Why I’m contesting against Jonathan – Tafawa-Balewa dailytrust.ng/daily/images/stories/politics/Balewa-tafawa.jpg Dr. Abduljalil Tafawa Balewa Dr. Abduljalil Tafawa Balewa, a presidential aspirant on PDP platform, is a physicist and holds a PhD in nuclear chemistry. He explains in this interview why he is contesting against the president despite his adoption as the sole candidate of the PDP. Excerpts: Why are you contesting for the PDP presidential ticket? I am contesting because it is my right as a Nigerian to contest. I am contesting strictly because I think that I can deliver a lot to Nigerians. Is that to say there is something the current administration has not done, which you want to do? I think the power situation should have changed. This is a very basic need. It’s even going to be considered as a human right, that we should have access to power. Without adequate power, we cannot have any industrialisation; we cannot call ourselves a functioning economy. Our educational system is also terrible. Even before that, we need to talk about security. These are all related. Without power, even the entrepreneurs and investors are not going to come here to invest, because it will cost them too much to be able to produce anything. It will be so expensive that profit will be very little. There are parts of this country that are geared towards particular industry. We need to be able to encourage that. Each of the states that we have can survive by itself. They have enough resources, whether alluvial or mineral resources and enough manpower, which needs to be trained to be skilled, because our educational system is not robust. We need technical and vocational schools so that we can employ our own people. Simple things like tiles or building or doing ceiling, we have to depend on citizens of other countries as close as the Republic of Benin or Togo to be able to do that. If we have technical or vocational schools, it doesn’t cost the government as much to be able to train them to acquire these skills. We will have them within the workforce within a very short period of time, because the training is not going to be as long as the supposed four-year training that a university graduate is supposed to get. The way we’re working now, we need to Nigerianise our focus. We’re trying as much as possible to emulate the United States’ constitution and type of governance. The US got here over 200 years by working hard. We just cannot get away from what we were and not studying what we were well. We thought we can just jump into this. Your party, the PDP, has endorsed President Jonathan as its sole candidate. Are you not defying your party by coming out to contest? Nigeria is a country of at least 180 million people. To now say that just one person in a democracy is the only one that this group chooses is the peak of sycophancy. It is not only degrading the constitution. The word that makes my party, the Peoples Democratic Party and democracy should be joining together of people to express in a concise form what they will want, not the joining together of some aberrant, small, minute, infinitesimal and, that are making themselves inconsequential now to the rest of the populace to the detriment of the president. The president is a good man. I don’t think that the way my party is portraying democracy is comprehensible to any right thinking person. Democracy, the way of the rest of us understand it and a lot more than a handful of them are blabbering this so-called candidacy is not common in democracies anywhere in the world. I think it is important that I give my people an alternative, it is important also for the president to test his popularity correctly, legitimately. These people are hiding their heads in the sand strictly for their own pockets and their own little shells and enclaves; they’re not speaking for the rest of the country. In endorsing the president, the party said it was to uphold the political cultures in other developed democracies. Do you agree with that? No. This is very annoying in many ways, because so many other people all around the world are very interested in Nigeria. These people are either reading history upside down or they just don’t understand what they were reading or seeing. It’s not so at any time, even when a president is just coming in. It happened as recently as with Obama and Mrs Clinton. There was time when Senator Edward Kennedy had to vie with Carter, and Carter even blamed Senator Kennedy that it was he that made him lose the election to Reagan. This is supposed to be a democracy; it’s not autocracy. In other countries, there’s a total separation of church or the mosque or religion and state. Our politicians mix everything up, whether it’s through ethnicity, religion, monarchy. They must find ways of always trying to mix things like oil and water together only because they have not been forced by the citizenry to tell them what is it that they’re actually coming to do in government? Using all these excuses insults the intelligence of the average Nigerian, because hardly do you have any issue-based campaign where you can tell people what you want them to do, not because this person is Hausa, this one is Fulani, this is a Christian, this is a Muslim, this is a pagan. They’re bastardising democracy. At some point, you were denied nomination form, but when you were eventually given, there were reports that you withdrew for Jonathan. What really happened? There are sycophants here much more than in any other country. I’m sure there are sycophants in other countries, but it’s being made a profession here. I’m sure that the apex leadership of our party, those who are at the very beginning, still understand what democracy is and gave us the form. One thing that is very strange is that I went to a press conference that I didn’t know. I just happened to see one of my most favourite elder statesmen, Dr Edwin Clark. I sat beside him; this is someone that has been very close to me and my entire family for a long while. He talked about so many other things that were happening in Nigeria, and when I was asked if I had anything to say, I said ‘no, it’s not my press conference; it’s Dr E K Clark’s.’ They asked me to say something about what Clark said. Everything he mentioned while I was there was correct. I said everything that he said was true, and if you look at the clip on television, that was what I said. I then started hearing of different things that I said that I didn’t say. So, I was forced to come out to deny the incorrect insinuations. I don’t have an iota of disdain or hatred for anyone. President Jonathan is still the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I love this country with all my heart and I respect all its institutions. I’m running to be able to salvage and redeem the country’s image, not against anyone. How did you manage to raise the N22 million for your nomination form and how prepared are you financially to sustain the campaign? The political scene in Nigeria is so money-based that it is sickening. Politicians will come only four years after the last event to now have trickles of whatever it is, maybe money or bags of rice, and then forget the citizens until the next election comes. That’s why I’m trying to practise issue-based democracy. What concerns all must be approved by all. I’m campaigning to be president of the entirety of Nigeria not for some governors or local government chairmen or NWC or any C. I am campaigning to the entire country, and I’m asking them if what I want to do for them pleases them, to please support my campaign in any which way. A lot of my posters, a lot of my adverts are paid for by people that feel the same as I do. You have neighbourhood organisations all the way down to wards printing either flyers or posters. I, of course, started it, but I didn’t say that I was uncomfortable. But, my support is coming from the grassroots, and it’s going very well and blossoming. Did such contributions form part of the money for your nomination form? Not at all. I think that will be very well of me. What’s your opinion about government’s handling of the security situation so far? Until recently, when the general populace and some of the hunters were involved, we didn’t get many results. Perhaps our army that has been revered all over the world to bring peace to different parts of the world doesn’t seem to either have the right direction or materials; we’re now beginning to get some success. But we need to get to the roots of the problem. We need to get to why we’re in this in the first place. There’s nobody that will have a job, no matter how menial, that’s bringing him money, who will now have time to go out of his way and destroy other people’s things. The thought that these people are creating little caliphates for themselves is ridiculous. Obviously, Muslims and Christians have always lived side-by-side not just in the North East but all over the North over time. I think that if we have the type of system that we had for militants in the South in the North, even the citizens will kick these people out. So, we need to look for a marshal plan for that part of Nigeria. Nigeria has a very bad data warehousing; that part of Nigeria that is very rural and depends on farming may not even have been captured, not knowing how many people are displaced. We wouldn’t want the world to think that we’re stealing their mandate by not allowing them to vote. But how can they vote when they’re not registered with INEC?
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 11:06:46 +0000
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