Nyako Will Be A Liability To APC – Dr Ardo By: Shuaib Shuaib on October 26, 2013 - 3:50am Dr Umar Ardo is a political adversary of Governor Murtala Nyako. He contested the PDP governorship ticket in the last election and believes the flawed primaries that were held is what led to the present crisis haunting the party at the national level. In this interview with SHUAIB SHUAIB, he also blames INEC for PDP crisis and suggests Nigeria would have had a different history if Atiku Abubakar had challenged the last PDP presidential primaries in court. The crisis within the PDP started in Adamawa State. Now, it seems that it is in Adamawa that the first PDP governor will decamp to an opposition party. What impact will this have on the PDP? On the PDP, there will be no impact. It is true that the present crisis started from Adamawa. And it is true that Governor Murtala Nyako is central to the present crisis in the party. But what is not known to most people is that I was the one that started to oppose Nyako. I am against the way he is handling the PDP in the state, the way he is handling the government in the state. The opposition pushed him to a desperate state, so he went to the Governors’ Forum to support a faction, and from there, it boomeranged to the present crisis. So, you can also say that if the present crisis started from Adamawa, then I am the initiator of the crisis because I did not believe in Nyako’s manner of handling the party and the government of the state. I believe very strongly that Nyako cannot make any change in the Adamawa State PDP or make any impact in the national PDP as well as in the electoral fortune of the party both in Adamawa and at the national level. What are the chances that he will actually go ahead and decamp to the APC? Well, he can decamp to APC as Murtala Nyako but certainly not as governor of Adamawa because he is governor of Adamawa State by virtue of being the candidate of PDP. The candidacy of PDP, as of now, is under contention at the Supreme Court. I have taken him to the Supreme Court, only two of us contested for the nomination and he did not win the nomination in accordance to the provisions of the party guidelines and the electoral act. I have contented that and I am at the Supreme Court contending that. If I win at the Supreme Court at the end of the day, Nyako’s nomination is going to be nullified and that means he is going to seize to be governor and then they will conduct primaries between the two us. Who ever wins that primaries will be sworn-in as governor. So, he cannot steal that nomination and go to another party with it. If he wants to go to APC, let Nyako drop the nomination, drop the governorship and then leave as a person. Then, we will constitutionally resolve the matter through the court processes that are still at the Supreme Court. And if he chooses to go ahead to decamp without stepping down as governor, I will again challenge him in court. It is not just Nyako, there are other governors that are threatening to move to APC, is this right strategy for them? You see, all these governors, especially Sokoto, Niger, Jigawa and Kano, they are under threat of APC in their own local environment. That is in their own states. None of them can influence the outcome of a presidential election between PDP and APC in their own states except for maybe Rotimi Amaechi. But all the rest of them are being compelled to survive. Their only way of survival is to negotiate with APC. But with Nyako in Adamawa, he cannot even help the APC too. In fact, I would advise the APC to keep a distance from Nyako because he is not going to add any electoral value to their party. Rather, he is just going to wreck the party as he wrecked the PDP in Adamawa State and he is going to bring misfortune to the party. He does not even have anyone to give to the party. I saw in a report that he had 300,000 supporters to give to APC. Where did Nyako get 300,000 supporters? We just conducted by-election in his local government. He sponsored another candidate in KOWA party. That candidate scored less than 9,000 votes when our own candidate in PDP scored 22,000 votes. This was in his own local government. That is to tell you Nyako cannot deliver even his local government to APC. If Nyako delivers his local government to APC, then I will leave politics. How can the crisis in PDP be resolved? The only way the crisis can be resolved is first, the PDP themselves must follow the provisions of party constitution through and through. They must follow provisions of party guidelines through and through. Internal democracy comprises two key elements. One, members of the party must be the ones electing the executive committee of the party and two; members of the party and the executive committee of the party nominating the candidate for the party. This is the only way we can resolve the problem. But where you sit down in your house and write the names of delegates from all across and then bring them to Abuja for election. That is no election. Like what happened in Adamawa that I am challenging in the Supreme Court. Nyako sat down in his house with his people and wrote the names of all their brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, aunties, and uncles and so on from across the states and brought to Lamido’s cinema and for the nomination. I said, no. The party guideline says this is how you are going to conduct the elections. You did not conduct the elections the way the party said. I said I will not go to Lamido’s cinema because what you have done is fraud. Unless we do that, I will go to court and that was how I went to court and we are in the Supreme Court today. This was the same thing that happened at the presidential primaries. I had given Atiku seven points that Jonathan violated at the presidential primaries, They did not adhere to seven regulations of the party in the conduct of the primaries. I asked Atiku to go to court. If Atiku had gone to court, the history of this country would not have been the same today. But Atiku did not. So, when you sit down in your house and you do not obey the constitution and the regulations, you are bound to have clash. The second thing is INEC. It is centrally the cause of our problems today. It has written a letter to Bamanga Tukur that it is their faction that they are supporting. Fine, Bamanga and the rest have accepted because it suits their interest but they refused to accept when INEC wrote to Baraje at the time Baraje was the acting chairman of PDP, that 11 states of the PDP do not have legitimate excos. Go back and form legitimate excos from ward, local government to the national convention. But Baraje and his group refused. These 11 states participated in the congresses that brought in Bamanga and the rest. This is the grouse that I have. And also the issue of Anambra, INEC wrote that Anambra does not have legitimate exco. Yet, INEC has accepted a candidate from Anambra as a governorship candidate. When you ask INEC, they say it is a court order. Which court order? It is a court of first instance. If INEC truly believed in its position, why did it not contest the order at the Court of Appeal? Why did it not go all the way to the Supreme Court to contest the court order? INEC cannot just claim the ostrich when things are going bad. We need INEC to stand up and perform its responsibilities to the best of its abilities and not allow the powers that be to dictate terms. So, these two ways are the only ways to resolve the crisis in the PDP and in any political party. We here about a plan not to hold presidential primaries in the PDP, can this work? It cannot work because it is illegal. The electoral act is very clear that you must hold presidential primaries. It is either you do direct or indirect primaries. You can so direct only if you are contesting for council chairman or at the ward. Apart from that, you must adopt an indirect way of conducting primaries. The electoral act specifies clearly how the primaries must be conducted. If people in the presidency are planning this, could they also have plans to make changes to the electoral act? Well, it is not the presidency that will change the electoral act. The act of making law is that of the legislature. If they are able to influence the legislature to amend this thing in their own way, that means they are powerful. They are strong. But if they cannot influence the legislature, then they cannot change anything. Now, accusations have been made that President Goodluck Jonathan wants to use the proposed national conference to further his ambition of getting re- elected. Will it work? I cannot see how he can do that because honestly, whatever discussions that are going to be made is going to be thrown back to the National Assembly. Everything will be within the provisions of the constitution of Nigeria. So, how can he do that? Maybe, the only thing is that the president may want to use it by the nomination of the chairman of the advisory committee, an Afenifere man, he will want to use it to break the south west. I do not know whether it will happen or not because as it is now, it is the same Afenifere that first came out to condemn the president’s position that the result of the national conference will be sent back to the national assembly. As far as Afenifere is concerned, it must be a referendum that will determine it. And there can be no referendum outside the constitution of Nigeria. Therefore, I can’t see how the president will use the national conference to advance the cause of 2015 ambition. What the president needs to do first is to resolve the eligibility question. After that, we can talk about his electability. What happens if the conference seeks amendments that have already been rejected by the National Assembly and are likely to be rejected again? Well, if I were the president, I would go ahead with the conference and then I would take up whatever recommendations of the conference, which I think, are germane and good for the purpose of governing this country. I will put them in an executive bill, whether it is going to be one bill or two bills; the number can be determined by the president and his people, and then send it to the National Assembly. If the National Assembly puts politics over national development, over national unity, then it is the fault of the National Assembly. But then the president has at least discharged his own responsibilities and the people of this country would have seen him having discharged that responsibility. So, I will not in any way advise that the national conference be stopped. Let it continue, let us discuss it, let us see the direction from which every one is coming. The only problem I have is that it cannot be every generation that will discuss the modalities of how we are stating together. When the Lancaster conference was done in 1957, when the London conference was done in 1959, each and every part of Nigeria was represented. Awolowo was there representing the south west, Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa were their representing the north and their delegation. Harold Dappa Biriye was there representing the Niger Delta. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Opara were there representing the south east. Joseph Tarka and his group were there to represent the minority groups in the north. All the various segments of the Nigerian people were there and it was those groups of people that came and said, this is what we want. What we need to do in order to move our country is for every fundamental issue to be determined at the campaign. Let people campaign on the basis of what they believe and after winning, they push things to the National Assembly and get it through. We should be repeating the conference at every generation. It shows that governance is week. It shows that politicians do not understand the essence of campaigning and politicking. They do not understand why democracy has term-by-term election. It means that after four years, all issues that come up will be addressed through the campaign for the next election. All issues that come up after that again, will be addressed through the campaign of the following election. That is how you build a nation, not at every time, every generation will say; we do not agree with what our forefathers did and we are going to do something different. I have not heard one person in this country who has said he does not agree with the resolution of our forefathers. Everybody believes the forefathers of this country were good people, were honest people and were for the good of this country. It is those forefathers that came up with these things. Why are we changing it? It is very clear that we do not know what we are doing as a people. But if it pleases the government, if it pleases some sections of the country, if it pleases the people of Nigeria to come together after every five, 10, 15 or 20 years to sit down and talk at a constitutional conference, then so be it. Can it hold in an election season? It can hold in an election season because, probably, the election will come up in November next year, that is the primaries and we can hold and finish the discussion before April so that by May, the president will send it to the National Assembly. They will take one or two months to either accept it or reject it. We know how they rejected the third term that was submitted by President Obasanjo. They can also reject this one. We saw that the third term agenda actually affected the timetable of the 2007 election. Could we see the same thing happening again? Unless the National Assembly enacts a law authorising the convention of a constitutional conference and that law allows for the election to be shifted, then the election can be affected. But without any law backing the convocation of the national conference, the primaries will be going on while the conference people will be talking.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 05:04:08 +0000
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