There may not be 2023 elections, if… – Solomon Dalung

Former Minister of Sports and All Progressives Congress chieftain, Solomon Dalung, bares his mind on the 2023 elections, and the intrigues in the APC, among issues in this interview with Ben Ogbemudia, Idu Jude, Elijah Keturah and David Lawani

How has your party, the APC, fared not just in Plateau State but also at the national level?
It is unfortunate in this country that with the abolishment of teaching of history, we have lost so many things, even our capacity to reflect on what has just happened not too long. The APC is an amalgamation of different political parties which in 2015, took power from an existing government. In 2015, not so many people believed that the APC would win in that election.

In Plateau State, we were only a few who advocated and believed in what we were doing. Our conviction then was that things were not going well and we wanted to a change.

Again, the president was a very unpopular candidate in the platoon of the crisis that the state has been through from 2002 to now. The crisis graduated into many things and so the President was seen to belong to an ethnic nationality that was a party to the crisis. He was not seen as somebody who was isolating himself.

So, people in my state that were supporting the President in 2015 were seen as the enemy of the people. Only a few of us stood out boldly behind the APC. But unfortunately, a majority of the founding members of the party are not even anywhere in the party now because after we formed the government, it was hijacked by PDP members, who suddenly became born again politicians.

All of them who were converted on Saturday, had holy communion on Sunday, suddenly displaced the communicants and took their place. So, the APC government as it is today, is an embodiment of those who campaigned for former President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015, lost the election and became born again. Today, they are in government, occupying strategic positions.

The former Chief of Staff to the Governor of Plateau State was the chairman of the door-to-door campaign of Jonathan in 2015, but he became the CoS in 2015. He was a PDP member until we formed the government. Again, we have a majority of those who are now in strategic positions in the government but they never believed in APC or believed in Buhari. Then, they were fighting some of us as if it was a war. They were the same people who were going about referring to us as agents of the (caliphate anti-Christ). Today, they are the ones sitting comfortably in the government.

So, if you have a church populated by new members, of course, the founders and the communicants of the church will take the back bench. So, in APC in Plateau State, the founding members of the party have now been taken to the background.

Will you say that this affected your returning as minister in the second tenure of Mr. President?

This is the irony of how our mental capacity is operating. You hold office at the pleasure of the President. I didn’t contest election, if I had contested election and lost, the question would have had meaning but I was appointed and I served my full tenure. If I wasn’t reappointed as a minister that depends on how the President had planned his government because I don’t constitute those who help him to form government. He has those who he needed for whatever reasons he needs them.

Again, the issue in the party is a national one. The other day, I spoke with one of the founding members of the party in Akwa Ibom State and he lamented about the exact thing I have just said. He said the party has been taken over by new converts, those who celebrated and ruled with PDP for 16 years. Some of them in 2019 became nationalists and believed in the President. By 2015, some of them were in PDP insulting everybody. In 2019, they became nationalists, and today, they are in the government.

So, it is not limited to Plateau State. It is a national problem being experienced in the party. If you check the background of the majority of those running political offices in the country today, you will observe what I am saying. It is a fact. Please carry out investigative journalism and if you find out anything contrary to what I have told you, come back, I will apologise and apologise again.

You sound as if you have you fallen out with your governor?

No, politics is about interest, this is another error we make. There is no permanent enemy in politics. What we have is permanent interest. So, when you have interest and plan; of course, everybody will pursue the interest. The governor was elected in 2015, re-elected in 2019. And he is accountable to the people of Plateau State and to realize the mandate is completely his business and I am not the type of politician that will follow somebody because of the interest I will gain.

That is the type of politics I play. Anything that benefits me as an individual is not worth pursuing. If that is my intention, I would have been with Jonathan’s government because as an arch opponent of Jonathan’s government, I was invited so many times to join his campaign team. He gave me so many offers but I rejected all because those offers were only going to benefit me as a person. It was not going to change the narrative.

So, the governor has a different interest from what I pursue and maybe his interest may be how to maintain his political legacy after he leaves office, quite different from the way I look at politics. I look at politics as a call to service and you should be ready to account for whatever tenure, whether by appointment or by elections.

Don’t you think political parties in the country lack proper ways of implementing their ideologies and mandates?

I can tell you that sustainable political traditions are driven by party ideology. Now, when politics is driven by self and personal agendas and by what is obtainable in our own clan, then jumping over the fence, cross carpeting, jumping out of the sea to the wall will continue until the end of the world.

Today, as I am talking to you, some people have been elected for six years and have failed to account for their six years and you can see them changing over and they are jumping into another ship and their argument is that they are now nationalists. We are born again nationalists. So what it means is that they were not patriots for the last six years they spent with previous party in office.

And the worst part of the whole thing is that they are still in the same office, but they have changed the political platform and they are saying we are doing this because we are nationalists. We love the country, so when they were elected in the past years, they were enemies of the country, it is just now that they decided to become born again. You see the contradiction, you see how Nigeria is going?

I thought that we would have got it right in 2015, but shortly after APC emerged and we started campaigning with the president, I realized that APC is a gathering of people with individual grievances but with a common enemy. We as party chieftains had our grudges against one another but for our political survival, we had an enemy which was the PDP. So we came to defeat that enemy.

Shortly after defeating the enemy, our individual grievances reared its ugly head and that was why APC with a predominant majority in the National Assembly, could not produce the leadership of the assembly in 2015.

It was just a few days after victory, a few days after coming from the defeat of the enemy, everybody picked up their political AK-47 and started looking for the enemy within the house. So, this caused the government great harm for four years. And during these four years, there was no year in which our budget was passed earlier than the months of June and July.

So, what you see happening in APC today, would have been ideological for any party in our country to work with the manifesto of its constitution, but the intention and the ambition of the individual element do not key into the ideological document prepared as manifesto.

Go and use the manifesto to measure all the APC controlled states, you will discover that the majority are not operating with it. They are completely out of sync with the party manifesto. For instance, we have security challenges. The APC has the highest number of councillors in the land; the majority of chairmen; an overwhelming majority of the members of the National Assembly, and governors too, why can’t we have a security policy, based on our manifesto to pursue, so that we can solve this insecurity problem?

Why is everybody, including governors, chairmen, councillors, market women, farmers, traders pointing fingers to one person, shouting Buhari is the problem, Buhari is the problem. And if Buhari is removed today, will things change? And if all of them are pointing at Buhari and saying Buhari is the problem, can you not see a conspiracy against one person. It means that all they are doing now is a gang up, to fold their arms and watch Buhari fail.

In all of these, do you still see APC winning in the 2023 general elections?

I am not a prophet and unfortunately one of the prophets in Nigeria has just passed on. If he were alive, I would have gone to him to say, can you look into the future for us. However, for the purpose of speaking the truth, 2023 is not going to be as politically as we assume it to be. We have already educated Nigerians in 2015 elections about what is good governance and what is bad governance. We campaigned in 2015, giving Nigerians indices to use to measure a government. And in 2023, they are not going to operate outside the score of those indices we armed them in 2015. Therefore, in 2023, if we fail the test, Nigerians will speak, and we will hear them very loud.

But it is still too early to predict because we still have a year and 11months left. If APC decides to embark on its magic and radically change its operations in governance, Nigerians can be tempted to say let us give the party another chance.

What is your take on the recent calls for secession by some sections of the country?

Well, I respect the rights of people and their freedom as constitutionally guaranteed by the constitution. I also respect the treaty of the United Nations for self-determination. It was self-determination that led to the independence of Nigeria in 1960. So, I believe that people are free to express their freedom within the confine of the law.
Historically, what fuelled agitations? Look at the history of countries that have disintegrated, counting from South-Sudan and Ethiopia. Even Europe has broken down into so many countries, such as Russia, Czechoslovakia, and the rest. What fuels agitations is when people feel they are not treated fairly. When there is the feeling of a strategic injustice against their people, whether heard or perceived, they will begin to agitate.

Therefore, when people no more feel they belong within a system, they will begin to ask for options and, of course, the current insecurity in the country with different nomenclature, from the farmers/herders clashes, Boko Haram, banditry, kidnapping and cultism, baby manufacturing factories to the ground mother of all, corruption are all pointers. These have contributed to failing the people. They have destroyed the confidence of the people and younger minds are feeling like we can do better if we go out of it.

But certainly they will not do better. Think of South Sudan, before the emergence of this country, African nations and indeed the world, mounted pressures for the creation of the nation of South-Sudan. Today, the violence that has characterized South-Sudan is worse than what it was when they were in Sudan.

That is the irony of agitation because when you set a standard of injustice, and you now break away as a country, it will follow you because that will be the same standard that your people will use to measure you. Once they perceive that you stray from it, then an internal agitation will start from there. So, for the agitators, they have the constitutional right to agitate within the law. However, I believe Nigeria is better and stronger as a united country. This country does not only belong to us, it is also a home for black people all over the world.

If Nigeria had got it right, a black man would have not been strangled by a police man in the United States, with his knee on his neck crying, I can’t breathe.

Politically, where do you see yourself in the next three years?

My attitude has been to continue to pray to God because I do not even know if I will live beyond today. So, I am not that type of Nigerian that continues to plan when my life is not in my hands. I know of people that printed posters to be president but today, they are no more. So, I should learn from them, I do not have control over my life.

What is important to me, and more important than 2023 is the unity and the security of this country. If Nigeria is not united, I do not see any day dreamer talking about 2023 elections. If armed men are bombing police stations and prisons, do you think you can go out to cast your vote? The way kidnappers are doing now. Every day they attack schools conveniently and the least they can take is 98 students, do you still believe that you can run anything called an election without this issue being addressed?

If Boko Haram still attacks with a grand metric style, taking over territories and even coming back again telling the people we love you, it is Nigeria that does not love you and is giving people N20,000 during fasting, do you think that it will be best for us to run elections, without some of these things being tackled?

With the drums of agitations, sectarian segregations, all over the country, do you think that these dissenting voices can be suppressed easily to enable us to have a free and fair election in 2023?

I will appeal to Nigerians to think about the unity of the country rather than 2023 because 2023 is just the personal ambition of the political elite.

As an ethnic and culture ambassador, how can we key into this to have a better society.

I am a scholar of a cultural civilization and deep research. I have established scientifically that no society or civilization evolves outside the tradition of the people and why we get it wrong always is that we are trying to build a society that is antagonistic to our cultural values. A civilization that faced the meaning of our culture to project itself and I believe in one of the researches conducted by Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the then western region.

Twenty students were selected and were trained in science and technology but in two different languages. The first 10 students were trained in Yoruba language and the other 10 were trained in English Language, and at the end of the exercise, a text was converted for them and it was discovered that those who were trained in Yoruba Language performed brilliantly, more than those who were trained in English. In other words, innovation thrive better in mother tongue than any other language. So, I believe that we must revive our positive culture and promote it.

I believe we should begin to teach our children in schools, our languages. We should teach them science in our languages and let us develop a technology that is natively driven.

I have not seen a country like Nigeria so rich in culture. The two dominant religions-Christianity and Islam-that have been introduced to us are the tools that we are now using to destroy our culture and tradition. When I dress culturally and the next day I go to church, I am always isolated because fellow Christians in the church look at me and say why is the devil here, simply because I dressed culturally the previous day. So also with Islam, every time there is self-defeat tendency that is being preached in Islam, if you are Muslim and you have not being doing good, your culture and tradition is not Islamic, then you cannot go to heaven.

And the question is, why did God create this culture then? Was it the intention of God that Yoruba people will now have to transform into Arabic or into Jews or cripto-Judia culture before they will see God? Then what happens to Jerusalem council, presided over by James, the brother of Jesus, who presented that we are gentiles. We are not Jews, we should worship God with our tradition. We should not observe or change the moral content of our tradition.

We are captives of a dominating civilization and there is this great philosopher, he is an architect of what is happening to us, a British scholar of international relations, he argued that if you want to dominate a society, just process and package your culture and language and sell to them. Once they can accept it, then they are dominated forever. So, we are dominated by Britain, the knee of the British culture is on our neck and we are crying, we can’t breathe.