Why Tinubu prostrated for me, by Shekarau Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau is not your everyday politician. He is a highly principled individual and his politics bears traces of conscientiousness and patriotism. In this explosive interview with IKE ABONYI, SULEIMAN BISALLA, ONWUKA NZESHI and EZE ONYEKACHI, the erstwhile strongman of the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) opens a can of worms on the All Progressives Congress (APC), exposing an odious stench from his ill-fated sojourn in the party that prides itself as bastion of opposition politics in Nigeria today. Excerpts: A lot of Nigerians know you as a highly principled opposition politician on the platform of the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) who also helped to midwife the All Progressives Congress (APC). What suddenly informed your decision to abandon ship and join the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the same party you had fought against for several years? Shortly after the 2011 elections, agitations started that it was high time the opposition joined hands together and formed a common front because it is not just enough to complain that a particular party or group of people are not doing well. We realised that no amount of noise-making would give Nigerians an alternative platform unless we get together. So, the merger is not necessarily about winning elections and taking over the Presidency. As far as I was concerned, it was about creating another avenue to speak with a louder voice from a larger platform. So, we started talking to ourselves, noting that if we are not careful, the country could turn to a one-party state and that was not going to be helpful to anybody. We have about 63 or 64 registered political parties but no one hears about most of them. Another reason I had in mind was that we needed to minimise a situation whereby we have parties that are seemingly identified with either regions, geographical locations, ethnic groups or religious inclination; because we were moving towards such a situation. So, this propelled some of us to start comparing notes. My party then, ANPP was the first to set the ball rolling. We set up a 21-man merger committee ahead of all the other parties. Our national chairman wrote to the leaders of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) expressing our desire to work together. I led the 21-member committee round the six geo-political zones in the country. When the other parties saw what we were doing, they set up similar 21-man committee. Initially ACN set up a fiveman committee; they later changed it to 19. But when we went for the first meeting and they discovered that we were 21, they quickly adjusted their own to 21. CPC also raised its merger committee. It would be interesting for people to know that the name All Progressives Congress (APC) was given birth to on February 6, 2013; that was the very first day of the Joint Merger Committee meeting. It goes to show you how committed all of us were. In the first day of the meeting, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) sent in a delegation of five members. It was after they made their presentation, we allowed them to raise their own representation to 21 members. Later, DPP came but it turned out to be a faction and very late, so we gave them a representation of just five members. This is how we came about having the 89 -member Merger Committee. Some elders like General Muhammadu Buhari, Bola Tinubu and others heard of the name the way all of you heard it in the media. They were not part of the meeting because it was just that 89-member team that was instrumental to the name. We then went through the other processes of deciding on the logo, the flag, the slogan and the symbol which took us a much longer time. We met severally but there was a time we had to adjourn for two weeks because we got to a point where we couldn’t agree on the flag and the symbol. Tempers were rising and on one occasion, one of the groups even staged a walkout. We had to adjourn for two weeks to allow tempers to calm down before we brought everybody back together. But we eventually tried to accommodate all the groups. We passed through a very terrible period and at one stage while we were working on the final stage of the party’s constitution, we spent six days at a stretch. We produced the constitution and the manifesto after a lot of wide consultations. For example, one outstanding difference in the constitution was that we created a new leadership strata. Traditionally, all parties begin their structures from the ward level. They have executives at the wards, local government councils, states and then national officers. But we now moved a step down and made provision for elected officers at the polling units, meaning that every polling booth will have 10 APC elected officials. We felt that with over 120,000 polling units in Nigeria, if you are going to have 10 elected officials per polling unit, automatically you will have 1.2 million elected officers down the ladder and that will give some level of commitment. You seem to be taking us through a long journey to show how deep you were in the APC and… You need to know my level of involvement in the party for you to know why I left. Now another component of the constitution was that since we were all members of different parties coming together, we needed a management team comprising representatives from all these parties. If you and I decide to form a new party, we can list the names of anybody just to give it the needed spread and we can just agree to apply for registration and open offices. But in this case, there are officials of these parties that dissolved to form one party called APC. So, we felt that the fairest thing to do is to have a transitional leadership composed of xnumber from each of these parties and we agreed to have a 35-member interim leadership. ACN was given nine, CPC also had nine, ANPP had nine, APGA had six while DPP was given two. We did it proportionately to the strength of the parties. To give this 35-member transitional management committee a constitutional backing, we put in the constitution that this transitional period will only be for a period of six months. The idea was that within the first three months of the registration by INEC, you set up the structure of the leadership of the party at all levels that will now facilitate the take-off of the party. Another thing they were to do within the first three months is to commence the registration of members. Then the last three months, you do the congresses up to the national convention so that within six months we have a full house of officials elected for four years as provided by the constitution. You remember that the party was registered on July 31, 2013 and if you count six months it expires on January 31, 2014. Up to the day I left APC on January 29, 2014, none of these exercises had been done. No registration, no structures of the party anywhere not to talk of the congresses and convention. Thereafter, they were not holding regular meetings and we kept wondering what the problem was. This is a new party that is supposed to be a daily affair from day one when you were given certificate. Take for example, the issue of registration. There were initial arguments that we needed money to print the membership cards. But some of us said you don’t need much money to do it. It got to the point where I personally canvassed that since we haven’t the millions that we require to print these cards and we have support all over the country, we could improvise. If you are an admirer of the party in your locality you could donate three hard cover notebooks. You can have volunteers, then fix a date and young men would sit down even if it’s on the street to do the registration of our members. Draw up columns for names, address, occupation, name of your village, your ward and any other data you want to obtain. Then when the cards are ready people can come back and take them. But for no reason, they were not able to understand. It was only around December we heard that Tinubu had awarded a contract to a private printing enterprise and had paid N89 million for membership cards to be produced. So, the production of the forms for the register is now at the mercy of Tinubu. He said he has paid but we said look, if you want to assist even if it is in billions, give to the party. Why should an individual go and award a contract, you are donating to an institution. It is not a personal affair. He gave it out and since he is the one that gave out the job, he is the one that knows the printer and how many are to be printed. Naturally, he will be the one to dictate when the job will be finished. I am sure you must have been reading in the papers, the inconsistencies on these issues. So, I asked who would have extended the tenure of the interim committee. No convention because there are no members. It is not INEC’s business because the party does not belong to INEC. Unknown to us, they were dragging this matter knowing that some fraud had taken place. By the end of December, we heard some people asking: Who told you that the life span of the interim committee would expire by the end of January? I asked too. Who told us? When we have the constitution? Then they said to us: Check INEC, there was no provision like that in the party’s constitution. When some people wrote to INEC to obtain the certified true copy of the constitution, to our dismay, we discovered that the constitution with which INEC registered APC does not contain that Schedule Three of six months interim leadership. It has been removed. Incidentally, it is the last schedule and the last page but it has been removed. We complained but nobody was ready to address this anomaly. Another thing is the removal of the unit leadership structure. I am giving you the history of these things for you to appreciate what we have gone through in APC. Go and check the timetable they have released now, they have unconstitutionally avoided conducting congresses at the unit level. This is a constitutional breach. In any case, what is in INEC today as APC Constitution is not what we the 89-member merger committee produced as the constitution of the party. From what you have told us so far, it appears you have not been happy all this while. What exactly is the real problem? They ignored all the basic things to be done in the party and started to recruit from the PDP. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with the recruitment. We are citizens of one country. There isn’t any difference between me and a man from the PDP, PDM or DPP. What makes the difference is your personal conduct wherever you find yourself. So, the first thing that triggered the crisis was when Tinubu, Buhari and Bisi Akande – the three of them are always the ones doing these things. They are the key players all the time. Without any meeting, without any discussion and without informing anybody, they decided to start going round to visit the PDP governors and asking them to join the APC. There is nothing wrong with that, but where they made a mistake was that they failed to recognise that in every state, there are leaders of ACN, CPC, ANPP and everybody recognises that we are the major stakeholders if not anywhere else, in our own parties. We understand you were not happy the way the leadership of the APC treated you when they came to recruit your governor, Rabiu Kwakwaso, into the party. What really happened? Up till about 6p.m. on the eve of their visit to Kano, I heard it just as a rumour that leaders of my party were coming to Kano to visit the governor. I didn’t believe it. Nobody told us. I checked on the elder person in ACN, Alhaji Musa Gwadabe, and he said he was not aware. I checked our counterparts in CPC, they said they were not aware. I said then, who else should know? At about 7p.m., I picked my phone and called Akande. I said: ‘Chairman, I heard you are coming to Kano to visit my governor’, and he said: ‘Yes, it was a sudden decision. We were in Sokoto for this university thing and some of us decided to go round’. I said Your Excellency, ‘I don’t think this is right. What is so urgent about it? We are not aware. We are supposed to receive you. We have not told any of our stakeholders. Could you please suspend it so that we would call the stakeholders to meet with you to explain the wisdom of this visit. Who and who would be on the delegation? Who and who are we going to meet? When we meet the governor who is going to speak there and what are we going to say? I said that I personally as a leader in Kano, I need to know all of these things. I said don’t forget, all of us have been in opposition with the party of the governor. We have been in serious opposition, so we can’t just walk up to him like that. We must know why we are going there, what we are going to say and what we want to achieve. He said he agreed with me. He called the National Secretary and we discussed. The National Secretary later called me and told me the visit had been put off. That was around 10p.m. But at about 11p.m., another elder statesman called me that they were together with Tinubu and he picked the phone. He started pleading: ‘Your Excellency, I beg you in the name of Allah, please bear with us, be patient we will be there; a decision had already been taken….’ I said look, I have just finished talking with the chairman and he told me the visit had been put off. I am not against the visit. All I’m saying is that let us discuss it. You are visiting my state, I am a stakeholder in this party and I am not aware because nobody told me. It was out of my own concern …. because people started phoning me to find out if it was true our leaders were coming to Kano tomorrow. I found out on my own which means if I did not even ask I would have been in my house when I would hear that the visit was on. We spoke for about an hour with Tinubu and I asked him to check with Akande who had earlier told me that the visit had been cancelled. Up to the following morning, I was left with the impression that the visit was not going to take place. But by 9a.m., the Governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi gave me a call. I picked the phone and he said: ‘Your Excellency, we are now at the airport in Abuja, I understand you are not happy the way things are being handled, the chairman has told me’. And I said yes. Is there anything about it? I am waiting for the chairman to call me, so that we can meet in Abuja to discuss it. He said: I am here with the chairman and handed the phone over to Akande and I asked: ‘chairman, is there any new thing?’ Then he said: ‘Your Excellency, early this morning we discovered that some people had already set off from Lagos to come, some are coming from Kaduna and are already on their way to Kano’. I said: ‘Chairman, hold it. Even if all of them are already in the Government House, you are the National Chairman, you can call them and cancel the visit. You are still at the airport in Abuja.’ Fayemi took over the telephone and kept pleading and asking: ‘What do we do now?’ I said: ‘Well, as it pleases you’. And then he said ‘the National Chairman said we would branch at your house on our way’. I said to him, ‘I am not an excess luggage that you will just branch to my house and carry me, put me in the car and move to Government House. I would not do that. If you come to my house, we will sit down and talk and then we will fix another time’. Fayemi pleaded that they will still come whether I was going with them to Government House or not. I said to them: ‘Since you said you will still come to my house, I will be waiting for you’. So, I immediately called a dozen or so of my stakeholders. We waited in my house. We were waiting for a phone call when they landed at the airport but they did not call. In fact, it was my security boys who were communicating with their colleagues on their entourage that made us know they had landed. When they landed at the airport, they had almost an hour argument. Governors Fayemi and Babatunde Fashola were insisting that they had promised to come to my house so they must come to the house. Meanwhile, the Deputy Governor of Kano State had gone to receive them at the airport and their argument was that they should drive straight to the Government House. There was a lot of arguments. Former Governor of Borno State, Ahmodu Sheriff was there and he was aware that the visit had been cancelled but in the morning when they told him that they would come through my house, he decided to join them. So, he was insisting at the airport that the agreement was that we should go to Sardauna’s house as the leader of the party in the state. But some others like Tinubu and co argued that they should go to the Government House. There was the impression that they would go to Government House and later on to see me. The National Chairman said that since I said I will not go with them to Government House even if they come through my house; it was better they just go to Government House. Maybe he did that just to allow them move. My boys who were linking up with their colleagues told me when they left to Government House. At this point, I told my stakeholders that they had gone to Government House and they will come later. So we waited. As they were leaving the Government House, my boys told me that they were leaving, we got ready for them. In fact, we came out of my living room just in case they came in so that we could receive them. After five minutes, my boys told me they had taken the route to Dutse, Jigawa State to see Governor Sule Lamido of the PDP. We still gave them benefit of a doubt. I pleaded with them to go home and reassemble at 4p.m. We all dispersed and by 4p.m. everybody was back. We waited up till about 7p.m. We still felt they would still come because they have to come through Kano to the airport. My boys were monitoring the entourage and by 9p.m., we heard they were already at the gate of the airport and nobody called to let us know whether to continue to wait or disperse. How did your supporters feel about the development and was there any apology from the party leadership? I appealed to my people and everybody dispersed. Nobody called me and they just flew out of Kano. It was on a Thursday and by Friday morning; I decided to drive down to Abuja. I shut down completely. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. For five days, I did not talk to anybody. But Kano was boiling. People were talking, making all sorts of noise; our party members were so enraged. The national leadership heard it and then Tinubu came in here to apologize. He prostrated here (pointing at the rugged floor of his office in his residence). He prostrated. He said ‘I’m sorry Sir. We have understood our mistakes. We are so sorry. This would not repeat itself again, we don’t mean to slight you. National Chairman is setting up a committee to meet you.’ He had never ever known where I stay in Abuja until that day when he traced where I was. About an hour after he had come, a delegation of four came and told me that the National Chairmen had set up a committee of five with Chief Odigie Oyegun, former governor of Edo State as chairmen; former Speaker Aminu Masari as member, Musa Gwadebe , Yusuf Ali and the governor of Zamfara State, Alhaji Abdulazz Yari. Only the Zamfara governor was not with them when they came. They said that the National Chairman had sent them to come and apologise and plead that we forgive and forget. I said to them: “You didn’t offend me but you offended our people. But it is not here in Abuja that you will apologise. I am not the one to carry your apology to Kano. Come to Kano; I would assemble all our major stakeholders and you will apologise to them in the presence of all.” So, a date was fixed; they came to Kano and we assembled all our stakeholders and they publicly apologised. I spoke on behalf of my people that we have accepted their apology. We told them not to repeat it again and that chapter was closed. Shortly after that, we heard that the PDP governors were now going to decamp and come into the party. But long before they declared that they were coming, we were all complaining. We were reading in the papers and we also heard rumours that PDP governors were coming into APC. Nobody in the National Headquarters of the APC called any of us from Kano or Sokoto, Adamawa, Kwara or Rivers to give us the due recognition as stakeholders of the party. We suddenly heard that these three people – Tinubu, Buhari, Akande and a few others kept meeting with the governors even though nobody met with us. They kept meeting with them to the point we learnt that they had drawn a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). In that MoU which was not the product of the 35-member council, but a product of this clique; they said they have signed a document that the PDP governors are automatically the leaders of APC in their states. They will nominate 60 per cent of the membership of the interim leadership when it is going to be formed. They are those to appoint the chairman of the interim leadership in the states and they will approve any office that will be allocated to any of the other parties. It therefore means that if in the interim leadership, ANPP is to produce the Organising Secretary, when we nominate, the governor has to approve. The worst is that any PDP legislator at the federal level who comes along with the governor will have automatic ticket in 2015. I have never heard of this nonsense! So, since we were not being listened to, in Kano, we sensitized our stakeholders in all the local government areas; told them the whole story about what we were passing through. The leaders decided to take a more civilized approach. We met and put our complaints in writing, stating all of these things I’ve told you. Over 250 stakeholders signed the petition. I called the National Chairman and told him that my stakeholders want an appointment with him. He gave us an appointment for December 18, 2013 at noon and all of us trooped to Abuja. We assembled with hundreds of our supporters and our stakeholders. Akande and Tinubu came and they received us. We read out our complaints and we handed over to Akande, the written complaint with the attached signatures of over 250 people who wrote their names and their designations in the old party. Naturally, we don’t expect him to solve all of the problems there. He promised us that a seven-member committee will be formed to come and address these problems. Up till the day we pronounced our decamping, on January 29 which was exactly six weeks after submitting our complaint in writing, nobody has given us an acknowledgment letter. So, stakeholders started trooping in to declare their intention to leave the APC. This is somebody (Governor Kwankwaso) that we have been fighting against for the last one decade and there has been stiff opposition between us. It requires an arbiter to come in-between us but there was nobody ready to do that. The seven-man committee Akande claimed he set up never talked to us. When you are in court and you hear that the Appeal Court judges and Supreme Court judges are already dinning with your opponent, why should you continue to waste your time in the court? So, this is the story. I convinced myself that from the religious point of view, if I go back, fold my arms and resign to fate; if I quit and retire to my personal life, then I would be ready to answer God’s questions as to what I did with all the experiences I have had as a public servant for 25 years and a governor for eight years. Where do I take these experiences given to me by God all these years? So, we convinced ourselves that folding our arms in resignation is a bigger evil. The lesser evil is to go elsewhere and continue the service to our people. I am fully aware of all the stupid things that have been said of this move. Some people have said that I have been working for PDP; I am going to work for Jonathan, I have been given money and I will be given a position. All these, I know. But what really encourages me is that the Prophet of Allah has said don’t allow accusations stop you from doing any good act that you have convinced yourself that it is the right thing to do because at the end you will be vindicated.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 12:50:14 +0000
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