How Dr. Umar Ardo became
the enfant terrible of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, and the man at the
centre of many controversial dialectical disputations in the party, could be
traced to his difficult relationships with some of the party’s historical
figures including Atiku Abubakar and Murtala Nyako.
A former adviser to Atiku
Abubakar, he had no scruples after resigning in 2006 to manage Nyako’s
successful re-election bid the following year.
Umar Ardo
Ardo has never shied away
from taking difficult ideological positions as he lately did in lampooning
President Muhammadu Buhari’s decision to honour Chief Moshood Abiola and
Ambassador Babagana Kingibe against what he claimed were constitutional
violations.
He served as Special
Assistant to former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar on States and Local
Government between 1999 and 2003, and as Special Assistant on Research and
Strategy, from 2003 to 2004, before resigning his appointment following
“irreconcilable differences” with his former boss.
Dr. Umar was also Director
of Research and Strategy of the Peter Odili Presidential Campaign Organisation
in the run up to the 2007 presidential election. He spoke to Vanguard on issues
of national importance last weekend.
Excerpts:
By Henry Umoru, Assistant
Political Editor
How is your party faring in
the opposition?
PDP is trying its best to
remain not only relevant, but to define and direct the affairs of Nigeria
politics in spite of the vicious propaganda against the party; in spite of
harassment and intimidation against members of the party.
In spite of all these
things, PDP is waxing stronger and as of now, it is the only political party
that is so entrenched in Nigeria to remove this sitting government within the
next few months.
How does PDP intend to
achieve this?
PDP will achieve this by
defining itself, creating a strategy that will change some views that the
ruling party wants Nigerians to hold and coming up with other members of
political parties and sponsoring a credible and sellable candidate.
Do you see the Prince Uche
Secondus-led National Working Committee as having the necessary gravitas to
lead the party to victory?
I think it is a divine
intervention, when God wants to do His thing, he guides you on to the right
path and it is divine intervention that Uche Secondus is the national chairman
of the party at this critical time of the PDP. The reason is, if you are going
to hire a person to do any job, hire a person who knows the job, who has
experience in the job and who can deliver. Secondus is the only politician, the
only party man in the history of this country who has been a party man all his
life.
He was the youth leader of
his local government under NPN between 1979-1983; he was the Publicity
Secretary of NRC of Rivers State between 1992-1993 or so; he was the chairman of
PDP (Rivers State) between 1999-2007; he was the national organising secretary
of the party between 2007-2011 and then he became the deputy chairman of the
party 2001-2015 and acting chairman of the party between a short period of time
and now, the chairman of the party. There is no single Nigerian who has held
such positions.
What blueprint would you
give to him to guide him to success?
We need a research think
tank to look at President Buhari’s leadership in the past, especially when he
was military head of state. Let us assess what he did, his war against
indiscipline, the issues of human rights abuse, the fight against corruption.
If you look at all the
politicians that were arrested and locked under his military regime, you will
see that less than 8 per cent were actually guilty of what they were accused of
while the remaining 92 per cent were all innocent people.
So if you take this as an
example, then you will come to appreciate that this looting that has become the
voice of the government, this fight against corruption may not be materially
different from what we saw in 1984-1985, that is to say, it is all hot air;
people are just being hunted, put into jail on the assumption that they have
committed crime. I can tell you, in 1984 a commissioner in Borno State, the
former minister of FCT, Engr. Abba Gana
was arrested and locked in jail for doing absolutely nothing, he was even a
victim, but he was locked just because he was a commissioner.
So whosoever holds a public
office as far as this regime is concerned, is either a thief or a potential
thief and that is not true because within the PDP, there are one thousand and
one patriots, there are one thousand and one honest people, there are one
thousand and one persons that have more integrity than those who claim to be
having integrity.
Can the PDP weave the kind
of opposition that the APC did to remove an incumbent from power?
Two things made PDP to lose
the election of 2015. The first one was PDP impunity both at the party and
governmental levels, both at the federal and state levels and this impunity
made people to be wary of PDP and to in fact, do anti-party against the PDP.
The second thing that made
PDP to lose the election was the high hopes of Nigerians that APC and President
Buhari were the saviours of Nigeria, that they would do everything and change
the country in a snap, there was high hope on the capacity, capability and good
intention of President Buhari.
Now Buhari after three
years as president, what we have seen is his incapability, incapacity,
incompetence.
With these things and the inability of the
government of the day to change the situation dramatically as expected and as
promised by the APC propaganda machine, their inability to match words with
deeds have made a lot of Nigerians all over the country to doubt the ability of
Buhari’s regime to make any change, there is no change.
In the North, more than 90
per cent of Nigerians have changed their position with regards to President
Buhari’s leadership and APC governance.
Given that this
administration did not make those changes that we were expecting, it has shown
to Nigerians that at least now you have something to compare PDP with.
In the first three years of
PDP, the changes that Nigerians saw cannot be compared with what we have seen
today. I cannot actually say how APC is going to win this election again; I am
speaking truthfully, not partisan politics, a fair assessment, except if
Nigerians do not know what they are doing.
Before 2015, there was nPDP
and now towards 2019, there is R-APC; what does it connote?
It is psychological because
if you look at the arithmetic of 2015, it was not the nPDP that made APC to win
the election. Let me do the analysis for you. Five governors left PDP to move
to APC.
Amaechi did not bring any
electoral value because Rivers State did not vote for Buhari, he didn’t get up
to 2% of the total votes cast, so we can say no votes came from Rivers State in
spite of Amaechi joining the APC, maybe he may have used money and helped them
to oil the campaign machines, but that is nothing. What we want to see is
electoral value.
For Kwankwaso, there was a
large turnout in Kano that voted Buhari but of course in 2003, 2007, 2011, Kano
voted Buhari so with or without Kwankwaso, Kano would still have voted Buhari
and the same thing applied to Sokoto State, with or without Wamakko, Sokoto had
always voted Buhari.
And then Adamawa, by the
time election took place, Nyako had already been impeached and he was in exile
as a fugitive in London. Atiku moved to APC, but everybody knows that he did
not support Buhari, he went into APC for his own, so when he lost the
primaries, he lost interest in the whole thing, so you cannot say on his
account Adamawa voted Buhari.
The only state that voted
Buhari on account of the moving of the governor is Kwara State and in Kwara,
without Bukola Saraki, they would never have voted for Buhari, but what was the
difference in terms of the result? It wasn’t more than 200,000; so subtract
that 200,000 and subtract the differences from the previous elections in those
states and the ones in 2015, there will still be more than two million votes
and Buhari would still have been declared the winner.
So arithmetically, their
moving did not materially change much in terms of electoral value, but it was
psychological; there were governors that moved and even on account of this,
some people will now have more confidence in the new party, more confidence in
the leadership of the direction that they have moved, it is the same thing for
this, it will strengthen PDP supporters, it will psychologically strengthen and
mould public opinion towards PDP in its favour.
You recently raised loud
objections to President Buhari’s awards to Ambassador Kingibe and the late
Bashorun MKO Abiola. Why?
Not that I opposed Abiola’s
recognition, I was for Abiola, but we must do the right thing rightly.
The president circumvented
the provisions of the constitution in awarding these national honours to the
three persons. I supported the award given to Abiola and Gani Fawehimi, but I
opposed giving national honour to Kingibe. If it was on the basis of June 12,
then it shouldn’t be given to Kingibe because he compromised.
He became a minister of
Foreign Affairs, dropped the June 12 struggle, he was the one saying that June
12 was gone forever, forget and support the regime. So if actually it was on
June 12, then he shouldn’t have been given the award, but that is even
secondary.
What is primary is that the
constitution of the country, I think in the Third Schedule expressly stated
that the Council of States shall have powers to advise the president on
population census and the award of national honours.
It therefore tells you that
the President shall have no powers to award honour on somebody until he
subjects that decision to the National Council of States for their advice,
whether he accepts the advice or not, he must subject it to the National
Council of States because that is the provision of the constitution, but the
president did not. I spoke to former President Obasanjo, I asked if the issue
came up at the National Council of States and he said no. Obasanjo is a former
president and an active member of that council.
This is how dictatorship
creeps into democracy; today you subvert one small part, tomorrow you subvert
another small part of the law and before you know it, you have subverted the
entire law and you have become the law and that is what is called dictatorship.
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