Buhari must take responsibility for low voter turnout – Gabam, SDP national chair

National Chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Shehu Gabam, speaks on the just-concluded 2023 general elections as well as the naira swap policy introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria that brought about untold hardship in Nigeria, among other sundry issues in this interview on TVC Politics Tonight, monitored by Deborah Onyofufeke

What are your views about the outcome of the 2023 general elections?

The process is very faulty. The election has been declared officially, the law authorises the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct and declare elections officially, and by the declaration of INEC, we await what the court can do because various interested parties that have issues with the processes have gone to court. Some of them have filed processes, and some of them are in the process of filing. We equally encourage them to go to court because that is the only way we can strengthen our democratic institutions. We cannot allow our democratic institutions to be weakened by desperate elements who don’t understand the transparent process, or who do not understand what it takes to follow a transparent process. I want to remind you one thing, I was among the youngest people who worked so hard in the restoration of democracy. My boss, the late Alhaji Abubakar Rimi then led the G7 Movement that led to the restoration of democracy. We went through a lot of turbulent periods before the restoration of democracy. He was arrested, and sent to prison. So many people were sent to prison, and when the founding fathers of the PDP, I think it is only Sule Lamido that is alive today. Most of them are no more, so, I’m part of the process that fought for the restoration of this democracy from G7, G18, and G34. I understand the dynamics, and I understand where the process has been abused and how people are feeling. By now, we shouldn’t be experimenting as a nation. You know, after almost 30 years of deep democratic electoral processes, we are still struggling to get a process that is decent, responsible, and acceptable to Nigerians. It is a shame we haven’t found the process that is acceptable to all of us, the unnecessary bridges. It is a tragedy that we are going through this once again. I thought the struggle to take the military back to the barracks was the best that we could do.

The use of BVAS, especially during the presidential election, has generated some issues, how would you react to the various criticisms?

Had it been that the BVAS been utilised effectively and efficiently, you wouldn’t have had any other issues. As I said, the laws are very clear, you can only cast your vote after you’ve been accredited either by fingerprint or visual capturing. Now, once that law is being respected, you will not find any conflict. There are no possibilities of any conflict. Those who violated the process and INEC allowed them to violate the process where results are altered, physically altered, and then the law says the supervising officer can declare that election cancelled. Once result sheets are altered or the ballot box is being tampered with, that election of that particular polling unit can be cancelled. That is the provision, but you can see the negation of the process completely. Once INEC has done the needful, send people sufficiently to deal with the BVAS system because the report you have seen in most of the states of the federation -video evidence of people thumb printing in various states of the federation. Result sheets, ballot papers, I mean it is uncalled for at the level that we are today. The billions that were used to conduct this election, you know, if you compare it with the situation that we have today, you ask yourself whether it is merited or not because it is public funds that were injected. What is it that we cannot accept that one can win, one can lose? There can only be one president at a time, so the process was a bit faulty. As I mentioned, the BVAS was not effectively deployed. It happened to me personally, which I have recorded. I have complained about it in my constituency and several other constituencies. There are many states where INEC ought to have cancelled results. I’ve seen the videos of what happened in Rivers. It is a shame that we cannot conduct the states where BVAS was not deployed. People just researched results. How can we continue with this kind of impunity?

Who is to blame for the sundry inadequacies, INEC or the political class?

We all are responsible. INEC is an institution that was established by law to conduct elections, and it must take responsibility. I’m happy they’ve taken responsibility, they said they are investigating thoroughly. Also the political players; the candidate must also take responsibility because talks do not fall from heaven. It is the people. Politicians mobilise talks to disrupt the process, and then the conspiracy of the political elite to ensure that there is confusion or to ensure that the system is being hijacked. You can see people hijacking ballot boxes, and result sheets. Ballot papers physically, and you’ll see security men right there watching, doing nothing about it. You can see some aides of governors counting money physically, and distributing money; there is no arrest. It is in the videos that went viral all over the place. You can hear people releasing audios that are provocative, and that has created a lot of tension in the system. And you have effective security agencies that ought to have performed efficiently, and effectively for the stability of Nigeria, peace, and unity of Nigeria. So, all the entire actors in the game must take responsibility. Parties must take responsibility, and candidates must take responsibility, but more so, INEC must take the most responsibility because, by law, they are the ones to conduct elections. The party produces candidates for the elections, so both of you know the actors compromising the process. I believe that this should be a lesson for all of us as actors and players in the field, because posterity will not be kind to us the younger generations that are agitating, fighting for fairness and justice, and equity. You cannot take away their issues; they are factual, and they are right. INEC is battling with image issues more than at any other time in the history of Nigeria. You can imagine a country that has registered over 90 million voters ending up producing eight million plus. You know to produce the president of Nigeria; you can see just the Abia election that was just declared, about 9,000 or something votes… If I’m not making a mistake, I made somebody a governor of the state. How do you define legitimacy in a situation like this? The last election in Anambra, 100 and something thousand votes you know produced the governor of the state. In the state where you have more than two below-registered voters now if the followership has a problem, the leadership equally has a problem. But in this case, you see much of the problem with the followership. You can physically see that people’s consciences were being bought with rice, spaghetti, Omo, with a lot of things. Physically, you’ll see it happening everywhere people use different means to buy votes. The buying of votes is one of the major things that has discredited the entire exercise. I do pray that our citizens will come back to their senses and do the needful will allow the system to work because no matter how you want to do it, except we Nigerians agree that we will be decent, we will be humble in our ways and the manner, conduct ourselves otherwise, there is no other miracle. Nothing will fall from heaven, we are responsible for most of the mess that has taken place.

Aside from vote buying which you just mentioned, what other factors do you think influenced the voting and outcome of the 2023 election?

Number one, I have mentioned it before – the policy of the government as regards redesigning the Naira and Naira circulation grossly affected this election. No government on earth can take an insensitive decision on the eve of an election. You disenfranchise people by denying them the means to go to even the polling unit. You saw a lot of people trekking, and some of them were not even privileged to cast their votes. You see the weaponisation of poverty above any other consideration. You can think of people who are hungry and looking for what to eat by all means. So, it is easy to distract, because poverty was weaponised and the government must take responsibility. I have said this, President Muhammadu Buhari must take responsibility for the low turnout of voters. This is the same president who said the legacy he wants to leave behind is the legacy of a free and fair election. There was no free and fair election. We accommodated what happened as a nation, but he must take responsibility because the turnout turned out to be the lowest. President Shagari’s votes that produced him as the president of Nigeria was almost similar to the one that produced the president-elect that we have, which is a shame, which means that we are retrogressing instead of moving forward, advancing our thinking, advancing our behaviour, advancing our conversation. This election happened between three major tribes. I can say it clearly, which is a great disservice to the country. It is an election among the Yoruba, the Igbo, and the Hausa-Fulani. The presidential election is a shame. That at this level we still go for ethnic bigotry, and religious bigotry. Religious leaders make pronouncements, make endorsements, make insensitive statements, and then you see security agencies aloof to it, showing a nonchalant attitude to it. You see the government that is in charge of the security agencies saying nothing about it as if it is normal behaviour that we should go through as a nation.

The SDP came sixth in the presidential election, winning two senatorial and four House of Representatives seats. I know you’ve accepted the presidential election, but you say you will challenge the National Assembly elections in places you believed the SDP won. Let’s know more about that.

Well, I’m happy that despite the hostile environment we found ourselves in, let me make this very clear so that you will understand that the APC is the government that is in power, they have access to resources, and they have access to public funds. The PDP has governors, senators, and the House of Reps, they also have access to public funds. In the Labour Party, the presidential candidate was a former governor twice, was a board member, and was also a vice presidential candidate to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Then, the NNPP candidate, Senator Musa Kwankwaso was a governor twice and was a minister, so he has some level of resources available to him. The SDP was among the parties that fought through the struggle. We went through the jungle. We fought hard, we marketed the party, and we defended the party. The votes that we got were hard-earned, because we have no money anywhere to buy anybody, or to buy the conscience of anybody. We are grateful to Nigerians for believing in us, and for remodelling, rejigging the party, and changing the mentality of the party. We changed the narrative from the narrative. We issued a clear statement, we did not compromise any candidate of the party. We stood by all our candidates, up to this last election. I’m very happy that we recorded success under my leadership. I’m grateful to God, I’m grateful to Nigerians that supported this party. This is the party for the future and we will continue to ride on it, we will continue to work hard. We will continue to contribute our quota. I have also seen the issue of our central bank; it is on the front burner. Nigerians are threatening to shut the CBN down because of this currency circulation. The fact of the matter is that people cannot afford to feed themselves three times a day; that is the situation. The Central Bank of Nigeria has committed economic sabotage, and there is a need to investigate. You can’t hijack public funds without any justification. The contract between the bank and customers is that they will have access to their money anytime. No law authorises banks to hijack public funds. The pains are enormous. Things are extremely very hard.

Some analysts believe that your party is not visible enough and hence couldn’t win much, so, what are you doing to expand your tentacles?

I do know what they mean by visibility. I believe the SDP was more visible and participated in a lot of conversations about ideas than any other presidential candidate. If you say we don’t have the money…you know to oil our structures, I agree with that. I’ve given you the analogy of the presidential candidate which is factual, and it is also on record that we don’t have that resources. We don’t have any source of income. Amongst all the parties that we are seeing today, the SDP has the best structure, physical structure. You can talk about Nigeria better than any political party. We have reached out virtually everywhere. We did not go for revenue generation. We went for quality individuals to contest for election, and that has given us some of the advantages. We have gotten we did not go for revenue generation, we went for quality of people. We are grateful to Nigerians

This election has brought so much bad blood and acrimony among Nigerians. For you, why do we have this development in our politics?

First, politicians are responsible. I must admit this, some of the terrible and treacherous situations the country is going through are the political actors that are responsible. Instead of uniting the country, they went on ethnic campaigns, dividing Nigeria, using all sorts of formats that are very negative for the country. That is why we are paying the price that we are paying today. Since there is no deterrence, this kind of situation will continue. When you allow lawlessness to prevail over the ability of the citizens to see reason and deal with it morally and intellectually, the country has to pay for it. If we do not solve this problem, this problem will envelop every one of us. This problem will overrun every one of us.

Talking about some of the factors that shaped the outcome of the presidential election, many say the outcome of the exercise is a replica of 1993 when the SDP won with a Muslim-Muslim ticket. What impact do you think this will have on the polity?

You know once you have multi-political parties you are not likely to escape from some of these issues. If you look at the mathematics very clearly, those who want to win elections, who are operational politicians, must deal with statistics. Those statistics are what will give you an idea of where to pick their vice presidential candidate from. Of course, if a presidential candidate like Atiku Abubakar from the PDP picked his running mate from the South-South, now we in the SDP our presidential candidate is from the Southwest; the VP is from the. Now, you can’t do away with these facts based on the geographical reality that we are in. So, the Muslim-Muslim ticket is based on party challenges and factual analysis. What can we do to win this election? It is far beyond religion. Those who are bringing religion, it is simply because they have lost out completely. Those who made me who I am today are not just Muslims, the majority of them are not Muslims. Those who contributed to who I am today so for me to talk about religion or ethnic or regional issues, I’m doing a great disservice to this country.

You talked about the president-elect which will lead me to my next question. You advised the president-elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to fast-track development and reconciliation in Nigeria through a government of national unity. How achievable is this?

It is very possible you know there are discretionary powers of the president and cabinet formation are discretionary powers of the president. The entire appointments of both parastatals, agencies, and cabinets of the president are discretionary powers of the president. Now bringing everybody together doesn’t mean that there must be an appointment but you must also create a conducive environment for people to feel a sense of relief.

How would you rate the participation of youths in this election?

I can tell you that I’m somehow disappointed because of the registered voters, almost 70 per cent are in the category of youths. When I mean youths, I mean the combination of young men and young women. Now, when you see how young men have compromised, due to inducement, this has some category of people that are calling for good governance. Some of them are graduates; they have travelled around the world. They have seen first-class infrastructure all over the world. They have seen first-class hospitals, and today, they happen to be one of those that do not stand very firmly, compromising the system or behaving ethnically or regionally. I can tell you I feel a bit disappointed with such a mentality. I do hope they will understand that the future belongs to them. They are the ones to shape the future of Nigeria.