A former National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, in this interview on Channels TV ‘Politics Today’, monitored by Deborah Onyofufeke, speaks on the chances of the APC presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, saying among others, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, is the least contender in the 2023 race to ‘Aso Rock’

Tell us what you are seeing that makes you think that Bola Tinubu is ahead of the race.

There are three main candidates, and there are several others and they are very competent people, good Nigerians, I believe they all have good intentions but as I have heard from you repeatedly, there are three leading candidates and if we talk about these three leading candidates, we proceed to mention their names or their parties. We talk about Atiku Abubakar (PDP), and we speak about my dear friend Mr Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) and then Bola Tinubu of the APC. It is no secret that we have at least five governors, including governors that matters in the South-South, if we talk about the stronghold of PDP, now, some of the governors voting against Atiku are from that part of the country and you talked about our candidate for the first time, going to Gbaramatu kingdom in Delta State. I am not even sure that the PDP candidate has ever gone to that place because they are always taking them for granted and so, PDP is a house divided against itself, the real damage being done to the reputation of the PDP candidate Atiku Abubakar is that governors, not unknown quantities, state chief executives who have never decamped from PDP who can be called PDP indigenes, they’ve spoken to the fact that you can’t trust the PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar. Therefore, they withdrew from his campaign council. Even the immediate past governor of Ondo State, (Olusegun) Mimiko, is in that group. So, if five people have reasons to question the character of Atiku Abubakar, that you can’t trust his word, and that he can’t even manage his party, he can’t grant concessions, and he’s so fixated on certain things, it means he is insensitive to project Nigeria- the need to keep Nigeria together. If he could go to a place like Kaduna and speak to a part of the country and say don’t vote for a Yoruba man, it says a lot. He didn’t say don’t vote for Tinubu because there’s a huge difference. When you say don’t vote for a Yoruba man and you see, these people who call themselves ethnic nationalities saying don’t vote for a Yoruba man, don’t vote for an Igbo man, the Igbo nation. So, because the man is Igbo, he doesn’t matter. The fact that he is Igbo makes him unelectable. A man who seeks to govern Nigeria has said this publicly on the record. How can he make such a statement on record? How can we trust you? You can’t manage your household, you are a serial divorcee and you want to preach unity, family unity to me? No. So, it’s not difficult to see why Atiku can’t win. He can’t. Also, remember that he had the benefit of a joint ticket between Atiku as a presidential candidate and Obi as a vice-presidential candidate, he got all the votes and he had his wife, I heard they are separated now, and the divorce case is in court, Jennifer, who he later converted to Jamila even with that all going for him, he went to the East and told them your daughter is my wife, he got all the vote in the East but he couldn’t make it. Now, between him and Obi, they have fallen apart just like he has fallen apart with many of the PDP governors, so, what miracle he has unless you know what I don’t know, based on what people can see, this house is broken.

Tinubu has not contested an election of this magnitude before, Atiku has contested with Muhammadu Buhari and the President won. Unfortunately, the President won’t be on the ballot this time, how do you think Tinubu can withstand Atiku?

He contested the governorship election in Lagos State and he won.

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I am talking about the presidential level. So, I am saying Atiku Abubakar, Buhari, Obi, they’ve gone to the battle before and their votes have been tested, but Bola Tinubu has not been tested at that level?

True. If you are a good sportsman, especially in boxing, or if you have been following the recent World Cup, you will find out that the teams that have been in the World Cup and some that have never appeared, in this year’s edition, are making a huge bold statement, redefining the ways of the game and playing it differently. And putting the traditional champions on notice that the world is changing, it can never be the same again. Now, Atiku is in battle wary, he has nothing new to say. He’s said everything. I will sell NNPC, once he says he will sell NNPC, people will say that was the way you sold NITEL, what became of NITEL? I will enrich my friends even if I will not enrich my family, so it is about enriching your friends those Nigerians who don’t know you, what are they going to gain? So, I don’t think you want to bring that up, I think Atiku himself, it’s just that at this point, it is hard for a man to say look, I will throw in the towel in the middle of the game so he will rather patch it up. There’s nothing, he’s the weakest link right now among the three leading candidates.

You’ve not touched on the question I asked about the fact that your candidate has not been tested compared to the likes of any of the candidates’ Peter Obi has been on the ballot but your candidate has not been on the ballot before.

They (Atiku and Obi) have something in common, both of them have offered themselves before and they were rejected. That cannot be a plus, but let me just draw your attention to the fact that you are easily one of the most seasoned political desk TV hosts in this country today, I’m sure you will agree that around the world many offered themselves for the first time and they won like Macron. There are several, so, it is not an advantage, in fact, sometime you will become stale, Atiku again? What he couldn’t articulate last time, he is going to disarticulate now so, I think there’s something that Nigerians can see, that the fact that somebody has been there supporting, not that I have to be. For Atiku, if he’s not the candidate, he takes a flight to Dubai but you are talking of someone who upon leaving office, supported his wife, talking about selfless service, talking about gender equality, where he said okay, madam, you have been taking care of the children for eight years while I was at Alausa, now, you go to Abuja and I will look at the home front in Lagos and that doesn’t make him a different person, he provides support for others including Buhari to contest and fortunately for him to win now that shows someone ready to support people who he believes can handle the Nigeria project as compared to someone who if he’s not the one, then he’s out of the game.

Does that make him a better candidate?

It speaks of character. You see, when you have set your beliefs, you cannot be jumping from one party to another in every other election if it is something you believe in. It is not possible that today, you praise PDP, just play Atiku’s statement since 1999, as a vice-president, he challenged his boss, and then, at the end of that tenure, his in history as the only vice-president not only in Nigeria but perhaps anywhere else in the world who decided to question the right of his boss to contest for the second term and his boss had to go on his knees to persuade him to allow him because the boss trusted him, unknown to him that it was about himself and he thought they had a joint ticket. So, if it is another jurisdiction, Atiku’s ambition is just about himself, it’s not about Nigeria and you know, whatever you want to say, people still listen to some persons, some children, young students asked Obasanjo what is your regret in life, without any difficulty he said the day I chose Atiku as my running mate not because of his race or his name but because of his character. So, he’s all about himself when he was plotting to get it off him.

But some of these things they said the former president has said that he did not make any of these claims

No. They showed it on Channels TV and I know you are not one of the purveyors of fake news. You are taken seriously, you need to know you are taken seriously. So, I am saying I saw Obasanjo on Channels Television talking to young people who asked him if he had any regret in life. It wasn’t a secret family meeting, it wasn’t a scoop that somebody revealed.

So, based on that you don’t think Atiku should be trusted?

His party governors said you can’t trust him, and those who are leaders of his party, five said you can’t trust this man. Every agreement we reached with him, he broke it. He is a serial betrayal of agreement. You can’t trust him. That when he is seeking power as an applicant, he doesn’t even respect the agreement as an applicant, is it when he gets the job as Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces? You know there’s a saying that you stoop to conquer, his not even ready.

Remember that the PDP will also remind your candidate that he has had a series of relationship with his former allies that has gone awry. They will mention the minister of interior, they would mention a former governor who couldn’t get a second term ticket, they will list a lot, they will have a long list of people who have been Allies of the former Lagos governor that have fallen off because of their reasons…

Why are you comparing potatoes with yam? You are talking about an alliance, I am talking about someone with his eye open by 1999, contesting as a vice president, and by 2003 challenging the then president not to run for a second term and positioning himself for the second term and positioning against the wish of his boss not to run for the second term and once he lost out, it is on record he decamped as a sitting vice president to ACN so that he can get the presidential platform to contest the presidency. It didn’t matter to him all that PDP had offered him. Our candidate has never decamped. When they took his party from him in the manner they did which is no secret, he simply formed another one and from there he allied- that is about character, consistency and having sense of belief.

So what are you telling Nigerians?

It is not a coincidence that every party that he has associated with is a progressive party. The word progressive is on it. It’s about character, it is about what you believe in. Now if you are talking about those who benefitted from his leadership, those he picked up like the minister of internal affairs and he felt he had grown up, his now a big boy, he walked away, there’s nothing wrong with that, you can’t blame Asiwaju for that. You may wish to ask the guy that gave this man, you wouldn’t have known, why will you do this? Many of us didn’t know that Aregbesola is not from Osun state until he went to Osun state to contest the election. We knew him as commissioner of works of Lagos state for eight years before then I didn’t know him. Now, what did you mention? That he supported Ambode and he left, was there a vacancy in Lagos? They brought a young man whom everybody can see is doing a much better job. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, you can’t compare Sanwo-Olu with, I mean look at the way he managed COVID-19 in Lagos. Look at Fashola. I mean you are being selective. You are speaking to the finest quality of Asiwaju, to catch them young, identify them young, build them up, mentor them and challenge them with a position of responsibility. There was one interview I watched on Channel Television, and the anchor person asked Atiku, who have you built? Who can you say I picked this guy from the ground and here he is, up there now courtesy of my mentorship? He talked about education in Ondo State, what is the level of illiteracy in Adamawa where he comes from? After being vice president for eight years, what did he do to reduce the level of illiteracy? Before you promise people what you will do tomorrow, you must tell me what you did wrong or right yesterday. When Atiku was vice president, he was extremely powerful. I knew that because I was president of the NLC. I was more or less the unofficial opposition to that government, so you ask, how much impact has Atiku made? You reason the quality of education and you reason the level of illiteracy in Adamawa State. Yes, he built a private university which is interesting.

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The APC has not had good times in the South-East and the South-South. Was that the reason Tinubu went to the Gbaramatu kingdom?

Well, South East and South-South are where PDP has had their strongest hold and even their highest votes. If you look at Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s votes in 2019, he got about 2.5 million votes. He got more votes from the South than he got from the North and those votes came from the South-South and the South-East, now as we speak, Rivers gave him I think about two million votes, and now he has serious problems with Rivers. He has problems with one or two other governors of the South-East states. For the first time in 2019, all the governors in the South-East were PDP supporting him. This time, you have a governor in Ebonyi and Imo, who are supporting APC plus one of the PDP governors that based on this character issues, and trust issues is among the now popular highly respected G-5 or integrity group in the PDP which is made up of the five governors and several other governors, like Donald Duke, Mimiko of Ondo state and several other prominent people you can’t dismiss politically. So, I think there are two things I can see, you don’t have to be a seasoned political analyst to appreciate this fact whereas Buhari became president of Nigeria twice. Without the vote from South-East and South-South, Bola Tinubu this time, has two South-East governors working hard for him in Imo and in Ebonyi state which we didn’t have before, Buhari didn’t have that benefit, 2015 and 2019, and like you rightly said, he went to Gbaramatu kingdom, which for me speaks to several issues about his views about Nigeria. He went to a place where none of his predecessors, I mean those who have governed Nigeria in the cause of electioneering, take those people for granted they just cope with the Pollution. I am sure the people in the area are honoured that for the first time a presidential candidate considers it worthwhile to come to them and solicit their support. That is a huge recognition and appreciation of the fact that you have a man in Bola Ahmed Tinubu Who is not looking at anybody as a minority, every part of Nigeria matters to him where previous ones Atiku hasn’t been there, I won’t be surprised if he quickly arranges a visit.

As a member of the inner circle of the APC, are the G-5 working for your party?

If the G-5 is working for our party, they should be bold enough to say so. It’s not me you should ask, you should ask them. Because I have not said they are working for us. If I meant to say so, I would have said so but what is obvious based on what I have said because I don’t believe in hidden agenda, I believe in open gender, let me speak on the open gender, they said because of character issues, trust issues, and I think the person who has summarized it most eloquently is his excellency, Governor Wike. He said you are not a president, we have an agreement with you. We are sitting governors, whether you like it or not, a sitting governor is more potent than a presidential aspirant because he’s governing and superintending over a sub-national government so, you have an agreement with us as a sub-national government and you being an applicant who is still at our mercy, once you passed through the first hurdle of the primary, you renege on the agreement and that’s why he now danced to this very interesting music. The agreement is an agreement, if you don’t obey the agreement then I will not trust you. You know, all of these promises that politicians make are about trust, why should you trust? So, if this man as an applicant for the office of president will not obey the agreement he voluntarily entered into with governors. These are very serious people and our candidate is saying every part of Nigeria matters and there is no better way to promise the Niger Delta people that they will not be the proverbial fish that can’t have access to clean water to drink because by going their, he can see for himself, I’m sure he saw for himself the condition of the people and he doesn’t need to rely on briefing to be told what pollution means. Whether air, water, or environmental pollution and all of those things that have destroyed farmlands and so and so forth.

Talking about agreements, your party the APC agreed with Nigerians to protect lives and property and make their lives better. That was the agreement they made with the Nigerian people with their votes. If you look at the queues that you see, interestingly, you are a former president, not the NLC, and I bet you I’m that if you were the NLC president at this time, you probably would have taken your colleagues to the streets. How difficult is it to ensure about the fuel queues that we are seeing? Are they necessary?

Use the correct word, in campaigns you don’t agree, you make promises. We made promises, not agreements. I don’t have an answer to that because I don’t know the cause of the queues. Now, the system can suffer failure. Even you could break down. So if you have an accident or breakdown it is not a basis for long-term decision-making. Number two, we must ask the question, who destroyed the refineries? What was the condition of the refineries by 1999? From 1999 to 2015, PDP was in power for 16 years, during these 16 years if they bring out the figure of what they claim to have spent, maintaining these refineries, you will faint and a PDP president decided to privatize the refinery. That was Obasanjo towards the tail end of his tenure another PDP president came and revised the privatization promising six months that fuel will be available. Sixteen years later, remember that part of the problem, one of the huge crises that president Jonathan faced was dealing with this issue and I am on record as one of the few governors who said this is not a Party matter, we have to act as state men and protect the system because if Nigeria fails, God forbid, we don’t have a neighbouring country where we can migrate to. We can absolve all the other countries around us but they cannot absolve us so if you talk about the maintenance of the refinery you will have to trace the history to 16yrs of PDP they couldn’t fix the refineries. Now a couple of things that I believe this government has done in this area they manage to pass the PPIB to law, which is something that has been on the drawing board for God knows how many years, and we are persuaded to believe that without that law we are not going to attract the right investment to that sector. Now that has been done and under this government, because every government speaks to how the private sector should be the edging of growth that seems to be in thing. Not state control, not state ownership of interest. Even Candidate Atiku speaks about privatizing NNPC but to the discredit of President Buhari and additionally credit to Bola Ahmed Tinubu that his vision to set up a free trade zone in Lagos attracted the private sector investment. The Aliko refinery is going to be the second largest refinery in the world in Nigeria located in Lagos. Now, why Lagos? Lagos is not known to be the highest or one of the major oil-producing states so why Lagos? Because Lagos created the enabling environment. They thought of the idea of a deep sea port, you remember how Eko Atlantic use to overrun Victoria Island? Fought it back and reclaimed the place we now call Eko Atlantic which is now a very beautiful area. The land they reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean is almost as large as Victoria Island and that is why some of us say that a man who can fight the Atlantic Ocean and reclaim it and turn it into a high-profile area. You can’t compare him to somebody from Anambra who according to the current governor presided over a state that according to Soludo is the headquarters of gully erosion.

The reclamation of the Eko Atlantic was during the Fashola days.

Yes but you see the planning didn’t start there. These things are a long-term program. If you ask Fashola he will tell you when the decision was taken, how they went to Singapore how they were spared to do a couple of things and decide that this is a long-term solution to the perennial problem.

Comrade the question I am asking you tonight is why Nigerians should consider your party to lead this country again in 2023. Has your party deserved it?

If we don’t deserve it, who deserves it? Those who mismanaged the country for 16 years so badly that they, I remember if you were to check you will find where somebody like the former Senate president and a few others when they formed what they called the new PDP and eventually decamped to APC. You remember that there was this debate about changing the name of PDP because PDP was no longer electable because of the damage they did to Nigeria at a time when the oil prices for about four consecutive years, five consecutive years, we were crossing over a hundred dollar a barrel, at a point, producing over two million barrel a day and yet, the Economy became what it was. Nigerians were so fed up that national elections had to be postponed because when you talk about security, you talk as if Nigeria was so secure now what led us to make that promise in the first place? Book Haram started under President Obasanjo in Maiduguri and then did additional strength up to the time of Jonathan so strong that President Jonathan requested the National council of states and enforcement to postpone the national election because 28 local governments were hosting the foreign flag. So, you can conduct an election across Nigeria and the National election in Nigeria in 2015 was postponed. No, whether you appreciate it or not the truth of the matter is going and talking to people in Borno state, they will tell you that Boko Haram, we can’t say it’s no longer there but it doesn’t have the kind of strength or even have the power to violate and make it impossible for people to go to the mosque.

A lot of Nigerians perhaps some of them have not made up their mind on the president they need to vote for, perhaps they are watching tonight and considering who to vote for, what is that one thing that you could tell them if you have 30 seconds to convince them about your candidate. What will that be?

First that Tinubu has promised exactly what he is going to do in a very coherent manner the only question now should be why should we believe him? Look at what he did in Lagos. The real issue in Nigeria is mobilising resources and look at how he mobilized the resources in Lagos. Some states were earning N600m IGR to over N50bn now in a month and not in a year. I don’t know what it is now, I know this because I engaged him over the payment of minimum wage so he could take the difficult decisions. Many interest groups in Lagos went to court to challenge his tax reforms in Lagos and today Lagos can do without them. Number two, he is a believer that Nigeria should be restructured and he tried to breathe air into it when he tried to create a new local government in Lagos president Obasanjo fought him and he decided to hide under the disguise that reform to stop allocation to local government. So he is a believer that states and every unit should run their affairs.