Oby Ezekwesili, a former minister of Education and Solid Minerals, is the presidential candidate of the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), in the 2019 presidential election. She recently held an interactive section with some selected journalists in Lagos, unfolding plans to transform the country, if elected president. INIOBONG IWOK, who was there brings the excerpts:
How do you react to President Buhari’s refusal to sign the electoral bill into law?
The president can do the right thing and sign the bill into an act. Buhari cannot be seen as imperiling the 2019 general election, because that is what would happen if the president does not sign the bill into law. The electoral integrity of next year’s election depends on how long the president signs that bill into an act.
The party and I as a candidate will make sure we don’t stop insisting that the president should do what he is supposed to do. The president should not allow his personal interest to get into the collective interest of Nigerians. This democracy is going to be 20 years in 2019; he does not want to be the one that will mar our democracy, he should sign that bill into law.
What do you think is the reason why the President is afraid of signing that bill into law?
I think the President is likely afraid of two provisions into that bill; it worries him. They don’t want the card reader and the provision. The card reader is the solution to election shenanigan. I don’t think the APC (All Progressives Congress) want that. The second part is that there is a provision that gives rules of INEC equivalent of the provision of the act. I don’t think they want that.
And you know INEC needs that kind of power in order to respond to some of the challenges as they happen. So INEC cannot be standing outside the legal framework. So what is this thing that stands in their way? So we hear of the mistake that has been found four times that the bill was presented. This last time we were told that the president’s people were working with the National Assembly members. They all worked together with the lawmakers and they could not detect the errors. No, I don’t think Nigerians are fools. The president cannot fool anybody. It is clear that this government does not want improvement in our elections.
It is same government that was confortable to see the election in Osun and Ekiti which is a disgrace to our country. It was a civilian coup to our democracy – I mean what happened in Ekiti and Osun. Our electoral process is now tradable whereby the buyer and the seller aided by the abused state institutions like the police and the military coming together to spoil our democracy. Our citizens will not accept it in the 2019 elections.
The elections must hold and it must be transparent, free and fair. That is the legitimacy Nigerians will confer on those elected in the elections.
Should the National Assembly veto the President?
It may have to come to that. It will be unfortunate for the President. I recall when the President was newly elected, an interviewer asked me: what word do you have for the president having been elected as a civilian and military president? And what I simply say is that civilian administration is not military rule. The President should know that history would place him in an ignoble position if he does not sign this bill and make progress on our democratic experience.
Two elections that were held recently in Osun and Ekiti were said to have ended badly. Do you have confidence INEC chairman can conduct credible elections next year?
I think that the chairman of INEC knows that all eyes are on him. He is someone that is well read; he is someone who should care about what history says of him. He is someone who has several competent people as commissioners. It will be a colossal tragedy if he disappoints the expectation of Nigerians.
Those that have followed recent elections in the country, even the international bodies, have said the present INEC is better INEC in terms of preparation, but there are many things involved in election management that can undermine the integrity of an election.
Why is it that we downplay the ugly incident of vote buying that was witnessed in the two elections? How many people have been prosecuted? Time has changes with technology. We saw what happen in those places.
So what we are saying is that INEC, the police, the federal government, and other establishments that are associated with election duties in Nigeria are simply not interested in addressing this impunity that is taking a foothold in our democratic process. We can’t accept that.
What we are saying is that the chairman of INEC has a bigger responsibility now than anything we have known him to do. Under this particular management we saw Ekiti and Osun states’ gubernatorial elections. But the police and the security agencies, the government, have a role to play in this.
The INEC law says that vote buying is an offence, so why is vote buying going unpunished? INEC cannot be the one punishing people but it has to make it a major issue.
Because it undermines electoral integrity, its mean you are giving election to people who have not won elections. The INEC chairman needs to make sure he is aware of what history will record of him.
He has the training to solve this problem. One major issue is: those basic solutions that people don’t have opportunity to trade their vote and take photography of it as an opportunity to collect money, what has been done about it?
Are we going to be ready to make sure that this kind of technology is taken to each pooling unit, so that no one can stay near the polling units in this country to know if a certain person voted for you or your party?
Are we going to make sure that the people cannot vote carrying their phones to snap their card to show who they voted for, while money is sent to their account. Those little things must be done. INEC must do these to have the confidence of Nigerians and we will keep on talking until it done.
You appear to have confidence in INEC chairman’s ability to conduct credible elections in 2019, but recent elections have been inconclusive?
I think what you have done is that you have made a summary statement. What I would say is that with the training and capacity of Professor Yakubu, there is no reason why he should fail in conducting credible elections in the country.
The Osun election has become a signpost to what could go wrong in 2019, so there is no reason why Yakubu should not pick up the lessons learned from the elections and give the country an internationally accepted election in 2019.
The two major parties are PDP and APC, but Nigerians want to know what your party is bringing to the table in terms of policies that is different?
The key thing for our party unlike other parties is that we feel embarrassed that Nigeria has overtaken India has the extreme poverty capital of the world. And that we want to tackle poverty in the way china faced it and were able to tackle it.
China faced poverty with hundreds of millions of its citizen and the way they faced it was to make the private sector the focus of their engine of economic growth and development.
When they initiated the right policies in health, education, they invested in their people and critical infrastructure, their economy began to grow above double digit over a period of over 30 years.
This double-digit growth pulled their people out of poverty. Today 700 million of those people have been pulled out of poverty.
We have gone in reverse. We did not have much people in poverty in the 90s. It was 28 million, but we have grown and grown since then. Today we are talking about over 87 million Nigerians in poverty, living on less than $1.90 a day.
So our government will run a market-friendly, private sector-driven economy, which will grow and lift 80 million Nigerians out of poverty.
Secondly, our emphasis on economy development are through human capital development. So education is our new oil and human capital is our new economy. So the kind of reform we are going to be carrying out would be on education, health and human capital, we know what it takes to have productive citizens who have the capacity to solve the problems in our societies.
The problem is what should our normal political parties care about? They care about oil prices.
For as long as oil is doing well they believe the country is fine, so when you really look at it you want to ask what is their contribution to the oil we have and to the development process? It is nothing. We want to change that and make Nigerian citizens the drivers of the process of economy development.
Thirdly, we look at the issues of primacy of Nigerian life; if we must have human development, we must keep and safeguard the human life. Human life must matter and for every human life we must put equal weight to Nigerian life.
Nigerian life must matter. We must put equal quality to Nigerian life. In today’s Nigeria we protect oil installation more than human life and we must change that.
So security reform is going to be major. The smart intelligent people in the Nigerian police and military are going to be happy; they are going to be given priority. Professionalism, leadership based on character, competence will be reward.
Merit will be the hallmark of the police; it wouldn’t be a race to the top. We would try and prevent that, which means we would invest massively in intelligent asset; intelligent asset reduces your risk of what you are going to respond to.
So every Nigerian life must be meaningful to us. As soon as I enter as president commander-in-chief, God forbid that our Chibok girls, Leah Sharibu and the rest have not been released. The first thing I will do is to send a special team which would proceed and work day and night to rescue the girls.
Those who live in the country and take the lives of Nigerians will not find it easy. The lives of Nigerians will matter to me, and I must keep them alive and make the tough decisions.
I will be an effective commander-in-chief; I will make sure we are not losing our people to Boko Haram, or herdsmen and that they don’t go unchallenged.
My final thought is that anyone who kills Nigerians must face the music. You cannot have a situation where people are killed and there is no consequence, nothing is done. It means you have taken lives to zero when you allow society to function that way.
What will you do to the high cost of governance in Nigeria?
There was time the National Assemble was angry that I called Nigerians’ attention to the fact that the cost of governance is expensive and we are not going to have investable resources of government to do the things we do for the poor if most government resources are used to take care of the few National Assembly members.
Well, you know in 2017 the government released its budget report that the entire oil revenue was not enough to pay the entire government workers. They had to borrow to complement oil revenue to be able to pay the personnel cost alone.
How can people hear things like this and still be normal? It means the country is in trouble. It means that two million people that work for government consume the entire resources. We are in post-oil Nigeria but government and its officials are not acting like that.
So, cost of governance will be part of the reform. When people talk of minimum wage, we need to talk of it together.
That is the unfortunate thing that happens that the government and labour are not telling themselves the truth.
We need to look at the productivity of labour, the productivity of the country, the productivity of the private sector, and the productivity of the Nigerian person we need to drive toward higher productivity.
I believe that our workers are not earning living wages, and we need to get the economy running to enable us prosper, so that the workers are beneficially part of that prosperity. We must make sure that the people are beneficially rewarded, and we must have solution to that.
In specific terms, what would you do to lift about 80 million Nigerians out of poverty?
The fastest way to lift people out of poverty is to ensure they have income, and the way people get income is to have job or things they do. So when we say we are going to run the economy, is to have sound policies and revamp it.
To have sound policies, we are going to do the reform of institutions and procedures, so that we don’t have regulation that is standing in the way of the private sector. If the private sector is small business or large-scale business, we say we are going to be very resourceful in the area of human capital development.
We will be very careful in the areas of governance; we will invest in infrastructure, education, human capital and health education.
All of those things will enable the private sector to grow and reduce poverty, so the agenda is that with the private sector driving the growth process, the regions will grow at two percent.
We want to grow to a level we were in the year 2015, from then we came down to seven per cent and five per cent in the policy of reforming the economy.
We will unleash opportunity for growth on the diversified base. What you will see is that we will move towards double digit growth just like China did
One-third of our people are in subsistent agriculture. If we want to reduce poverty among those people, we need to improve productivity. How do you do that? All the things in their value chain, yield from their farming, you do it from their seedling, irrigation, so that it would not only be rainfall anymore but through irrigation system. You look at their access to market and the role power and infrastructure play in their business.
We would look at land ownership issues. This will support them to grow large by supporting the system of cooperative that enables them to have competitive completion that somebody who was generating two tons on a small acre of land will now generate more. So we can have higher outputs and improve people’s productivity.
We have seen giving such advice to countries we need this and by doing this their economy began to grow. The people became more productive and earn more, one of my initiatives is to work, work and earn more.
Your party does not have a national spread and structure. Don’t you think this will affect your chances?
I am not worried. The reason am not worried is that up till now Nigerians don’t know that ACPN existed before the 2011 general elections, and that ACPN fielded a candidate in the 2015 presidential election. That candidate then is my vice now. They actually placed fourth in that election. It may be low but history has recorded that they participated and they came fourth in that election.
So when you say ACPN does not have presence in all the states of the federation and ACPN do not have candidates, the fact is that they have candidates running for House of Representatives and other positions; the total number of ACPN candidates across the country is more than 250.
ACPN is not like green party, where you are only talking about a particular person being in charge. The grassroots structure is there. This is not a solo effort; there is a party and there are candidates. These are the reasons I chose my running mate because he is really a grassroots man.
Because the party is interested in the grassroots people, these are people who operate subsistent farming, people who operate at the grassroots level, and have skills, we will initiate policies that boost business environment and grow business.
So when people talk and say you don’t have a structure, we say we are very glad we don’t have this corrupted structure. While they are solving a structure problem we are solving a distribution problem.
What I mean is, we just think of election as a product. So what you want is that your product should get to those who need it, and you should think that the party should be taken to the citizens who need it. So what we are concerned about is that our product gets to that the citizen who needs it.
We are using network marketing. We have seen people building shops to sell products. It is because there are networks we are using data and the media to distribute our agenda to the people – those that need it – and we have seen the effect.
I have seen people who come to me and say: ‘We know of Ezekwesili, I know what you stand for; I know your background and I am donating to your campaign because I know your pedigree.’ So when people talk, I say, ‘I am not a candidate of the political class; I am a candidate of the Nigerian people.’
The people of Nigeria are hungry and they have a strong desire for a new direction, and they see me as that new direction.
INIOBONG IWOK
