Spokesperson of the Atiku Campaign Organisation, Mr Segun Showunmi, says Nigerians should prepare for the annulment of President Muhammadu Buhari’s victory in the last presidential election. He also speaks on other boiling issues relating to the election and the case at the tribunal. He spoke to ADELEKE ADESANYA. Excerpts.
There were reports in the media alleging that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar paid the sum of $30,000 to some lawyers abroad to lobby the United States to recognise him as the authentic winner of the recently concluded presidential election. How would you react to this?
Atiku Abubakar is an enigma, some kind of phenomenon that is unusual in Nigeria, relative to how political players have been able to occupy the media space in the last decade or two. Atiku has done the election, Nigeria has finished with that, but we believe that the elections were not properly declared. We think that the mandate was clearly stolen and we believe that some pressure should be brought to bear over and above the legal issues that we are pursuing in court, to let everybody know that we are not going to sweep it under the carpet and let this injustice go away. It has to be addressed.
As to the specifics of whether they are paying somebody or somebody is lobbying for them, or somebody is getting money, that is just APC and their spin doctors chasing shadows. The petition has been laid, and instead of strategising on how to answer to the serious issues that are in that petition, they are more interested in asking whether Atiku bought a bag, Atiku ordered pizza from England, Atiku slept in a hotel, Atiku brushed his teeth and so on. We are not particularly surprised because Atiku has always been someone that every action of his enjoys robust media attention.
Did the former VP pay lobbyists or not?
Atiku has not paid to lobby anybody. Atiku has simply gone in the right direction of talking to those that he needs to talk to, so that everybody knows that what is going on in Nigeria is a shame on the democratic process that the world knows.
But this was said to have been confirmed…
I’m sure what you would have read is that they talked about one website and they mentioned the name of one company and they said that those companies said that Atiku lobbied and so on. Let me tell you, I just answered you that friends of Atiku do things on his behalf; members of his campaign organisation do things on his behalf; even his followers. But to be specific on whether Atiku is lobbying anybody, I would say no. I think it is not unusual in a democracy, especially one as big as ours, that the issue of the Nigeria 2019 General Election would be a subject of discussion in a lot of capitals in the world, including England, America, Germany, Russia, France, Dubai, all over, not just because it’s a Nigerian election but because of the personality of the democrat involved.
Despite the fact that some notable Nigerians have reached out to your principal to forget about going to court and let the country move on, he has remained adamant. What do you think is his driving force?
I believe that if you are a democrat, whatever you want to say about Atiku, you can’t take away the fact that he has spent his time encouraging and building institutions and strengthening democracy from the minute he started in the ‘90s. He has been very consistent and I think for someone like him, who is also interested in a nation that works for all Nigerians, he understands the danger in not having free, fair, transparent, credible and easily acceptable elections.
Beyond Atiku, these are issues that need to be corrected. These are issues that need to be redressed, these are issues that we need to know, and don’t forget that in the business of that election, a lot of innocent Nigerians lost their lives. One of the things that drive people like Atiku is to ask himself all the time: ‘Have I done everything humanly possible to give to the younger generation of Nigeria a country that can work for them?’ This was the reason he was on the ballot in the first instance. It is the reason he is going to try and get those issues resolved in the court.
Most people don’t know that, but for Atiku, it would have been very easy in this country for people to just set up any white paper to eliminate their opponents, either at the local government, state or federal level. Atiku had to go to court, all the way to the Supreme Court, to make sure that doesn’t happen here. That is one major contribution.
Most people also don’t know that, but for Atiku, it would have been very easy for a presidential candidate to win an election with his vice-presidential candidate and sometime in the midst of that journey, remove the vice president who was on a joint ticket with him and treat him the way he would probably treat a minister, a vice-chancellor, a driver or a cook. Atiku has gone all the way to the Supreme Court to ensure that the office is equally protected and the Supreme Court made the declaration that the ticket is a joint ticket and the same process the country will go through to impeach the President is the same process we must go through in the case of the VP. That is what Atiku has done. If he hadn’t gone to the court then, maybe Nigeria would have had a situation where presidents will just wake up in the morning and start getting angry with their vice and just change them, and that would
be very bad.
Most people don’t also know that when it comes to an individual that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court to deepen jurisprudence around the democratic space, Atiku has done that diligently. Atiku has done that continuously and Atiku is lucky a lot of the time also in court. So, on this particular one, I think Atiku is motivated by the fact that the entire democratic process must make sense to you, it must make sense to me, it must make sense to Atiku and even to the upcoming generation.
When you now have a situation whereby they hired those that disrupted elections, people’s lives were no longer safe, no one could even be sure that he would return home safely after voting, it becomes a big problem that must be solved for the benefit of generations yet unborn. They even delved into the dangerous level of having ethnic clashes; they were attacking people where they normally reside because they considered them to be an endangered species within that space, like what you saw happening with the Igbo in some parts of Lagos. You saw a situation whereby there was arbitrary allocation of numbers, a situation where integrity of even the voters register was not respected, a situation where infractions were too many. Not to challenge this is to set a motion in precedence that probably will make the shameful scenario repeat itself as the right way to
select leaders.
How sure are we that Atiku will get justice in court in this case?
Let me tell you, the structure of government is divided in such a way that there is sufficient independence guaranteed to each of the arms. Yes, the Executive could be considered as first among the equal parties in the primaries, but the authority of the Executive would not interfere with that of the legislature. The legislators still have more side functions. That is why you see the President goes to lay the budget before them, that is why he has to wait and defend the budget and get them to approve it, and that is why he can easily be impeached because of the integrity of the Legislature. The Judiciary, perhaps, is the one that enjoys the biggest independence because of the quality of their training. The fact that they have to interpret the laws, the fact that they can tell the government, this is the intention of the law, the fact that they have to figure out a way to make sure that the law works all the time and for all persons. Therefore, I do not believe that if people go to court, you can completely say you don’t trust the Judiciary.
The Judiciary in Nigeria has given judgment against the presidency in the past and I believe that even on this occasion, they can do that. And I need to remind you of Kenya. For the first time in the history of that country, an election was done and the Judiciary in that country was brave to say a substantial infraction took place, which warranted the cancellation of the election, and they annulled it, and called for a rerun. So, maybe Nigeria should get ready for a similar kind of thing.
There are insinuations that former CJN, Walter Onnoghen’s travail was mainly because of his suspected romance with Atiku. What is your take on this?
It seems to be that if the wife of any of the top leaders of APC can’t really conceive, Atiku is responsible; if their kids fall off their backs, Atiku must be responsible. If the rain is not falling according to how they want it, Atiku is responsible. Atiku is a kind of phenomenon that just seems to be that kind of guy that everybody likes to hold responsible for everything. That is a hallmark of leadership, because Atiku has the capacity to carry responsibility with dignity and forbearance, even when everything is not going his way. What could remotely have suggested that to APC is best left to their imagination. So, on their behalf, APC needs to take a chill pill. It is not enough to just do propaganda, you can’t make blind and stupid comments on generalizations, you have to go after the facts. There is no evidence whatsoever that Atiku had anything to do with that case.
Recently, it was alleged that PDP hacked into INEC server, while trying to show evidence that they won the last election. Don’t you think this will work against Atiku and his team in court, in their bid to reclaim their perceived stolen mandate?
One of the things we have observed, or a culture that we have seen in the diverse promoters of the APC is that they like slogans. They would just take one word without really checking the full meaning of the word and they start running with it. The same way they like corruption and they cannot differentiate what it means to be corrupt, and they cannot see corruption around them. I think they are just using that word hacking without paying attention to the meaning just because they have heard that we know and we are saying that in court, we would provide evidence that we won the election clear and square.
I think the first time I heard it was from a loquacious spokesperson of that party, Festus Keyamo, who was the first person I could recall with a petition asking people to come and find out whether INEC server was hacked. The question you would ask is, who would know if their system has been hacked? Is it INEC or Festus, who is also probably just as vulnerable to INEC issues as PDP? So, I am saying to you that no such issue took place, I am saying to you that we have the result, I am saying to you that we make bold to say that is what is in their server. I am saying to you that at some point in time, we hope that it can be so clear that Nigerians can see.
We cannot give and allocate the money, the resources, N240 billion for INEC to be able to carry out the 2019 election, the largest allocation of resources in our history and it was supposed to give us an election that is credible, that is fair and that is able to be accepted by all and this is all we get. I would just say disregard APC and their acting. They will eventually find out the truth when they get to court.
Despite the fact that former President Olusegun Obasanjo backed Atiku before the election, he couldn’t win the race. Does that mean Obasanjo’s influence has waned in Nigeria’s politics?
I think that everybody in Nigeria who loves the country, who has followed the development of Nigeria for years and who occupies that special position of eminence, many of them backed Atiku. And why were they backing Atiku? They backed him because it didn’t make sense for someone who could not get a grip of the running of the affairs of the state, who could not reduce killings, who could not stop poverty, who could not unite the country, who could not give us a Nigeria that all of us could be proud of, to be allowed to continue in a democracy. And I think that what all of them could not possibly plan for was that after about 20 years, especially having observed the 2015 presidential election of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, they couldn’t really imagine that Nigeria would fall in a low class that the APC and Buhari have allowed it to fall into. They couldn’t imagine that ‘inconclusive’ would now be the new lexicon in our election, they couldn’t imagine that people would be beaten and driven away from the polling units just for ethnic reason, they couldn’t imagine people would actually take guns and be shooting at themselves in locations like Rivers State.
If anybody wants to say anything has gone wrong, you cannot say Obasanjo did not back the right person, you cannot say Nigerians did not vote for the right candidate and you cannot say Atiku did not win. The best that you would say is that we have gotten ourselves something that is similar to a Machiavellian civilian dictatorship that all of us must brace up for. And all of us must pray that our judiciary, which obviously is going to be on trial as a result of this case, would man up and deliver to the Nigerian people justice, comprehensive justice. The kind of justice that all Nigerians are looking for and all Nigerians will be happy with. Check all the locations where they claim to have won election, there is so much despair, killings, and there is so much frustration. No one is happy, even the economy is dragging and slacking.
How would you react to claims by the APC that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is not a Nigerian by birth?
The claim by APC is a dangerous one, which can start giving the world a different perception about who is qualified or not as a Nigerian.
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is a former vice president who has equally held several big positions in this country. They must be very desperate to weave anything. APC must be suffering from hallucination.
So, because we have engaged in an election, everything has become a problem now. I have seen this as very childish and totally false. His Excellency, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is a bona fide Nigerian citizen.
