*Why Ekwueme didn’t become president in 1999
*My pact with Tinubu
High Chief, Alegho Raymond Dokpesi, business mogul and founding Chairman of Daar Communications Ltd, in a no-hold-barred interview with editors as part of the programmes for his 70th birthday, spoke on why Dr. Alex Ekwueme lost the bid to become Nigeria’s president in 1999, his relationship with the National Leader of the APC, Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tunubu and several other issues tearing the nation apart. MYKE UZENDU brings part 1 of the interview:
You became chief of staff in Gongola State. Looking at the country today that is divided along religious and ethnic lines, what do you think in responsible for that?
Completely bad leadership! You see, when these issues come in, people run away from reacting. It is not the Fulani man that is bad: Shehu Shagari was a Fulani man who served Nigeria, in my opinion, very meritoriously, very conscientiously. We have had military Heads of State that are northerners but there were visionaries, they were ready to accommodate all others; they pulled together the best brains that were available to bring about development and they gave them opportunities.In those days I remember my uncle Chief John Umoru, he was mayor in Port Harcourt and he is from Agenebode.
Even in Lagos and Enugu, there were northerners who contested and Yoruba’s who contested and won, people were living freely in Kano. So there was unity, it didn’t matter. When we were growing up the whole idea was that it is a country that was going to flowing with milk and honey but all of a sudden, when you have religious extremists, when you have people who exploit the very thin lines of unity then you will find yourself here.And that is why I strongly believe that there are still Nigerians who believe in one united Nigeria, there are still Nigerians who appreciate the value of what Nigeria is supposed to be and those Nigerians must come out.
Most of this younger generation of people that I am seeing, people that are clamouring for the disintegration of the country and so on, I sympathize with them, I am sorry for them but I feel also very strongly that they are in that position because of the injustice that is going on in this country, because of different laws operating for different parts of the country.Even look at the electoral law, in the south in 2015, you said this law is what is applicable and it must be applied and then in the north you allowed free voting, so people were able to vote normal.
There is no electronic transmission. Borno where there was bomb blast in the morning, Borno where the population we all know how it was, they returned 1.7million votes! Lagos which is densely populated hardly returned 1 million votes.In very simple terms, the jobs that used to be done in the Northern Region by one person for instamce, now that there are 19 states, are being done by 19 people most inefficiently and ineffectively.
The jobs that used to be done in the Eastern Region by just one person is now being done by seven persons with different approaches. So it has not helped our development.So we must sit down and said if we want to move ahead we must reduce our administrative and consumption cost, we must give more attention to development. Today over 80% of the monies we have in our budgets are for recurrent expenditure and so for capital, you have less than 30%.
If we are going to move forward, we must reverse it, we must produce, we must get involved in industrialization, in development, in satisfying our needs.When we finished school, work was looking for us and not us looking for work. They will come to you and say Shell is recruiting tomorrow, do you want to go to Shell or do you want to go to the ministry, do you want to go to this other private company, they were chasing you everywhere and you had a choice.But today, you get PhD you come back, the sole of your shoes will peal off and in10 years you are still looking for jobs you can’t get.
You are a member of the PDP BoT if I recall correctly but you are canvassing for a Northern presidential candidate under the party amidst calls by southerners that they should produce the next president. Why do you take this position?
In 1998 when PDP was being put together after G-34 have confronted the military, you still had elder statesmen who still believed in Nigeria and who went through the trauma of the military torture in prisons, some of them sentenced like Solomon Lar to the ridiculous number of years by people who are today occupying the same position.I was arrested and tried at that time, my offence was that I held political office. That became an offence and yet they are holding political offices today and they are not jailed.But your question is very simple and clear.
There is a constitution of the PDP, which states very clearly that there shall be rotation and zoning of offices both for party offices and for political offices and I have remained very consistent in my argument.In 1998 after the G-34 it was Alh. Isa Lawal Kaita who moved at the G-34 meeting, I was going with Alh. Bamaga Tukur to attend all those meetings, and it was moved there that Dr. Alex Ekwueme should become the next president by Lawal Kaita, a northerner and Alex Ekwueme said G-34 a political pressure group not a political party, when we transform into a political party we will then canvass whether he should be or not be.
When the party came in, the northerners decided that because of the injustice that has been done to the South-West, that they should be given the opportunity to run. It was in Jos, AIT transmitted it live, that was the first live transmission into the United States of America that President Bill Clinton called President Oluswgun Obasanjo the PDP candidate at that time, to congratulate him on the floor and Obasanjo was surprised and Clinton told him that he was watching him on a Nigerian station, AIT.
So because of the necessity, agreements have been reached that there will be zoning and rotation but where do we start from? They said let us start from the south and we choose to zone it to the South-West.Don’t forget that in 1995 draft constitution which Abacha conducted, in the reports and records they had entrenched this idea of zoning and rotation where it was envisaged that the six geo-political zones will have a turn of five years so that in 30 years we will end up from zoning and would start experimenting merit.But after deciding on the 5 years rotation, when Obasanjo came in, there was an expanded party caucus where it was canvassed that the military had done a lot of damage, the programme of the PDP could not be fully implemented within those 5 years and it is desirable to extend it to as the constitution has provided for them to do 8 years.
Again, all the founding fathers, including Alex Ekwueme, Ogbemudia, all the big wigs of the PDP were present at that meeting and it was the northern delegates who said we have no objection, we shall exercise patience, we will allow Obasanjo to have another 4 years but with the proviso that if he do 8 years we too will do 8 years, so let it be understood that is the foundation and everybody said yes.
Ogbemudia gave the vote of thanks, appreciated the north for their understanding and so Obasanjo did up to 2007, 8 years.And so by that agreement power is supposed to have rotated back to the north. But I was South-South People’s Assembly chairman I led the delegation to say, the South-South had not had any opportunity, that South-South should be given the opportunity. I travelled round the country, I did not carry gun, I did not cannon, I did not fight, all I did was that I engaged the Nigerian public.
We travelled to everywhere, drew the best of the names I could have from the South-South to travel to lobby for a South-South president.By the time we got to the convention, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo said look Dr. Peter Odili, you have done very well, if we go into this convention, you are going to win overwhelmingly but we have had an understanding with the north, please let us allow the north to be the president and that was how Umaru Yar’Adua came in.Yaradua unfortunately did not live long enough to see his 8 years, he did only 2 years. If you like, two and half years because in actual fact I can tell you for free, that by November 2009, Alh. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was not available and therefore the Vice-President was the one in charge.
The argument that he didn’t have executive powers, he didn’t have constitutional powers, let’s leave all that side, but he was the de facto until Yar’Adua died in 2010 on 6th May.And that was supposed to be the first term. I agitated at that time I said: for us not to break, with the principle already established, let us have the north complete that second term of 4 years so that we will be done with the north and it can come back to the south.And at a meeting I said: Mr. President as he was at that time, if you then want to run, please prepare yourself and you can even be a vice president to any of the northerners that you want to choose if you say you have to be relevant and be there. If you think that you want to leave because you have been president because he was actually sworn in as president, then you can go on vacation and prepare yourself to run at the end of the tenure when you come back.
But some people in the south or in the south-south in particular said no, it is not possible, you cannot be so close to power and you relinquish it and so on, and crisis entered. So Jonathan did another 4 years.So we came to 2015 and by the time we got to 2015, the PDP had done 16 years in power, if you like 14 years of the south and 2 years of north and that is the situation up till today.You say you believe in justice, fairness and equity, the north has done 2 years and the south has done 14 years is that balance?
What of the other parties?
The other parties that you are talking about came into being in 2013, 2014, they don’t have a background, they don’t have history. In 2015 when we fielded in PDP Jonathan, the north had started clamouring and agitating that it is their turn. You have spent 14 years, so allow us to complete our 4 years and we said no, we have eaten smarties, we are very smart and that is what plunged this country into this crisis, that is why we are in a mess now.So I am PDP. I am guided by the constitution of the PDP which in its preamble said for its unity, for the stability, for the growth of this country, we must rotate such that every part of the country, no part will be neglected.
The APC on its own came in and also said they were adopting some zoning an rotation and in their situation they chose to pitch a northern candidate knowing full well that the sentiments of the north was that fact that they were this thing.
They put a northerner there to stand against the southerner.I believe that everybody knows here what comments and my position was at that time, that very clearly at the end of that election, I do not agree, I do not believe that Jonathan lost that election but in any case, he didn’t contest it, even when there were ample evidences to that effect, he has become a statesman now but that has not solved the problem of Nigeria, it has deepened it.So APC has its own constitution and its own rules.
If in my own party, I want to win an election, I cannot win an election when there is injustice, where there is unfairness, when we are not guided by certain rules and regulations.So in the PDP what I am agitating for is let us be fair and just, let us put ourselves in the shoes of ourselves, let us all as one family, as this party started, let us still remain one and in doing so, please let us choose a candidate from the north.Some people have come to me to say how can we allow them to do 8 years again and I said sorry, in 2019 we fielded a northern candidate as recommended by the Ekweremadu’s Report but again the PDP was out maneuvered. I don’t agree that Atiku lost that election, I don’t, I am not convinced, I am not persuaded but INEC has said so, I am a citizen of Nigeria and so I must live by the rules and so on. I am criticizing APC for failure, I am criticizing APC for making Nigeria the capital of poverty in the whole world.
For the level of unemployment I am criticizing the APC. Are these PDP policies? These are not PDP policies, they are APC policies, so I cannot be dragged into APC situations and conditions. Let me tell you, it is the APC policies that are being implemented. The lack of recognition of the federal character provisions in the constitution that has brought us to this level of you are suspicious of me, I am suspicious of you, you are suspicious of every other person. It is because of that lack of respect of that federal character provisions in the constitution that we have a Security Council that is totally peopled by one side of the country and speaking only one language.All the appointments that have been done, even where there were southerners and so on, they were all uprooted and replaced.
I want Nigeria to be restructured on the principle that I see Nigeria progress and the PDP principles and policies that were implemented of giving every part of the country sense of belonging, it needs to be brought back and revised and the person for justice, fairness for now is from the north.What the PDP did and we southerners, we had the opportunity to be in power, we grabbed it and threw away this and that one so that we can now monopolize everything and that was what gave birth to APC. If only we were fair, we were just and we were rational, we won’t have been in this problem.
What is this that you are always speaking glowingly about Ahmed Tinubu?
Let me tell you that Bola Ahmed Tinubu, before he became governor, when he was still in Mobil, you know the headquarters of Mobil is just directly in front of my house in Lagos. As young men, we eat and drink together and I dare say we womanize together, we were close friends. And he became governor, God blessed him but does that remove the fact that we were good friends? No, as young men. Should I say because he belongs to a political party he is now my enemy? He is the godfather of my second to last daughter who has a Masters degree, and Tinubu is a Muslim; I’m a Catholic. If there is an interview and in which they ask your relationship with this man, I will say I don’t know him because of politics? I don’t believe in that, I will never do that.He is a philanthropist, he is kind hearted, he is supportive of the ordinary person. He has brought about bringing hope to people. There is no journalists in Lagos who Bola has not touched his life in one way or the other. So why should I be envious or condemn him for that? I praise him and I wish him the very best.
For 2023?
I wish him the very best in whatever he puts his hands on. So it has nothing to do with politics, it is a matter of the good relationship we have always had and I cherish it and I want to keep it.
There is this rumour that former President Jonathan is hobnobbing with APC, probably he is going to cross carpet?
President Goodluck Jonathan has not mentioned it to me nor any other person, I am sure. Goodluck Jonathan is a statesman, he sacrifice his ambition after the 2015 elections because he wants a united Nigeria.Don’t forget that the person we have at the helm of affairs globally or when Africa matters today is Olusegun Obasanjo, he is aging and he is going out of and very soon he may not be able to move around as he needs to travel. But President Jonathan is a younger person. He is able to represent Nigeria, promote Nigeria, attract friends and investment to Nigeria. That role will fall on his shoulders very well and I encourage him very well to keep that position, to be Nigeria’s number one image maker, to be Nigeria’s reference point and so on. He is well suited to that and I wish President Jonathan the best of luck in achieving that.
Will you advice him to go to APC?
He takes his own decisions, he is an adult, he is able to assess the circumstances, but I don’t believe he will go to APC.
What will you use your remaining years to do?
Service to humanity.
