Says Atiku, Obi, others to contest ADC ticket on equal terms
By Dickson Omobola
Chieftain of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Dr Ladan Salihu, in this monitored interview on Arise News, discussed the principles that would guide the party in choosing its presidential candidate for the 2027 general election.
Salihu also speaks on the impact the defection of Peter Obi, the Labour Party, LP’s, presidential candidate in the 2023 elections will have on the ADC’s chances in the general polls. Excerpts:
What impact will Peter Obi’s decision to join the ADC have on the party’s chances in the forthcoming general elections? Professor Pat Utomi has said if Obi is not made the presidential candidate of the ADC and he accepts a vice presidential position, he will part ways with him. What is the guarantee that Obi will be the chosen presidential candidate of the ADC in 2027? What do you have to say about Nasiru Gombe, who says Obi has joined the wrong faction of the ADC?
Politically, the defection of Peter Obi to the ADC is a blockbuster. It is a defining moment in our own political history, in the history of the ADC and in the history of the opposition movement in Nigeria. Remember some weeks back, Atiku Abubakar declared for the ADC and now we have Obi.
Numbers do not lie. The two put together in the last presidential elections in 2023 had about 62 to 63 per cent of the total presidential votes. If you take that calculus and put it on the table, you can literally say that the coming of Obi into the ADC has put us in a pole position, one leg already in the presidential villa. I am so excited.
Our whole members from top to the bottom echelon of the ADC are excited by this moment. When you look at the optics in Enugu, who is who in Eastern Nigerian politics was there. Senators led by Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, the former governor of Imo State, Ebonyi State, former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives and many others. We are excited, we are upbeat, we are looking forward to a very keenly contested national and presidential elections. We are going to, in the coming weeks, come up with a strategy to communicate to Nigerians, to articulate our own policies, manifestos and the way forward.
On Professor Pat Utomi, he is rushing, he has rushed with his comments. I believe he should calm down and sober up. I will also plead with those who have the kind of mindset and temperament of Pat Utomi. I am certain that at this stage, we savour the moment and look at the issues dispassionately because we are trying to recruit members. We are trying to put the party together to begin to articulate how we will perform our role as a mega opposition party.
I think that should be the issue on the table. We should not be looking at the issue of presidential primaries at this stage. We should be looking at how we grow the party, how we market the party, how we sell the party to Nigerians, how we take the message to the grassroots, the nooks and crannies of this country.
For the third question, this is the first time I get to hear of a faction in the ADC. It is all a playbook. It is in the playbook of the All Progressives Congress, APC-led government. Their own tactics and strategies politically is to continue to cause disaffection, disunity, so that all the political parties will disintegrate and collapse so that they can have a one-party state and eat their cake and have it. It is not going to work with the ADC.
The ADC is one party. The other person (Nasiru Gombe) is on his own. He is just what you would call an irritant interloper, excuse the language. But at this stage, with what happened at the Yar’Adua Centre when the ADC structure endorsed David Mark and his team, and the metamorphosis of the party politically, the inclusion, the structure as we see it today, and then someone comes out of a cocoon to tell Nigerians that he has a faction of the ADC, I think it’s hysterical nonsense. It’s not something that will fly.
When you look at the trend at how factions have destroyed other opposition parties, the case in point is the Labour Party, LP, even the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, which is fast on not becoming the main opposition party, how confident are you that the same technique that has seemed to work in the other parties would not work in your own party, especially as it seems as if some challenges are brewing in the ADC based on who would eventually emerge as a presidential flag bearer?
When you look at the history of the PDP post-presidential elections, it was a party that continued to gravitate towards the domain of disintegration and collapse. They either have their in-house issues to deal with or the structure of the APC-led government is busy recruiting their governors into its own fold and so you don’t have a party in the PDP now as we speak, per se.
Now, talking about the ADC, when you look at the creme de la creme of Nigerian politics in the South, eggheads, people who have been tried and tested, when you look at the same picture in the Northern part of the country or in the middle belt area, we have seasoned politicians that are experienced with pedigree, knowledge, integrity and capacity to withstand the kind of politics of ill wind that blows nobody any good that the APC is selling to Nigerians. We will resist it.
They will not divide the ADC.
We will coalesce as the coalition that we are, we will come up solid and I have no trepidation. I don’t even have any fears about the quality that we have on the table. We can take on anybody, any political structure and we will defeat them hands down. I don’t have worries about who we are, what we are, our mission and vision to create a greater and better Nigeria for everybody.
I don’t have worries about that. On the issue of if Obi doesn’t get the presidential ticket, his followers won’t support the party, they should calm down. In politics, you don’t join a political party with conditions or preconditions. You join as a member, you harvest your votes, you put your credibility and you sell yourself to the voters, to the delegates.
Eventually, the delegates will decide. The idea of somebody coming up to tell Nigerians, not only in ADC, in any political party, that if my presidential candidate should win or nothing, is anti-democratic and should not even be encouraged because we want to see a Nigeria that grows into a strong, virile and democratic nation, where values, not sentiments, are obtained.
Three things. We have seen people who joined a party on the promise that they would be given a ticket. Second, you said people who join can canvas, get their delegates and votes. However, we know that this is a game of money, in which Obi is not interested. For that reason, some say the primary might be the first albatross of the ADC. Third, Nasiru Gombe exists. Can you react to these points?
I do not necessarily believe in the defection of a candidate into any other party on preconditions or based on conditionalities or expectations.
That, I repeat, is anti-democratic, and we in the media should not be wasting our time discussing issues like that. Let us look at the constitution. Let us look at the issue based on equity. Peter Obi said it as much as he has defected into the ADC. He has said let the best candidate win. And if he wins, he has the assurance that Atiku will support him. If Atiku wins, he has given his own word that he will support him.
And nobody can sit down and make a caricature of that statement and reduce it to something that does not suit the narrative of the two men. We are trying to make sure that the Nigerian democracy obtains within the platform of decency, best practices, not sentiments, not histories that have failed. Let us look forward and see how we come up with a structure, how we deal with the issues that contradict and sometimes even subvert the polity? How do we amalgamate? How do we come together and devise a solution that addresses all the issues you have raised? We don’t have to be locked up in our cocoon of historical antecedents that are so negatively espoused and have not served the nation, politics or democracy any good. I want to say it without any fear of contradiction: it’s all about issues of equity.
In law, you talk about equity, but equity cannot replace the Constitution. And the constitution says that political parties have to operate within their own set rules and regulations, have to come up with their own strategies, and so on and so forth. Now, let me talk again about the last person (Nasiru Gombe). I don’t know him.
It seems to be a settled point that the APC and the PDP, for pragmatic reasons, have resolved that they will field a Southern candidate as the presidential candidate in 2027. Now, only the ADC, I think, said the matter is too early to be discussed. There seems to be some consensus that there should be an additional four years for Southern Nigeria before anybody even begins to talk about the North. What is your take on that?
I want to believe the word, in my own opinion, is not consensus, it’s debate. When we look back, history does not lie. We had a president who was flying the flag of the PDP, who contested an election in 2015. He was from the Southern part of the country, Goodluck Jonathan. He had four years.
He was contesting. Southerners and some people, especially in the South-West, coalesced and took him out. They vilified him. They made him look like the worst candidate Nigeria has ever had. He had four years to go, but they didn’t endorse him.
They came up with a Northern candidate who took out a sitting Southern president under the platform of a group led by President Bola and the late former President Muhammadu Buhari of blessed memory. The APC took out President Goodluck Jonathan. Nigerians cannot come out and be told that there are different strokes for the same folks.
If you had a Southern president sitting in, that was doing excellently well, vilified and called all names, yet you brought Buhari from the North to take him out. What is wrong in getting a Northern candidate if that happens to be? And I’m not foreclosing any chance in the ADC having a Southern candidate.
The idea of saying one portion should do eight years, the other one should do eight years, even in the political mathematics of Nigeria, is unsustainable. I do not agree with it.
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