Presidential Candidate of the Advanced People’s Democratic Alliance (APDA), Mohammed Shittu and his party say their opposition to assent to the Electoral Act Amendment Bill recently passed by the National Assembly, is because it could truncate Nigeria’s democracy, adding that it is ill-timed. In this interview with INNOCENT ODOH, Shittu also says that his ambition to lead Nigeria as president in 2019 is based on his ideological convictions to help the nation out of economic doldrums, insecurity and social disharmony. Excerpts:
We understand that your party was among those that went to court to stop President Muhammadu Buhari from giving his assent to the Electoral Act Amendment Bill. What motivated you to do that?
What motivated us was patriotism because we don’t want this democracy to be truncated. You have to see that this bill should not be signed now. We are not saying that this bill should not be signed but at this juncture that we are already 50 percent to our electoral process; it will be counterproductive, especially with some provisions like 87, 84 and 52. If you look at them one is saying that we must transmit our election results by electronic means. How will you electronically transmit from rural areas at this time? Where will you get those equipment quickly now in one month? Who will manufacture the equipment for us and how do we train the INEC staff? For me I saw a foul play somewhere around it.
This bill will affect our democratic process. I am a Presidential candidate and I know what electronic transmission of results will be and I know that my people are not aware of it and I am suspecting foul play. How can you amend the electoral law two months to election, do you want to put the country into chaos? It is a wrong time, it should be signed but not before 2019 election. We have two months to election and we are campaigning and you are saying that there must be a new rule. We should not be sentimental, I am not supporting anybody, but this is distraction.
Some people have suggested that if the bill is not signed into law, it will give room for the President and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to manipulate the process to their favour. What is your reaction to this?
It is a wrong timing, two months to election, how do you get the equipment? INEC will tell you that they don’t have budget for it and it has become law. So what will you do? We are always sentimental in our judgement. If it becomes law, you must implement it and INEC will tell you that they have no budget or say they have no equipment for it. Are we going to wait for that equipment? I think we are trying to drag the country back.
But INEC has said severally that they have the capacity to do electronic transmission of results…
They don’t have any capacity to do that. So who gave them the money to buy the equipment, where are the equipment? Let them showcase it.
Nigeria is said to be the world capital of extreme poverty with 87 million of our citizens living in extreme poverty. If you become president, what exactly will you do to revive the Nigerian economy?
We must go back to our culture and marry our culture with our economy. What do I mean by this? We are an agrarian society and we have to elevate this agrarian society into productive and industrial society. Until we are able to integrate our agrarian society into industrial hub we cannot get it right. Therefore, as a party we will move back to rural agriculture and be able to promote our products. But we cannot go into manufacturing or processing until we have power. So we have to marry power and industrialization.
Now instead of generating power and put in the national grid we must decentralize our generation and transmitting capability by allowing investors to come in. Even our people on their own can generate, transmit and then distribute power within their own factory and you can even have what is called processing centers, where you can generate power by yourself either by solar or hydro, thermal or wind. This was what the Chinese did. China took capitalism; they took socialism from Russia and married it to their own community.
Then we must stop importation of whatever we have in this country. We must meet World Trade Organisation and re-negotiate whatever agreement that is inimical to our own economic development and then close our borders on some goods and also ban exportation of raw materials from Nigerian until it is processed. This is because it is when you process these materials that you create employment. You just don’t take for example soya beans from the farm and just export it. If you do it that way there is no value chain. What we should do is to grow, process and package it. During processing you have employed many Nigerians, during packaging you have employed Nigerians, in transportation you have employed Nigerians and then you export it to get foreign currency. It is because there is no value chain in our products that is why we are having the unemployment today. Even the crude oil that we have we just export crude oil. We are supposed to refine it and even sell to our neighbouring countries.
What kind of education will work for Nigeria at this critical time?
We must concentrate more on vocational education, where we bring out technicians to be able to work out these processing centres. We must invest in technical education and skill up Nigerians.
How much of the National budget will you commit to the education sector if you become president of the country?
When you are talking of vocational education, technical colleges, the mistake we make in this country is to allocate amounts of budget into the sectors without aggregating what we want to do in that sector first. This is what I want to do because if you create value chain people would need the skilled workers. So for us you don’t just waste money because you want to build class you will have to aggregate what the sector wants.
Despite the huge amount of money committed to curbing insecurity the problem persists. Recently Nigeria has been rated the third most terrorized country in the world. Apart from the terrorism of the Boko Haram we also have growing criminal activities ravaging the country. So, what exactly will you do to secure the Nigeria?
First of all, we must take the welfare of the military seriously. Their package must be well spelt out in a manner that it goes to them directly. Secondly, we must provide employment opportunity for the teaming youth in order to curb insecurity. There is no amount of money you pump into insecurity that will work if you don’t create employment opportunity for people to curb the menace. So, until you take people out of the streets, and they are engaged in factories, there will continue to be insecurity because as you are finishing one you enter another because that is the only means for them to have livelihood.
But if you create these vocational centers, you create these value chains people will realize their legitimate objectives. Let’s assume that Danladi is producing tomatoes in Talata Mafara and you have a processing center where he can process his tomatoes and in one year Danladi was able to realise substantial amount of money and build his own house and marry a wife, you think that the next young man will not do the same? But in a situation that Danladi cannot even produce anything, and he has to fend for himself, the next thing he will be thinking is what to do and what an idle mind does is thinking evil. That is how insecurity occurs. But if we engage the young ones, the situation will not be as bad.
The Boko Haram insurgency is not just about tackling unemployment because it is deep in ideology rooted in beliefs. So there is already an ideologically driven war against the Nigerian state. So, how are you going to tackle the issue?
We have economic ideology and religious ideology. This insurgency occurs because the government has not provided the economic ideology to them and they have to develop their own ideology and whatever they call that ideology they use it to perpetrate criminality. That is why as a government, you have to impose your own economic ideology which will kill that fundamentalist ideology that they have but you have to be proactive. It is not enough for instance to give them vocational training and skill but where will they work after they have received training?
Ideology is built by government and propagated by the citizens and each generation put themselves into different ideology that they encounter as they go on. Human mind is dynamic; it changes according to its own environment. We are the ones providing room for them to build that terrorist ideology. If you go back to the root of how Boko Haram started, it did not just start as a violent organization but when that did not work for them they ran into the bush and built a new ideology for themselves that had become a menace to the Nigerian society. Therefore, it is government that drives ideology and as government they should drive the ideology that will take them away from such fundamentalist ideology.
The President Buhari government says it is fighting corruption, but it appears increasingly difficult to tame corruption in Nigeria. If you become President, how will you tackle corruption and how will you rate the fight against corruption of the current government?
You must provide security of life for Nigerians. As a public servant when you are retiring back to your village and you have no house to stay, your pension may not even be paid for three or five years, how will that person want to leave office without getting something for himself? That is why we cannot kill corruption until we do the right thing. For instance if a police officer is injured or is killed in active service and you take token money and give to the family and forget them, how will they cope with the demand of sending their children to school?
In a nutshell the government should provide incentive that will give people confidence and security so that they will feel that after retirement they can be okay, so why will they steal? Secondly we must also re-orientate the mind of the Nigerians to believe in their country Nigeria, to believe that they have no other country than Nigeria and that if you stack money abroad you are only wasting your time because you may not even be able to get this money back to yourself.
What is your take on restructuring?
We are talking of economic restructuring which I have just laid down to you indirectly. We can say that each state should bring up a crop that they have comparative advantage in, develop it and we go into the Concurrent and Exclusive list and look at issues like the rail and allow states or individual to build rail within their economic zones. You can even do it from state to state. That is where I talk about decentralisation of power generation. We should allow state to take care of some of these federal roads so that state to state will be linking their road and their rail line and link their water ways. The economy will start booming. This is the kind of restructuring that we are talking about.
Are you advocating for the states to own and develop their resources in the form of resource control?
What I am talking about is economic restructuring. You are not controlling any resources because at the end of the day you pay tax to the federal government. People are talking of political restructuring but how many political restructuring do you want to have? We should look at ourselves as Nigerians, we should not be subscribing to regionalism, tribalism and sectionalism. What we should be subscribing to is that you and I talking today should see ourselves as Nigerians first and whatever we want to do, Nigeria should come first.
There is this insinuation that your party is backing President Muhammadu Buhari and the ruling All Progressives Congress APC for the 2019 elections. Are you in any coalition and do you have the financial power to face the big parties in the contest?
For us we believe that big or small parties it is a creation of the mind and until we take away money politics we will still be under the people that we don’t want them to control our destiny. We have made mistakes in this country by electing the wrong people. But I want to urge Nigerians to look at the new parties, look at us that have ideas on how to run the country and vote for us. Nigerians can vote for me and I know they are ready to vote for me coalition or no coalition, APDA is an ideological party and I will stand on this believing that history will judge me because my decision is for the betterment of this country.
