Dr Muazu Babangida Aliyu was a two-term governor of Niger state and currently, a member of the 2019 general election review committee set up by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP to review its performance in the last general elections.

In this interview with Vanguard, Talban as he is fondly called speaks on the leadership of the party, the crisis it is facing and its readiness for the 2023 polls.

You moved a motion for a vote of confidence on the Prince Uche Secondus-led National Working Committee during the party’s last National Executive Committee, NEC meeting. What informed your decision to do so?

Dr Aliyu: There are processes on how things are done in a political party. if you want somebody to leave a position, there are ways to do it. You don’t go to a marketplace, calling somebody bad names just because you want him to leave. We have a way to make people resign. We can query them if they

But those asking the NWC to go, what is the objective? In the process of thinking you are correcting something, you destabilize it. Our convention comes up in December, so why not wait? They may think they are trying to deal with the NWC alone, but they are actually dealing with PDP as a party. Getting rid of anybody in the NWC now will create a lack of confidence in the minds of the people.

If people cannot even organize themselves as a party, how do you now entrust them with the governance of the country? A party that was able to stay for 16 years in power and whether you like it or not, from Obasanjo to Jonathan; stabilized the economy of the country. We became richer and then the unity of the country was never questioned. There was no agitation for secession. Can you believe a mature Nigerian asking for military intervention? That is not right.

I am happy that the whole NEC members unanimously agreed with me. We need stability now, we need unity now, we need cooperation now, that is exactly what we should be looking for now.

Has that confidence vote restored peace to your party?

Those who agitated and believed that there was a problem in the party now know that there is a better way to handle issues in the PDP. So this motion of confidence was to let people know that even if you have to remove people, you cannot remove them with the way they are going about it.

As far as peace within the party is concerned, the PDP has established a committee headed by the former Senate President Abubakar Bukola Saraki. He has gone round and he is going round to resolve many of these problems.

For instance, there was this intractable problem in Yobe, but we have no peace in Yobe. In the Supreme Court judgment in Borno, the committee ensured the implementation of that judgment. And then you come to Kaduna, they are still there but we have seemingly a peaceful resolution that is coming up. Kano too but I think that Kano is more of a zonal convention than the issue of peace.

So for me, a motion cannot just create peace but a motion provides the position. On the one hand, the NWC now will sit down and say, why do we have a motion of confidence to support us? And the general people will say yes, we needed this and we should all go back villages and our own states to do a similar thing; if it is something that you can correct quickly, correct it; if it is something that you cannot correct, try and manage it.

What is your advice to the NWC in the wake of these issues?

I think we must look at the politics of the matter. Where is this problem coming from? The problems are not coming from other regions, they are coming from Secondus’ home state. This is because somebody wants to be a godfather, a dictator. I don’t think he wants to be President or Vice President, I don’t think Nigerians will accept such a thing. But probably he wants to be a godfather to dictate who becomes what.

Looking back in history from 1999 till date, many governors think that by providing a successor, they will go to the background to steer the ship of the state. Believe me with my little experience of 8years and with my observation, even if you give your son a position, you may still run into problems. If your son respects you, you are not sure of the way the mother feels. The mother may call her son and say look, don’t do like your father did. This and that were his mistakes. Stop listening to him.

I think governors particularly those who are now in their second term should understand this. In fact, it will be better for you to allow the generality of your members to decide who takes over from you. But then, why are we afraid? Why are we so concerned to install who succeeds us? Is it because we have done so bad or is it because we have messed up the economy of the state?

Many governors or leaders think that public money is their own money. In the olden days, from the government of independence up to Yakubu Gowon’s period, no expenditure was made without budgeting for it If a biro was not provided for in the budget, you could not buy it.

But what has happened through the time is that today, the budget is just been done for the formality of its sake; probably for the past 20 or 30 years, we have never implemented the budget up to 50 to 60 per cent and if you cannot implement a plan, then it means you should review the next year.

So we go back to the issue: why will the major supporter of my chairman now become his own major opponent? You go back to the politics of Rivers, one in terms of a successor, second in terms of the ambushing of a person who accidentally becomes rich or who leads a rich state.

If you are the one who supports a person, who went round to ensure the election of this person even when something has gone wrong; you are from the same state. Find a way to resolve it at home, not to make it public. With the statements he is making, he is not making Secondus look bad, he is making himself look bad and making Rivers state look bad.

So, I will advise him (Secondus) to keep doing what he is doing. Yes, you were supported to be elected, you have been elected. You have a four-year tenure, make sure you complete that tenure. You have a room and a right to contest for the next four years. That decision is yours but you have more supporters now than you did before the other election.

Where is the place of party supremacy in all these? How comes, the discipline of members is hardly brought to bear?

The fellow who raised issues the other day is not our member; he is not a registered member of PDP even though he is still claiming our membership. But don’t forget he was suspended, he was never recalled and he never registered back. One of two things has to happen if you are suspended. If you were suspended with a letter, another letter will say return or you write to the party and say you have been suspended for one month and now the one month has expired, what next? Obviously, you will be admitted back. I am not sure that has happened.

And for any member by the way, even if nobody talked, for any member to say I am in PDP but I am going to work for the rival party, you don’t have to dismiss that person, he has already dismissed himself. And when you have people whose survival depends on such things, you don’t want to waste your time. I was surprised that nothing was done with the other person who called the NWC tax collectors.

I was surprised that nothing was done. I remember many of us in the Board of Trustees raised the issue. I also remember that one or two of us raised the issue in NEC. Even if a letter of warning had gone out, other members would have learned from that. That was very unfortunate.

The supremacy of the party that you are asking about is not actually there in our arrangement now or in the constitution as you see but usually, the party chairman and the executive are supposed to represent that supremacy. But again, when you are dispensing decisions or actions it must be seen to be fair and equitable. Maybe, that is why we lost it.

The party is being funded by a group of people. That automatically makes them too powerful to handle

As far as I am concerned, I am aware even when we were governors, we used to find a way to contribute money from time to time. Sometimes, we may call some of these people to say the party has mandated me to do something, please help us raise the fund to go and do it.

Like you said, yes through the time we have spoilt that supremacy that will come because if you go to some places you will even discover that even a membership card is paid for by somebody who may be interested in running for election or somebody who is just a major stakeholder in the community, he may pay for many people.

You don’t need up to a million people to boost your membership drive. As a party, you don’t need that number, you need a dedicated number that will sell the ideas of the party and the manifesto of the party.

Yes, you are right in a way that unless we bring back that kind of commitment, where no matter what you bring, the party will always be supreme.

When somebody very rich thought he could defile the political party called the National Party of Nigeria, NPN, the chairman of the party then said to him, you cannot do that because NPN is not up for sale.

And believe me, I still say that. The PDP is not for sale, so no matter how rich you are, you cannot buy it because we are talking of human beings, many of who have the honour to protect.

Like they say in English, those who pay the piper dictate the tune. We have the governors who will sit and agree for instance that they need to contribute two million nairas each. If out of your own discretion as a governor, you bring 10 million naira, are we going to say that because we decided 2million that you should not bring extra? You brought extra but we are telling you that whatever extra you pay, now is not the time for you to dictate to us what to do.

We need to revive party supremacy. We need to go back to the people, in fact, that is why a committee was set up to now register people online and I am sure the committee very soon will let us know how to go about it and that will make it easier to even identify people..You don’t need to be carrying the card around because the moment you are registered online, anybody can look to see who is where and where you are registered.

2023 is just a few months away and the PDP has repeatedly said they want to regain power; how prepared is the party for 2023 vis-à-vis these pockets of distractions here and there?

Will you believe that the distractions will help us organize ourselves properly. I just said that it is a mistake when you say you must have this number of party members. What you need is the number of dedicated party members.

I recall reading that in an election in the United Kingdom, that if a member is campaigning for the assembly and let’s say he comes to this site and I said to him, come and take tea please, come and eat this and come and eat that, from there he will know that I am not supporting him because all that I am doing is to delay him from going to the next door.

And you know they have reached a stage even if they are going to bribe, it will not be like give him rice, give him salt, give him this but we are still at that level. It is good we are now beginning to see that these distractions now are becoming what will open our eyes to say we need to do this and do that to be able to get somewhere.

Don’t think because of insecurity, poverty and lack of this and lack of that, that people will just wake up and say oh, we are voting for this party?

If the other party is able to articulate issues properly and you are just hoping or sitting down thinking that, no, no, you need to define it in your own terms, in your own manifesto and in the people that will be selling the party so that people can appreciate it and come along with you, otherwise they will just lump you together.

Look at the level of perception now; Ebony left PDP, now Cross River, in terms of perception particularly to the common people, they may begin to think that all the people from PDP are running to that party, maybe we better stay where we are or we better vote the way we voted.

But if you articulated and say, some people may leave a party because of their own personal problems but they cannot say the personal problem, they will say official issues to cover their personal problems.

But I am happy that even those who joined APC for fear of EFCC are beginning to see that that is not the issue. So if you leave PDP and join APC because of EFCC, what you have done will remain, you may not escape from it and from the law of the land.

We have the largest number of former governours, the largest number of former National Assembly members. If all the former governors are to wake up and come up properly, many of them are the ones controlling their states and if you have done very well in your state, people are not that forgetful. They say public memory is short, people are not forgetful.

And this is what I tell some of my mentees-that sometimes, it is not the skyscrapers or the constructions that you did that will make people remember you; they remember you more by how they felt when you were in power. Have you respected them, have you done good to them, have you done this and that?

Talking about defections, you have lost two governors to APC. How do you think PDP can recover those states in the next general election?

If I remember the state that we lost, if I remember the way and manner the governors that defected came, I will still say, we will regain them very nicely.

I recall Ebonyi, the former governor Sam Egwu, the former secretary to the governor Anyim Pius Anyim, I recall because I followed vividly how a deputy governor was being frustrated, how he ended up being our gubernatorial candidate and how he won that election. And Ebonyi is one of those states that will always hold stability strongly and I believe these people and their support, friends and colleagues will do so much for us.

Cross River is a PDP state, we may have lost it but we are going to win that state back. I will love in the future to see either a constitutional provision or in our electoral law to say if a party elect you to a particular office, giving you a mandate as president, governor, national and state assembly member, councillor, chairman of a local government or whatever, that if for any reason you don’t want to go with that party again, then you should resign but not to defect with the mandate, for example, this one that you are referring to, they have defected with the mandate of PDP to APC. That is morally wrong and politically incorrect because the political culture that we are building, we are already putting the holes of political correction in them.

So a law must be enacted that if you are elected on the platform of PDP, resign your job if you are no longer comfortable with the party. Don’t take the mandate elsewhere.

Look, corruption is not just about stealing money. I remember Jonathan said so and people misunderstood him at that time about corruption. Corruption is not about stealing money but corruption is even in the behaviour that you display in the presence of your subordinates. Anything that will spoil the procedure and the process of doing things is corruption.

If you don’t want to be in politics, nobody is saying you should be; when I was drafted I had an option as a permanent secretary at that time. I had an option to say please allow me to continue with my civil service but I chose to go. So whatever came with it I must bear it.

Aren’t you worried about the spate of attacks on INEC offices nationwide?

I am very much concerned. I thought insecurity stops at the banditry and the Boko haram thing but with what is happening in the south, it is no more a Fulani thing. I am aware of a state that any time they have a problem, they will say Fulani have done this so they unite.

My concern is what has the INEC office done that you will go and burn it? what will you achieve but then when you look at the subtotal of people who constitutionally have a right to ask but not to burn and not to fight, but to ask.

We have a lot of treason in this country but I think the people who are burning INEC offices and police stations are people who are trying to provoke the state, I mean the country. By provoking the country, they want an activity that will be taken that they will not justify all their actions.

Maybe it may be too much to ask because it is part of the fundamental human rights of people; this dual citizenship thing, I think we must look at it and review it properly. Are you a Nigeria or not a Nigeria? You will go and serve in the military of a foreign country, then you come back to Nigeria and start agitating for what is not. That is wrong.

In other countries, unless you satisfy certain requirements, you cannot even run for elections but here everybody wakes up and begin to run for elections, producing leaders that sometimes may not appreciate the gravity of the situation that we are in.

So, it is very important that our security agencies and believe me, each institution have one security agency or the other from the military down to the actual SSS, to investigate this matter properly so that we can separate them from what we consider the insecurity of kidnapping, banditry and Boko haram from these particular internal provocateurs who are trying to provoke the state. We need to distinguish and understand what is happening.

They may relate because we know about these groups that are agitating for separation, agitating for secession and so forth. So, they may be the ones now who are doing this particular one to encourage them and to give them a justification to continue.

I believe, maybe I am too hopeful the PDP, the former governor’s forums of PDP, indeed the former governor’s forum of Nigeria and by the way I am the chairman of the PDP governor’s forum, I am the coordinating chairman of the former PDP governors in Nigeria; we will not agree to secession, we will not support military intervention. Military intervention should remain as history in Nigeria. Whatever mistakes we will form, will be corrected as we go along.

There have been agitations here and there, what is the state of the party in Niger?

At the moment, the state of the party is intact, the central zonal executives are overseeing the party’s issue. We would have resolved it in a way but when this committee came in, we had to defer to it and the committee has sat. There are two groups supporting chairmanship candidates.

Don’t forget Niger state is a PDP state, no matter what happened. This time around we will make it.