Hilliard Eta, former acting National Chairman and Vice-Chairman, South-South of the All Progressives Congress (APC), speaks with TAIWO AMODU, on the discontent within the party arising from its recently conducted primaries and other issues. Excerpts:

AS a former national officer of the APC, what is your take on the lack of confidence trailing the party primaries that produced the candidates for the next general elections? A lot of aspirants are saying they were short-changed.

Well, thank you very much. First of all, you must bring it under the proper context, bring a background to it to be able to come to the proper conclusions. In 2013, when the party was established, the establishment of that party was predicated on certain fundamental issues, one of which was the failure of the internal democratic process in the then ruling party, the People’s Democratic Party. So we offered to do things differently. That is, amongst other variables, what made us congregate those variables and advance change as the course of action for Nigerians to give us a chance. This was, in brief, what made for the success of the party in the 2015 election.

So it is therefore instructive for not just the party managers today, but also the founding fathers of our party to come together and examine whether, in the area of internal democracy, we have achieved the goals that we set ourselves. And if you ask me, I will tell you that we have failed in that regard abysmally. Now, people complain, and their complaints are valid, about the nature of the processes that throw up candidates for the party. People believe that most of the candidates are hand-picked, and that this does not represent the electoral will of the membership of the party.

So for me, the best way to look at this scenario is to offer a perspective that will take us away from having these kinds of scenarios every time we have primaries within the party. Of course, you know the dictum by Albert Einstein that you cannot do the same things the same way over and over again and expect a different result. In fact, he described it as madness. We have been doing the same things since 2013. We have been aping and emulating the party that we replaced since the 2015 elections till now. I think the time has come for reforms. The time has come for reforms within the party to make it possible for a just and fair internal democratic process to be institutionalised in the party. So, I sympathise with those who feel short-changed. I also appeal to the managers of the party today that, not with a wave of the hand, should they dismiss all the concerns of the people who feel short-changed. There should be a fair way of dealing with each and every issue that has arisen as a fallout of the last internal democratic primaries of the party.

When the Electoral Act was amended and indirect primary was expunged, there were people who were excited that this would, in a way, remove the governors’ vice-like grip on party structures. If you have to do an appraisal of the recently conducted primaries, do you think the enormous influence of the governors has actually been whittled down?

I have been a party manager for as long as I have been in politics. Even at the local level, I was a party manager. At the state level, I was a party manager, and at the national level, I was a party manager for six years. I will tell you this: the most manipulable process is the direct primary, within the context of the Nigerian democratic experience. And so when people were rejoicing, I found nothing to rejoice about. You see, we are in the 26th year of the 21st century. We are in a new era, the era of AI and ICT. And so we cannot perpetually run away from the realities of today.

If the party must survive beyond the Asiwaju presidency, then the party must begin a process of reform and engage and embrace technology. It is possible for you to have the required results within the structures of the party, whether it is by indirect or direct primaries, if you deploy technology. For instance, there were glitches during the NBA elections. Glitches occurred in those processes. But for me, it was a good thing that a financial member of the Bar was given the opportunity to elect his or her president directly. And I hear that about 93,000 people voted in that election. Now, even in some primaries, governorship primaries, you may not have up to 90,000 people voting as members of the party. Which is to say that if you break these primaries into their constituencies, they are not as many as we had in the Bar elections. I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying. So what I’m saying is that we cannot perpetually run away from the realities of our time. We are not going to allow some of us who are in this party and who knew the reason we came together to form this party. As long as we remain in this party, we are going to be asking for reforms in such a way that certain parameters are established, so that when we finally retire and leave this party to people who will come after us, we will be able to be satisfied in our various retirement homes that we did our best.

One of the things that we have to do is to reform the internal democratic process of our party. It must be responsible and responsive to the needs of our people on a day-to-day basis. Number two, we must develop a body of ideas that will constitute the raison d’être for even the membership of the party. For you to want to be a member of our party, you have to look at this body of ideas and say, I agree with this body of ideas. This is why I’m a member of the All Progressives Congress. We did not choose the word ‘Progressives’ for the heck of it.

The people that are running the party will always tell you they have done certain things to instil sanity and inspire the confidence of the average party faithful. They tell you that they have a progressive institute. They have done biometric registration of members and all that. But members still express disappointment and raise concern over hijack of primaries. What really is the problem?

First of all, you cannot dismiss what we have contributed to the political history of Nigeria. When you are talking about biometric membership of parties, you have to give that to the APC. Prior to the APC, there was no such thing. So you have to give it to them.

If you say that members are biometrically identifiable, you have to give it to our party. But we have to go from there. That is the foundation. For me, when we were in the NWC, we studied that proposal, and that proposal was not to end there. That proposal was to enable the party to collect its dues from its members seamlessly, technologically, so that no big man will say that he owns the party. The party will be self-funded. That’s one of the reasons why we started the process of biometric registration of members.

The number two thing that we wanted to do from there was what I am telling you now: that we would have employed, based on the fact that we know our membership and we can identify them by their biometric numbers, a system through which they can use their membership credentials and vote, while sitting in the comfort of their homes, for candidates of their choice. And the winner of such a contest will be the reflection of the will of the members of the party. So for me, I will always call for reforms on those two major political pillars.

One, internal democratic process. Number two, identifiable ideas. Because let me tell you the fear. The fear that I harbour, as not just a member, but as a founder of APC. I’ll give you my fear. My fear is that two iconic individuals came together for the establishment of APC. One was former President Muhammadu Buhari and then the present President, His Excellency, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The two of them. Now, to God be the glory, the first one had finished his presidency. And I do know, as I speak with you, that this second one will also finish his presidency. But immediately after his presidency, we do not have any member of that kind of stature who will be the reason that people will leave their houses to go and vote for the APC. Even though I know the nature of the politics of Nigeria, you do know that societies are never stagnant. Societies are dynamic. It might get to a point where Nigerians will be asking for ideas, and they are beginning to, especially the younger generation now, ask for ideas. So after Asiwaju, good for us that we today have a man of immense ideas and creativity as President. But post-Asiwaju, we need to be able to convince Nigerians to leave their houses and come to vote for us, based on the body of ideas that we have adopted as a party. For instance, we should have an idea of what we want on education and we need to be able to convince Nigerians to differentiate where we stand on education and where the ADC, the NDC, and the PDP stand on education. We should be able to have that on health. We should be able to have those ideas on external relations. We should be able to have that on tax. We should be able to have that on social welfare. So on those two fronts, we shall be calling for reforms. We shall call on other founders and members of the party who are so minded to join us in a national call for the reform of our party.

For those saying they foresee internal implosion in the APC post-Tinubu’s presidency. You’ve just mentioned Tinubu and Buhari — that even before the tail end of Asiwaju’s tenure in 2031, there could be an implosion in your party against the backdrop of these inherent contradictions?

Of course, first of all, we are not God. We can only do some permutations and some summations. We can only do our research and then propose an end to a particular situation. But let us not forget our history. We need to ask ourselves, why were we able to defeat the incumbent government in 2015? What was it that was wrong with them that Nigerians rejected them? Are we not repeating the same mistakes? Because this has been the bane of the average African politician — his ability, his uncanny and inexplicable ability, to repeat mistakes. People learn from mistakes. Have we learnt from the mistakes of the PDP? You see, every politician, I should think, is propelled and driven by enlightened self-interest. And one of those interests is the ability to go into government and use an approach that you have developed, a vision that God has given to you, to govern the people. You get what I am saying? And we saw in 2015 a party that had no ideas, a party that had no internal cohesion, internal democratic processes and all of that. You know, what happened in the PDP was that at every election cycle, they selected people to represent them and those that felt short-changed were left unattended to. So they became a community of very highly angered people, people who were disenchanted, people for whom the level of dissonance between them and the party was quite high. And so when they found a voice at the convention before that election in 2014, and they then decided to rally around that voice that was led by the then Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, and five governors who walked out of that convention, they found a voice across the nation. That was the reason for the balkanisation and the atrophy that attended the PDP, and today the PDP is almost at the point of extinction.

We have to learn from these experiences and chart a new route that will resonate with our people. There are lots and lots of people who will tell you that there is no difference between the PDP and the APC, that the difference is only in name. It is insulting to us who can be described as the founders of the party because that was not the reason we got together. We did not get together in 2013 to be sewn into the same garment as the PDP. So I always say that if God has given you the opportunity in our party, your work Is cut out for you. So the present managers of the party can do a world of good if they can start the process of reform of this party; else, the doomsday prophecy of the people who say that the party will implode may come to pass. Because the things that happened in the PDP that made for the implosion of the PDP can be found in our party.

In the last few months, some of the major parties, including the PDP, NDC and ADC, have been going in and out of court over certain critical issues, including party registration and a number of other things. Your party has been fingered as being behind this. What do you have to say?

First of all, it is very childish. It is very infantile for the opposition to think that it is the place of the ruling party to make their lives comfortable. No political, democratic environment will advise political parties that are fighting for the same thing to be friendly to each other except on the basis of ideas. Like, maybe you have progressive parties like the APGA and APC always collaborating. But generally, the first thing in politics is not for the ruling party to make the life of the opposition party comfortable, neither is the opposition party expected to make the life of the ruling party comfortable. It is childish. Having said so, if you look at all their legal issues holistically and sensibly, you will see that each and every one of them was contrived by their lack of intelligence, lack of strategy, and lack of the ability to look beyond their noses.

Let us start with the ADC. The ADC was adopted by Atiku and his cohorts as a platform for the next election. Are they now saying that they did not do due diligence on the ADC to know that the man who became national chairman of the party in 2005, Mr Ralph Nwosu, desecrated the constitution of his party, which spelt out that no officer can be in office beyond eight years? It is in the constitution of the ADC. So before Atiku and his people moved into the ADC, these court issues, these legal battles, were already on. People who thought that Ralph Nwosu had no reason to be in office were already in court. So is it not nonsensical for Atiku and his people to now accuse the APC of igniting the crisis in the party, the crisis that started many years ago, long before they chose the ADC as their platform?

Take the NDC. The NDC was a product of the court. The NDC did not go through the processes that parties are required to go through in Nigeria to be registered as a political party. INEC was ordered by the court to register the NDC, and it was the court of first instance because if it was the Supreme Court, that would have become a statute in Nigeria, a law in Nigeria, because you cannot go beyond the Supreme Court. But this was the judgment of the court of first instance. So Obi and his group, did they not think that because the NDC was a creation of the court, an appellate court could also take that right away from them? Does it not make sense to them? Does it not make sense to them that if you got a judgment from the court of first instance, an appellate court could withdraw that judgment? Is it not possible? So was it the APC that instructed the court to rule on the establishment of the NDC? So what it shows to you clearly is that these are non-thinking people.

Now let us go to the Labour Party because, you see, Obi cries wolf where there is none. There was factionalisation until the Supreme Court said that Nnenadi Usman’s faction was the right faction, and the Supreme Court gave that judgment before Obi left for the ADC. Which means that on the day Obi left for the ADC, there was no problem in the Labour Party. The Supreme Court had already given its judgment. But you know, Obi himself has said that he does not like challenges. He doesn’t have the stomach for challenges. So he had already made up his mind that in Labour, there was likely going to be a presidential primary. So he needed to go to a place where they would give him food ready.

But is it a mere coincidence that all the parties that are contesting this exalted seat of the Presidency with the APC are having critical Issues with registration and growing internal cracks?

No. You see, I have told you this. You think that when we came in 2013 that we did not have problems? Have you forgotten? Have Nigerians forgotten that the gove”nment of that day got an organisation registered as APC? Have you forgotten? There was an organisation that was not properly processed and was not properly registered by INEC but was allowed to register as APC. What I’m trying to tell you, my dear friend, is that if you look, you will see snippets of what happens in the House of Commons between the Conservative and the Labour Party. They are never friends. We are not the friends of ADC and NDC and Labour. We cannot sit down in the comfort of our offices and begin to contrive how their lives will be easy.

So it will be right to validate the insinuations that the ruling party has a hand in their crises?

No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that they are intellectually lazy. I have told you that the Labour Party, as we speak today, has no issue. Why did Obi leave there? Now, ADC had an issue before Atiku and his people got into ADC, that the NDC was a proclamation of a court and it was a court of first instance, which allows for an appellate court to upturn that judgment. How much more can the APC explain to the Nigerian people that though it is not our business that their life is easy, they are intellectually lazy, unstrategic and nonsensical in their postulations? We knew when we were registering the APC that the government of the day was not going to make our lives easy. So, we engaged ourselves and made sure that, at the end of the day, we would prevail. When they had their meeting In Ibadan, what was their communiqué? Was it not that they were going to have one presidential candidate? Did they not clap their hands all over Nigeria? How many presidential candidates do we now have in the opposition? Makinde, who convened the Ibadan declaration, has become the presidential candidate of APM. And let me ask the question, please, if you say, for instance, that the APC is the one orchestrating all the crises in ADC and NDC and Labour, why have we not orchestrated the same problem in APM?

Let’s look at the array of presidential candidates: Makinde, Donald Duke, Adebayo; incidentally, all of them are from the South. Are you seeing a coalition in the opposition parties against Tinubu to divide and undermine the formidable Southern bloc he has been building?

When, in 2023, he contested, was there no coalition of Southern candidates? Go and do your research now. Look, Donald Duke is my friend, my brother. Go and write it down. Donald Duke and his PRP will not have 500 votes from Cross River. Asiwaju will defeat Makinde in Oyo State and, outside of Oyo State, Makinde will not have 2% in even the South-West states in Nigeria. Let them ask themselves the question. And I will not say more than this. If the man was outside, facing the cabal in Aso Rock, in his own party, the governing party, facing Atiku, the connivance and the calibration in Aso Rock was for the ascension of Atiku, facing Obi, facing Adebayo because Adebayo is not the candidate, facing Sowore and the rest, and he was able to defeat them from outside the government, is it now? We are not talking about governors. Take the South-South, for instance. Even the Igbo-speaking areas of the South-South, nothing, nothing, will make the South-South leave Asiwaju and go and vote for another person. And that’s the South-South. And I said, go and write it down. Except, and I make bold to say this, except for the Igbo-speaking areas of the South-South that will vote for Obi, nobody will leave a man that is giving us what Asiwaju is giving us and go and vote for people that we do not know, people who don’t give our people what Asiwaju is giving us.

Finally, you sound so confident that your party will do well in the next general election, and this is at variance with the public opinion polls already conducted, which, perhaps, may not necessarily make President Tinubu unpopular, but his policies are biting hard on the people and these have given rise to the wave of opposition you have. How do you respond to this?

First of all, I’m not saying that we’re going to have a smooth ride, but let us put your question into two perspectives. One, the reason for the hardship and whether the people will vote for us or not. If Asiwaju wanted to be “popular”, he would have done populist things like other presidents. He would have brought our reserves for everybody to share like Jonathan did. He would have continued printing money like Buhari did, through Ways and Means. But in the life of a people, a man will come and will know that it is not about the next election, it is about the next generation. He has done a lot of things in Nigeria that are making Nigeria transit into the Nigeria that will have enough to cater for the needs of Nigeria. As you are aware, Asiwaju has moved our GDP from about 300 and something trillion naira to about 550 trillion naira. Today, he has moved our net external reserves from 3.8 billion dollars to about 48 billion dollars and the entire foreign reserves to about 52 billion dollars.

The economy is growing at between 3.8 and 4.2 per cent. There has been an astronomical growth in the Nigerian Stock Exchange, to the effect that we have moved our market capitalisation from about 55 trillion to about 155 trillion. Now, just a few days ago, the naira was described by rating agencies as perhaps the best-performing currency in the world. About a few weeks ago, the Nigerian Exchange surpassed the South Korean Exchange as the best-performing exchange in the world.

People are seeing the statistics as abstract, because the poor remains poor and the so-called gains are not reaching the average Nigerian. What do you say to that?

There are two reasons, amongst many reasons, I want to touch on only two. Number one, the greatest problem that we have in Nigeria is the governors. In these reforms, it has made it possible that the allocations to state governments have, in some cases, quadrupled, and in some cases tripled, and because of the way we have a federation, most of the policies are done by the federal government, while implementation is at the state and the local government levels, so one would have expected that, having these humongous amounts of money going to the subnational governments, the states would create policies and platforms where these macroeconomic gains of the country will trickle down to the microeconomic expectations of the people. This has not been done. That’s number one.

Number two, price gouging. What we have is an economy where most of the things that we consume are imported. These importers put prices on their goods arbitrarily in a way that does not have any connection to the economic realities of what they are doing, and that is why I disagree with the president when the president said that we will allow the market forces to determine the prices of our consumables. The reason I disagree with the president is because we have a largely informal economy, so most of our markets are not regulated. We cannot have a perfect market, and if we have the kind of imperfect market that we have, then the market cannot be the instrument to regulate. So we have to go back to a time when government will insist on behalf of the people that you cannot price gouge, and that was the reason the Consumer Protection Commission under Tunji Bello was established. So those two things, for me, constitute the reason that Nigerians…. I am not saying that by today, everything would have gone back to what it used to be. I am just saying that if these two variables are activated, if the governors begin to think proactively and if the governors know that they represent the people, and that they bring out policies and platforms to trickle down the macroeconomic growth that we have in Nigeria, things would have been better.

I’m not absolving the federal government of blame, but I’m just saying that yes, we have had some level of downward spiralling of the cost of living, especially in the area of food. There was a time that a bag of rice cost about N100,000, but right now it’s hovering between N50,000 and N60,000, the same thing for beans, the same thing for garri, the staples in Nigeria. They have gone down. They have not gone down to the level of the pre-reforms period, but they have gone down, and I know that as we continue with these reforms, as we have more money coming into the economy, the prices of goods will come down. (Sunday Tribune)