.
Two, they would say these ex- governors trial was started by them, they never complete anything. Why didn’t the trial completed under their terms. Some of these trial lasted more than nine years. It started in 2007 when those governors left power, don’t forget Dariye left power in 2007, Nyame left power in 2007. So how did they fail to complete the trial during their tenure but less than three years, Buhari completed the trial and got them convicted . This is just so shameless on their part.
So on the anti-corruption fight, we have moved far away from where we were in 2015 but we are not there yet. Petty stealing is still going on under this government, you cannot stop petty stealing like that. I am talking about things like gratification, petty stealing and all like that. I will be a fool to sit down here and say that we have clean the Augean stable, it is a lie. But what we have done is to first of all concentrate on grand corruption. Grand corruption is that open deliberate stealing without justification from the national treasury. For instance, what happened before the 2015 general election when they just took 100bn dollars out. Buhari government has dealt with that with two key proactive actions. All these recoveries are retroactive action but the pro-action include Single Treasury Account. The single treasury account they have lacked the will to enforce. This policy was there all along, it was introduced by Okonjo-Iweala but they have no will to implement it, because they were stealing. But now, we have up to 90 per cent compliance to the single treasury account. So every MDA, every agency is using single treasury account. From 2010 to 2015, N51bn was remitted by JAMB, for five years, but in 2017 alone, N7.8bn was remitted by JAMB. So that is the kind of the proactive steps they have taken to curb grand corruption. Sealing up the treasury, you cannot just go there and take money. On that front, we have been able to do that. Then, the presidential initiative on continuous auditing to curb the payment of money to ghost workers which has been a serious problem over the years. We have been talking about ghost workers for long, Obasanjo talked about it, Yar’Adua talked about it but there was no will to do something decisive about it. With the Presidential Initiative on continuous audit, 54,000 ghost workers were sieved out of the system. These were people who had died, people who have left the system, but some people kept collecting their money and that is to tell you how much has been saved in that regard.
The last one I want to say in this respect is that, they said we went down in the Transparency International Perception Index and I have clear response to that. The first one is that the Executive Director of Transparent International came to Nigeria in May 2018 , she came here and she was confronted with what they wrote and she said we have done a lot of recovery but people don’t even understand what they are doing. She said first, this is just a perception index and that most times, it didn’t reflect the progress we have made. That it is not tied to actual achievements at times. She said something significant, she said it does not reflect what happened in that country that year. She said it is actually a collection of what happened three to five years before then, that they put together and make their findings. She said the achievements we are making now will not reflect until few years later. So, people should not play politics with what Transparent International did.
If you also juxtaposed that with what the world leaders said, the African Union made our President the champion of anti-corruption in Africa. United States President, Donald Trump, said Buhari is one of the most incorruptible president coming out of Africa. What Trump actually said is that a lot of corruption has been going on in that country but we are confident that you are tackling that.
So on the issue of corruption we have made a lot of progress but we are not yet where we ought to be. And that is why I am doing what I am doing today. We have a lot to gain by sustaining honest determined leadership for the next four years.
Let’s talk about the issue of security
On the issue of security, there are two aspects on the issue of security challenges. One is the insurgency, two is the communal clashes and farmers and herdsmen clashes. It does not lie in the mouth of PDP, they should hide under the table anytime the issue of Boko Haram comes up. What they are doing now is that each time they go outside, they take a loaded gun and try to shoot themselves on the foot. PDP is asking Nigerians to decide whether we are better off in terms of Boko Haram insurgency than during their tenure and I laughed. Do these people know what they are saying? Either by sheer bragadocio, they are expecting that Nigerians would have erased their memory. And they are banking on the fact that naturally we are short sighted people or that we are very emotional, that we react to what is happening now without recourse to the past. Have they forgotten that Boko Haram has entered Abuja before? That a colleague of yours was killed at Danex Plaza when he just went there to buy something and he was killed by the bomb. That was how bad it was. They were few metres away from the seat of power. They bombed police headquarters, they entered barracks of soldiers, killed soldiers in Abuja here. They entered mosque in Kano, they killed worshippers in Mosques in Kano. Every Sunday, when we woke up in 2013 and 2014, a church would have been bombed. It was Sunday Sunday tonic. Boko Haram had hoisted their flags in 17 local governments. They hoisted their flag in Maiduguri. At a point, they entered Damaturu, the state capital of Yobe. Apart from all these, Boko Haram started actively under the PDP regime. They refused to nip it in the bud, it grew from an ant to a cat, from a cat to a dog and from a dog to an Octopus under their nose. Because they are running a self-indicting campaign, they are saying there is terrorism everywhere. It is a ridicule. We are talking about comparative advantage. In this interview, I am drawing Nigeria back to the PDP period. I am doing comparative analysis and I am not telling Nigerians that they are totally safe now. I am not telling Nigerians that we cannot do better. I am telling Nigerians that it is the person that is trying to ameliorate the situation that is being crucified. It is the villain that they are packaging as saviour and the saviour as villain. If they have taken their intelligence to nip it in the bud and corruption did not take over their purchase of arms and equipment, we wouldn’t have had what we had. Another example and I don’t want to offend the sensibility of Nigerians. This is what the president did in case of the IPOB. It started as pure tribal sentiment, we want to be on our own, the old Biafran sentiment, no problem about that. It is the normal United Nations self-determination right, no problem at that point. People forget there was a day that they took arm, cutlasses in Aba and they were checking buses, saying any Hausa Fulani, come out to be killed. That is how a threat arises in a country if you don’t know. They were telling people to come out of buses and they were looking for Hausa/Fulani.
On communal clashes, it is not possible for the PDP to play politics with age-long community disputes across Nigeria and especially across the Middle Belt and Northern Nigeria. These grievances leading to communal clashes and the farmers- herdsmen clashes are age long conflicts .It is some people in the south that are using these conflict to play politics. Those involved are not blaming Buhari, they have been in this problem for a long time and they know. But we are the ones carrying it on top of our heads. The question PDP wants us to answer is: are we better off. That question is a question based on comparative analysis. Then, I have to go to the past and count the dead bodies. They said are we better off’? In the year 2005, a whole governor was suspended in Plateau State, why? 2,000 people were killed in one week, bloodshed. That time, it was almost every month that they were killing. It got to a point that a state of emergency was declared, a governor was removed from office and an administrator was appointed. We didn’t get to that crisis point today, which means, we have improved on the issue of communal crisis. The problem was not created by the PDP. I am not playing politics with that , during Babangida era, we have the Zango Kataf crisis and General Zamani Lekwot paid for it.
So, in term of communal clashes, farmers -herdsmen clashes, it will be sad to say Buhari caused it. Let me digress a minute, the gang up against Buhari has been unprecedented using primordial sentiment , religion , using issues that have been on the front burner for many years, bringing them now and using it as a basis to campaign against Buhari is not only wicked , it is unpatriotic and unacceptable to Nigerians.
But never has any government made effort to tackle insecurity like this government. Aside the military operations, military bases have been established and that is why you can see that this whole thing has come down significantly now. These are robust solutions but the government knows that we cannot continue to fight our citizens. So, the President did not stop at putting military everywhere, but at the same time, we have on the table suggestions to put things off through the issue of ranches and cattle colony
On the economy?
The PDP is also running and telling bare face lies in term of the economy and it is running a self-indicting campaign. In 2012, Okonjo -Iweala said we were heading for recession. She said the way the economy was going, we were heading to recession and this was the Coordinating Minister of Economy. I want to say that Goodluck Jonathan easily conceded the victory because he knows the danger was ahead.
So, poverty did not grow under Buhari, the recession, he did not cause it. In fact, if anything at all , he is a magic walker because, despite the depleted foreign reserve, despite fall in oil prices and the collapsed economy, by the fact that the dollar has crashed to N225 and 24 States could not pay salaries at the time of hand – over and the inevitability of recession because there was no buffer, inflation is now less than 18 per cent and it is about eleven point something per cent now
So on the economy, the president has performed magic not because we are where we should be but in very difficult circumstance, he tread cleverly out of the woods. It could have been worse, we could have gone the way of Venezuela but we were able to sail out safely.
PDP has launched its campaign and there was huge crowd at the rally in Sokoto. Is the APC nursing any fear concerning the 2019 presidential election
In the North West, there is total votes of about 19 million by INEC registration, we would be happy to give them the 20,000 people at the rally in the stadium, because the stadium is 20,000 capacity, that is my answer to that.
