Vanguard columnist Dr. Femi Aribisala, in an interaction with Vanguard
editors, explains why he is not proud to call president-elect, Gen.
Buhari his president. Quite interesting. Read below...
How did you come about your claim that INEC rigged the election for Buhari?
There are certain things that are interesting about this election. The
first one is that it is one of the most keenly contested elections that
we have had in this country. It involved more people. But 10 million
less people voted than last time, which gives us some idea as to how
true some of the figures we have been having before had been. But the
question is: Where did the decline of 10 million come from? I discovered
that it came disproportionately in certain areas than it did in others.
And to some extent, if you look at the PVC distribution, you can
project the election. It is because Buhari could campaign in the South,
but the North didn't permit same kind of liberty for the president.
The president was stoned in Bauchi and he was threatened. By the time
the pattern of PVC distribution became very known even in war-torn
states, it was easy to know that it had been front-loaded. When you then
analyze the election result itself, you will discover that some places
just had an incredible suppression of voters in spite of high level of
interest. Some people had an incredible number of voters. And I am still
interested in why more people voted in the governorship election in
Katsina than the presidential election.
On alleged gang- up against President Jonathan
If Buhari had contested in the United States, there is no way that he
could win. It is impossible. We know his antecedents. Nigeria doesn’t
even teach history in schools. Once you bring up the antecedents, the
very idea of having such a person gunning for a position, not even talk
of the presidency, would have nullified his candidacy. I was not just
writing about Buhari because he tried to arrest me. There were all sorts
of things that he did and for which he never apologised. Buhari took
ownership of those things. And he never asked for forgiveness. At
different points in the history of Nigeria, he was given an opportunity
to do that.
We set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but he refused to do it.
You don’t forgive a man who does not repent.
With regards to President Jonathan, I had a problem with the gang-up.
And I think it is wrong for two major tribes to gang up against someone
from the minority. Why should a President be called clueless? I don’t
think that someone will get away with calling Obasanjo clueless. Somehow
I feel that the South-South is entitled to have their son as president
and we were acting as if we were doing them a favour. If it was not
providence that threw up Goodluck Jonathan, I wonder if we would have
considered having a South-South president. In the interest of national
unity, the North-West producing the president again does not balance any
equation in Nigeria. If we are talking about a president from the
North, we should be talking about the North-East. I was offended that
from the beginning, some people insisted that there would be a civil war
if the man ran. They also insisted that they would create a problem if
the man ran. And I said that Nigeria belongs to every one of us. So that
was an issue to me. Wole Soyinka had vowed not to support Buhari but a
few weeks to the election, he asked Nigerians to forget the past and
move on.
Are you not being unfair to Buhari given the circumstances we found ourselves?
I said you only forgive somebody who repents. Buhari has never asked
anyone to forgive him. So you are jumping into conclusion that we have a
new Buhari? And the fact that he has won the election has not won him
forgiveness. We are going to see if Buhari has changed. And I have said
that if he has changed, he will do more than just wearing a suit. He
will come out and apologise for things done and overdone. He said he
took responsibility which is different from apologising. The man who
admitted stealing a cow is different from the one who said forgive me
for stealing a cow. Buhari is a very deliberate man.
I am not persuaded by the election campaign that Buhari is going to be a
very competent president. I have not seen any competence in him. There
was nothing in the campaign that was of substance that impressed me. No
new ideas came from Buhari or the APC. Most of the people in APC are PDP
people. So I am not persuaded that we are in for any new thing. But I
hope you are right.
Beyond Buhari, you are also not a friend of Bola Tinubu. What are your reasons?
I wonder why anybody will be a fan of Bola Tinubu especially if you live
in Lagos. He is not a democrat. I don’t like Bola Tinubu because he has
monopolised Lagos politics. To some extent, Ekiti governorship election
was lost because of him. I live in Lekki and every day I have to pay
toll fare and I wish I was not doing that. APC is in control of the
media to a very large extent. Governor Fashola has gotten an easy pass
with the media. It is easy for a Lagos State governor to be seen to be
good because he has resources. In the light of the resources of the
state, only 10 percent of the people have access to potable water, the
same percentage has access to educational structures. In order for the
APC to survive, the resources of this state had to be commandeered for
political purposes.
So, you can see the end justifies the means.
I think it will be foolish of Tinubu to take AIT to court over the Lion
of Bourdillion case because if he does, the kind of things that would be
revealed about him would be shocking. This godfather business is
undemocratic. Let people choose their leaders. One person cannot sit
somewhere and decide what is best for everybody. I don’t believe that
elections are free and fair in Lagos. I do not believe that Jimi Agbaje
lost this election. It was APC’s manipulation that brought out the
governorship election result. That is my own opinion.
Not many Nigerians are asking Buhari to apologise. What exactly do you
want him to apologise for?
It is part of my problem with the media at the moment. We are being
given the impression that Buhari won by a landslide. Please let us look
at what INEC declared. 12.8 million people voted for Goodluck Jonathan.
So don’t assume that they don’t have their reasons or that the people
that want him to apologise don’t exist. I maintain that it is very easy
to say that we don’t want to look at the past because we want to look at
the future. But we need to understand the past in order to move to the
future.
So, Buhari needed to apologise. He needed to ask for forgiveness because
he killed people through extra-judicial means, he jailed people for
telling the truth, he kept people in jail even when kangaroo courts that
he set up said they were not guilty. He manipulated the judiciary into
jailing some people. I could go on and on. That is why I said that if we
were a serious democracy, he would never have gotten away with it.
There is a reason Buhari was not nominated by the northerners. They
voted for Kwankwaso and Atiku at the primaries. Buhari got his candidacy
through Tinubu. We don’t have to pretend that Buhari is well liked
because he has won, it seems to be like that but we should know that he
only has the plurality of 2.5 million votes.
In your penultimate column you claimed the emphasis on the alleged
rigging was in the South-South and South-East, but the PDP was beaten in
areas where they had strengths like Niger, Kaduna and other places.
You think the resentment was not real?
I mentioned those areas as well. I mentioned Kano, Jigawa, Katsina and
Bauchi. I said the results from these places were inflated. We have
video recordings of underage voting. There is a problem with the
election because if we accept what the PVCs are saying that 17.1 million
registered for the election in the North-West alone, the zone will
determine future elections. If they decide that they want somebody to be
president, by the time we will be looking at the result and they will
come up with 9.1 million from Kano, the whole equation would change.
What can you get from Imo and Anambra? So, if the North-West vote is
more than the South-South and South-East, there is going to be a
problem. There will be a problem if we don’t get the proper census of
Nigeria. They used to tell us that Kano was bigger than Lagos. Jigawa
was split from Kano and Kano is still supposedly bigger than Lagos. In
this last election, about 3.1 million people voted in Kano and Jigawa.
And 1.4 million people voted in Lagos. That is twice the number of the
people in Lagos. I don’t believe these figures. If you do, fine. I am
entitled to my opinion.
You said you don’t like Tinubu because of the reasons you adduced,
but when the books would be written, it would be said that Tinubu
contributed significantly to Buhari’s emergence as a democratically
elected president. What do you make of that?
I don’t agree that Tinubu made Buhari the president. Let’s get the facts
right. Tinubu made Buhari the presidential candidate of the APC. But in
the presidential election, Buhari did not win Tinubu’s votes. And that
is part of the problem. All the discussion before was that everything
would be determined in the South-West, but Tinubu did not deliver the
South-West. The margin of defeat in the presidential election was not
much in Lagos. Tinubu, to some extent at the presidential level, is
expendable. And that is the problem. You can actually not choose a
president just from the North. It interests me that while the campaign
was going on, all the northerners making noise that it was their turn
disappeared.
They did not campaign with Buhari. The people campaigning were Tinubu,
Amaechi, Fashola. I bet you that the northerners are going to come out
come May 29. And you will see it happen. Don’t think that the people
that had been clamouring for power to return to the North in the past
six years, were doing that for Tinubu to inherit. I don’t believe that.
They have an agenda. That is why I said the story is not told because
the election has taken place, the story will unfold when the
administration comes on board.
Are you saying that you are impressed with Jonathan’s performance?
Yes I am. I think APC ran a fantastic campaign. They hired Obama’s
people and they controlled so many different things. So, a lot of things
were simply propaganda. And part of the problem with the PDP was that
they had it so easy for so long that they did not know how to campaign
anymore. So, they thought that it was just going to be another cake
work, and this was a different issue for them. Many of the things that
Jonathan did, his people like Reuben Abati did not talk about it. People
just did not know anything until some spirited efforts were made at the
last-minute during the extension. That was when they now told people
what had happened. But within the framework of Nigerian presidency,
Jonathan is a good president if you compare him with others who had
occupied that position.
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