APC can’t tie Buhari down –Tapgun

Former governor of Plateau State, Mr Fidelis Tapgun speaks on key national and domestic issues, in­cluding president Muhammadu Buhari’s relationship with the National Assembly, the All Progressives Congress, APC and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.

Excerpts

You were one of the PDP chief­tains critical of the way some offi­cers of the party in Abuja handled issues relating to elections in some states, including Plateau where you were an aspirant to the office of governor. In fact, in our last in­terview, you warned of dire conse­quences and threatened that PDP will lose the governorship poll here and that Jonathan will also lose the presidential election if the party failed to address issues. Now that the chips are down and the PDP is in the opposition, how do you feel?

How do I feel that we are in opposition? It is normal. Politics is a game. Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. We have been winning in the last 16 years and have been in power in the last 16 years. It has grown to become weak that it allowed itself to be defeated. I think that it is good that we are defeated so that we can now go back to the drawing board so that we can begin to do the right thing as a political party. It is a lesson that everybody has learnt; that you don’t take human beings for granted, no matter how loyal. If you expect people to be loyal to the party, you also must show good example to the party. The leadership of the party did not show good example at all. If they had, we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are now. They refused to listen. They refused to look at the hand writing on the wall. They just became arrogant and I think that it caused the party dearly. And everybody is regretting. They are all regret­ting now. I am sure. They may not come out to say it, but I am sure that in their heart of hearts everybody is regretting.

I think I should ask you what hap­pened to the much-touted slogan that PDP will rule for 60 years.

No way. Who is talking about that? That was part of the arrogance. And I think those of us that were in the PDP didn’t ac­cept that sort of thing. Well, we are out in the cold now and only God knows when we will come again. APC has learnt from the mistakes of the PDP now. And when they change and Nigerians see the change in the APC, well.

Talking about change; people say APC and PDP are the same thing.

That’s what I am saying. We make mis­takes. They are all the same. There is noth­ing different about their philosophy. So, it’s just change of words in their manifestoes. We are all the same thing and we are all Ni­gerians. A lot of the chieftains of the APC were PDP people. They were groomed in PDP.

In other words, Nigerians should not expect anything different?

No. no. no. We will wait to see. APC came to power on the mantra of change and I expect that we are going to see the change. I just believe that the president is a disciplinarian. That’s number one. If for the time he would be in power he can make Nigerians realize that there must be disci­pline in anything they are doing and then stamp out corruption in this country; if they are the only two things he would do, I think he would have done a lot.

I would want you to undertake an overview of the recently concluded elections, the razzmatazz, the sur­prises, the new democratic ideal es­poused by Jonathan’s concession of defeat and all that. What do you make of them?

The elections came and everybody knew what happened during the elections. Like I said since the return of democracy in 1999, we have been in power and whether we like it or not, PDP has become a brand in this country. There is no polling unit you will go in this country you will not find PDP. So, it is a brand. And the behavior of the leadership of the party over time without challenge led people to think that they can get away with anything they want. That led to the defeat because we kept crying don’t do this; don’t do this, nobody listened. And when it came, it was not something anybody can dispute. It was a very clearly won election because a lot of innovations were made in the electoral process. Even though they were not perfect, they went far beyond what we knew in the past. Those innovations also made the elections very credible. Therefore, since there is noth­ing you can dispute, you had to accept the results. The numbers were there and the people who voted were there. It was good Mr. President accepted defeat because the country was really charged. Like the Presi­dent said, if Jonathan wanted to make the situation difficult, he would have made it difficult by not accepting defeat and if he had gone to court, things would have been scattered in this country. It was the states­manship in him that he displayed. Leaders should be in the forefront of maintaining peace in this country and that is what he did. If he had done otherwise, we don’t know where we would have been today. And nothing made it so charged than the campaigns of calumny, of maligning peo­ple’s integrity and so on. We should have been talking about what we can do and not making reference to people and saying all sorts of things.

Some Nigerians think Buhari’s in­augural speech wasn’t rich enough and others believe that it didn’t state his direction about how he would fight corruption, for instance. What is…

(Cuts in) That’s what I am talking about; this mantra they came about “change, change, change”. People who say PDP has not done anything in the last 16 years are not being sincere to themselves because whether we like it or not, like Obasanjo or whether you don’t like him, he changed things in this country. Yar’Adua came in. Unfortunately, he didn’t last long in of­fice. Then Jonathan came in. And if we say Jonathan didn’t do anything, I do not think we are being fair to him. At least we know what he did in railways. That is transportation. We know what he did in the road sector. He revamped the rail­ways. The economy improved. So, if you say he didn’t do anything, it is not just right. We are an emerging nation. We are just developing. There are things we will be learning and making mistakes in the process as we grow. Over time, certain things will be corrected. Part of what has destroyed us is corruption because this has become so glaring and it wasn’t handled properly. There is corruption everywhere. Federal and public officers, there is corrup­tion everywhere and PDP didn’t handle it properly. And I think that is part of the rea­sons why we failed. And you know Buhari came to power for what people know him for fighting corruption. He is a disciplined person and he is in to fight corruption. If he succeeds in the fight against corruption and stamping it out, even three-quarters of it for the next four years, I think he would have made a headway. I know a lot of things will change. The way we are used to doing things will change. Business will not be as usual again.

What do you make of his speech?

For me, the speech is rich enough. It contained a lot. We already know what the manifesto is. It is a progressive manifesto they said. It has free education, free health, social welfare and the economy is going to be improved. They said they will change the naira to a dollar, dollar to a naira. They are going to give allowances to…well, like they do overseas. They are going to give allowances to the unemployed. That’s what PDP has not done even though they intro­duced it through the SURE-P programme. But you know what the programme be­came at the end of the day. So, they are all the same thing like you said. But how they will implement them is what we are going to see. Until they start working we will not know what they said they are going to do and what they are doing.

Some ethnic nationalities, groups, organizations, regions of the various geo-political zones and some sections of organizations, in­cluding formal and informal asso­ciations are lobbying and mounting enormous pressures on the Presi­dent for one favour or the other. For instance, some northern elders are calling for particular positions to be ceded to them. The Igbo in the south-east are interested in some ministerial positions. The north-east, north-central and south-west and south-south have just finished their jostle for the Senate presi­dency and Speaker of the House of Representatives. I will like you to comment on the implications of these demands on the polity.

Politics is about interests. It is either you are trying to provide for the people or peo­ple join to gain out of it. If they gain out of you, they support you and you pay them back in return. These sorts of demands are usual in politics. They are not uncom­mon in every dispensation once there is a new government. But the President or the governor knows exactly what the consti­tution has said about sharing of political offices all over the country. And since he has sworn to abide by the constitution of the country he would abide by that. We are a federation and the idea is to have every segment and section of the country to be part of the system itself so that people can feel a sense of belonging. So, if it comes to power, people will demand; but he knows what to do. He knows how to spread the positions. The demand is natural. Even if you come to Plateau here, there are de­mands already on the governor for certain things. But he knows there must be shar­ing. People should not keep everything to themselves, otherwise people will feel alienated and you will have problems in the system. So, sharing these things are sensi­tive issues and I think he knows what to do to balance the act.

Do you see the APC surmounting the problems on ground now?

With regards to the National Assembly, you know he said clearly that he is not go­ing to be part of the problem. He said they are a separate arm of government them­selves. So let them sort themselves out. Now, he would not expect the National Assembly to dabble in his affairs as presi­dent. That’s what he said he is going to do. So, there is separation of powers. In fact, what he said to the governors who went to submit list of people to him for nomi­nation as ministers should be instructive. He told them to go to their states and pick those who will help them run their states. He is not going to pick commissioners for them; so they should not pick ministers for him. This is a different thing from what we know. And like I said they have learnt from what PDP did and failed, asking governors to nominate persons for ministerial posi­tions. Buhari is going to be different be­cause his statement that “I am for nobody, but I am for all” is pregnant with meaning. And I just interpreted that statement to mean that I am not going to be tied down by anybody, not even the party itself. He has a vision about what he wants to do. He has been Head of State in this country.

And you don’t see him running into problems with party members on account of this principle?

To me, honestly, I will support a situation where the president acts as the president, not as a party man because acting as a party man is what brings the problem. Once you are elected the president, you become the president of everybody. So, he should be able to act to satisfy everybody and in do­ing that you must act independently from the party because the party is the only body that will force you to do certain things. And this is because of party discipline. But in this federation where we are operating the president should be able to be left alone to have a vision of what he wants to do and how he wants to go about doing it espe­cially in the appointment of people who will help him. I think he wants to be an in­dependent person and I support him to be an independent person. He is no longer an APC president. He is the president of Ni­geria.

It is like we are having conflict­ing demands based on regional sentiments because whereas in the south-west, the Afenifere, the so­cio-cultural umbrella of the Yoruba told the president point blank that he should implement the National Conference report, the North is say­ing President Buhari should ignore the report because the conference was convened in bad faith and riddled with contradictions. Mean­while, the fundamental interest of the south-west is anchored on the need to give true federalism to the modus operandi of the Nigerian constitution. Do you…

(Cuts in) There were a lot of things sur­rounding the conference report.

Do we throw it away?

No. There are a lot of good things in that report that can be implemented for the benefit of this country. People are so entrenched in certain things that they don’t want it to change. I think that is why you have this clamour. Because we are running a federation, if you take an independent stand, you will see how beneficial it is go­ing to be. But once you become sentimen­tal, then you will shift grounds, just like the north is saying something different from what the south is saying.

I asked you this question because you are a northerner of Middle Belt extraction…

(Cuts in)Yes. That’s quite true. And that is why I am saying that the conference report contains a lot of recommendations that will be beneficial to this country. Anybody who loves this country will not ask the president to throw the conference report away. They will need constitutional amendments and National Assembly’s approval. There are a lot of recommendations that will need to be implemented for the benefit of this country.

But in the course of doing that you must step on some people’s sensitivity because they are so used to certain things that they will not want them changed. Like some of the recommendations we made which they did not like was the operation of the federal system which we said was too ex­pensive to run. Why don’t we go back to the constitution we ran during the First Republic? We ran a single unified cameral House. But what we have now is presi­dential system and the cost of running it is enormous. So we looked at it completely and said why don’t we merge it? We op­erated it before and it worked. Why can’t we operate it now? It was the military that brought us this system; otherwise, we had this federal system that worked for us. We had the president, the National Assembly and we had the prime minister. There was a nominal president and then the Prime Minister. So, why don’t we bring it under one roof? Instead of this bicameral, we had a unicameral system. We have recom­mended how they can be constituted.

Do you imagine that the legisla­tors at the National Assembly will, in their wildest imagination, ap­prove this?

This is the problem I am telling you. For us at the National Conference then it was the consensus agreement that it should be implemented. But now you are saying some people are working against it. Even from the National Assembly, there were lots of lobbying by some legislators for us not to accept that recommendation even after the consensus agreement. But we got it through. It is the implementation that is now the problem because it has to go to them. That conference report must be subjected to a referendum. Nigerians will decide on what we want. Yet, some other people do not want referendum. But the President should be ready to take a stand because he is the head and everything rests on him.

If he says there should be a referendum there will be a referendum. The president should be interested in what the people want. I am appealing that the recommen­dations of the National Conference should not be thrown away. That we think Nige­rians should be allowed to decide on the recommendations we made so that they will decide on the outcome of that confer­ence. We were only slightly above 400 at the conference. So we said out of about 170 million we cannot be the genius in the country. Once they decide and vote on it then you have no locus standi not to imple­ment it. But a few people sat down and say no.

Now, Lawyers have given Buhari 100 days within which to make a difference. Some people believe he should tackle security, fuel scarcity, power, unemployment, overhaul EFCC, ICPC, plug revenue leakages and the rest. What magic wand do you think can make the president achieve these within four years and which is your priority area?

My priority area really is the fight against corruption. So the EFCC should be strengthened and the judiciary revamped so that they can fight these corruption cas­es quickly. There are a lot of cases lying down there and people embezzling gov­ernment funds and nothing is done; five, six years it is still hanging. This is not good for our image at all because people just think we are people who steal government money and nothing is done to punish us. There should be a special court to handle corruption cases so that they are dispensed off quickly. But the cases we have go to normal courts and they keep hanging. And people you accuse are still roaming around and holding offices. I do not think this is good enough. That’s why people take us as a corrupt nation. We are a very big country in this continent and I think we should be able to lead. This stigma of corruption has been bringing us down.

Nigerians simply tend to focus, primarily on the outcome of the recently concluded elections, why Jonathan failed, Buhari’s victory and the prospects of change with­out appreciating the critical fac­tors that shaped the much-touted change. Even the man whose ac­tion was mostly responsible for the peaceful change appears to have been forgotten. Would you consider Jonathan’s government a failed one because some people believe that his being forgotten within a short space of time is a sign of his fail­ure?

Jonathan did not fail. I told you from the beginning that in the last 16 years that PDP was in power people keep saying that PDP has not achieved anything. That is not true. What PDP has done in the last 16 years cannot be wished away because a lot of positive things have happened. The nega­tive ones are there, one of which is the cor­ruption thing we are talking about. I think Jonathan’s problem is trusting people too much that he gave them too much lee way. They cheated Jonathan really. Yes, they cheated him. I have really been looking for the appropriate word to use because, if not, you knew this thing was not going to work and you encouraged the man that this is go­ing to work. I am going to do this when you know you are not in a position to do it and the man depended on you. What do you call that? Do I say they deceived him? I feel very bad about it honestly. I feel very bad. Leadership should be transparent, should be honest. They should have been honest to the President. They were not honest at all. They deceived him.

Who are these people you are re­ferring to?

The governors of PDP, the party hierar­chy are those I am referring to. They kept telling him everything is okay when every­thing was not okay. He agreed with them that everything was okay. There was too much arrogance and he kept accepting the fact that everything was okay only to dis­cover at the last minute that everything was not okay. And it was too late.

Would you say you are not part of those who cheated Jonathan be­cause if at the state level you cam­paigned for an APC candidate…

(Cuts in) See. Look, I didn’t start cam­paigning for APC people. I didn’t. You know that very well. I campaigned for the president even before he declared that he would run. I just thought that it was right for him to go for a second term. That was my belief. When we started having prob­lems was after the primaries. It was from the delegates’ election actually. That the president was not in tune with what was happening in the states, that he was more inclined to listen to the governors than lis­tening to any other person in the state. We thought it was a joke. But as time went on it became manifest that he was more inter­ested in listening to the governor than any other person in the state. And so we felt it was not proper and for some of the states where there were no primaries, people just…like this state that was what caused the loss of the PDP. When we tried to point out these problems to them they refused to listen. That was when we said fine, we have gone on our campaigns very vigor­ously. But when they started exhibiting ar­rogance and told us this is the person that is going to contest for us in the state, they turned blind eyes to what we were pointing out and decided what to do, according to what the governor wants, we told them the governor is just an individual. Since they refused to listen we said okay we will fight you out.

Would it not be right then to say you used the action of the governor in your state to judge over Jona­than?

Unfortunately, it was not only in this state. A lot of the states were like that. A lot. There was no state that had no problem in the primaries. And that was the undoing of the party itself. The president was just looking. He was the head of the party.

Now, how do you feel having lost the state to party you campaigned for?

Very, very bad. But it was a situation nobody could help. People said they want to die and they say okay they want to die, you can see them wanting to die, you have helped them and helped them so that they don’t die and they insist they want to die, what do you do? You just sit down and watch. When they die you just laugh.

Couldn’t you have fought to en­sure your party’s victory then re­solve this later?

There was no way we could have fought for the victory of the PDP in Plateau State. Certainly not because the candidate was not a PDP candidate. The candidate was a Jonah Jang candidate. So there was no way we could have fought for Jang’s can­didate to win under PDP in Plateau State. No. Even the president’s election, the two things were tied together. Jang did a wrong thing and the president looked the other way. So, there is a connection.

Are you then not qualified for sanction as somebody who en­gaged in anti-party activity?

I didn’t do anti-party activity o.

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