Vanguard columnist Dr. Femi Aribisala, in an interaction with
Vanguard editors, explains why he is not proud to call
president-elect, Gen. Buhari his president. Quite interesting.
Read below...
How did you come about your claim that INEC rigged
the election for Buhari?
There are certain things that are interesting about this
election. The first one is that it is one of the most
keenly contested elections that we have had in this
country. It involved more people. But 10 million less
people voted than last time, which gives us some idea
as to how true some of the figures we have been
having before had been. But the question is: Where did
the decline of 10 million come from? I discovered that
it came disproportionately in certain areas than it did in
others. And to some extent, if you look at the PVC
distribution, you can project the election. It is because
Buhari could campaign in the South, but the North
didn't permit same kind of liberty for the president.
The president was stoned in Bauchi and he was
threatened. By the time the pattern of PVC distribution
became very known even in war-torn states, it was
easy to know that it had been front-loaded. When you
then analyze the election result itself, you will discover
that some places just had an incredible suppression of
voters in spite of high level of interest. Some people
had an incredible number of voters. And I am still
interested in why more people voted in the
governorship election in Katsina than the presidential
election.
On alleged gang- up against President Jonathan
If Buhari had contested in the United States, there is
no way that he could win. It is impossible. We know
his antecedents. Nigeria doesn’t even teach history in
schools. Once you bring up the antecedents, the very
idea of having such a person gunning for a position,
not even talk of the presidency, would have nullified
his candidacy. I was not just writing about Buhari
because he tried to arrest me. There were all sorts of
things that he did and for which he never apologised.
Buhari took ownership of those things. And he never
asked for forgiveness. At different points in the history
of Nigeria, he was given an opportunity to do that.
We set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but
he refused to do it. You don’t forgive a man who does
not repent. With regards to President Jonathan, I had a
problem with the gang-up. And I think it is wrong for
two major tribes to gang up against someone from the
minority. Why should a President be called clueless? I
don’t think that someone will get away with calling
Obasanjo clueless. Somehow I feel that the South-
South is entitled to have their son as president and we
were acting as if we were doing them a favour. If it
was not providence that threw up Goodluck Jonathan, I
wonder if we would have considered having a South-
South president. In the interest of national unity, the
North-West producing the president again does not
balance any equation in Nigeria. If we are talking about
a president from the North, we should be talking about
the North-East. I was offended that from the
beginning, some people insisted that there would be a
civil war if the man ran. They also insisted that they
would create a problem if the man ran. And I said that
Nigeria belongs to every one of us. So that was an
issue to me. Wole Soyinka had vowed not to support
Buhari but a few weeks to the election, he asked
Nigerians to forget the past and move on.
Are you not being unfair to Buhari given the circumstances
we found ourselves?
I said you only forgive somebody who repents. Buhari
has never asked anyone to forgive him. So you are
jumping into conclusion that we have a new Buhari?
And the fact that he has won the election has not won
him forgiveness. We are going to see if Buhari has
changed. And I have said that if he has changed, he
will do more than just wearing a suit. He will come out
and apologise for things done and overdone. He said
he took responsibility which is different from
apologising. The man who admitted stealing a cow is
different from the one who said forgive me for stealing
a cow. Buhari is a very deliberate man. I am not
persuaded by the election campaign that Buhari is
going to be a very competent president. I have not
seen any competence in him. There was nothing in the
campaign that was of substance that impressed me.
No new ideas came from Buhari or the APC. Most of
the people in APC are PDP people. So I am not
persuaded that we are in for any new thing. But I hope
you are right.
Beyond Buhari, you are also not a friend of Bola Tinubu.
What are your reasons?
I wonder why anybody will be a fan of Bola Tinubu especially
if you live in Lagos. He is not a democrat. I don’t like Bola
Tinubu because he has monopolised Lagos politics. To some
extent, Ekiti governorship election was lost because of him. I
live in Lekki and every day I have to pay toll fare and I wish I
was not doing that. APC is in control of the media to a very
large extent. Governor Fashola has gotten an easy pass with
the media. It is easy for a Lagos State governor to be seen to
be good because he has resources. In the light of the
resources of the state, only 10 percent of the people have
access to potable water, the same percentage has access to
educational structures. In order for the APC to survive, the
resources of this state had to be commandeered for political
purposes.
So, you can see the end justifies the means. I think it will be
foolish of Tinubu to take AIT to court over the Lion of
Bourdillion case because if he does, the kind of things that
would be revealed about him would be shocking. This
godfather business is undemocratic. Let people choose their
leaders. One person cannot sit somewhere and decide what is
best for everybody. I don’t believe that elections are free and
fair in Lagos. I do not believe that Jimi Agbaje lost this
election. It was APC’s manipulation that brought out the
governorship election result. That is my own opinion. Not
many Nigerians are asking Buhari to apologise. What exactly
do you want him to apologise for?
It is part of my problem with the media at the moment. We
are being given the impression that Buhari won by a landslide.
Please let us look at what INEC declared. 12.8 million people
voted for Goodluck Jonathan. So don’t assume that they
don’t have their reasons or that the people that want him to
apologise don’t exist. I maintain that it is very easy to say
that we don’t want to look at the past because we want to
look at the future. But we need to understand the past in
order to move to the future.
So, Buhari needed to apologise. He needed to ask for
forgiveness because he killed people through extra-judicial
means, he jailed people for telling the truth, he kept people in
jail even when kangaroo courts that he set up said they were
not guilty. He manipulated the judiciary into jailing some
people. I could go on and on. That is why I said that if we
were a serious democracy, he would never have gotten away
with it. There is a reason Buhari was not nominated by the
northerners. They voted for Kwankwaso and Atiku at the
primaries. Buhari got his candidacy through Tinubu. We don’t
have to pretend that Buhari is well liked because he has won,
it seems to be like that but we should know that he only has
the plurality of 2.5 million votes.
In your penultimate column you claimed the emphasis on the
alleged rigging was in the South-South and South-East, but
the PDP was beaten in areas where they had strengths like
Niger, Kaduna and other places.
You think the resentment was not real? I mentioned
those areas as well. I mentioned Kano, Jigawa, Katsina
and Bauchi. I said the results from these places were
inflated. We have video recordings of underage voting.
There is a problem with the election because if we
accept what the PVCs are saying that 17.1 million
registered for the election in the North-West alone, the
zone will determine future elections. If they decide that
they want somebody to be president, by the time we
will be looking at the result and they will come up with
9.1 million from Kano, the whole equation would
change. What can you get from Imo and Anambra? So,
if the North-West vote is more than the South-South
and South-East, there is going to be a problem. There
will be a problem if we don’t get the proper census of
Nigeria. They used to tell us that Kano was bigger
than Lagos. Jigawa was split from Kano and Kano is
still supposedly bigger than Lagos. In this last election,
about 3.1 million people voted in Kano and Jigawa.
And 1.4 million people voted in Lagos. That is twice
the number of the people in Lagos. I don’t believe
these figures. If you do, fine. I am entitled to my
opinion.
You said you don’t like Tinubu because of the reasons you
adduced, but when the books would be written, it would be
said that Tinubu contributed significantly to Buhari’s
emergence as a democratically elected president. What do
you make of that?
I don’t agree that Tinubu made Buhari the president.
Let’s get the facts right. Tinubu made Buhari the
presidential candidate of the APC. But in the
presidential election, Buhari did not win Tinubu’s
votes. And that is part of the problem. All the
discussion before was that everything would be
determined in the South-West, but Tinubu did not
deliver the South-West. The margin of defeat in the
presidential election was not much in Lagos. Tinubu,
to some extent at the presidential level, is expendable.
And that is the problem. You can actually not choose a
president just from the North. It interests me that
while the campaign was going on, all the northerners
making noise that it was their turn disappeared. They
did not campaign with Buhari. The people campaigning
were Tinubu, Amaechi, Fashola. I bet you that the
northerners are going to come out come May 29. And
you will see it happen. Don’t think that the people that
had been clamouring for power to return to the North
in the past six years, were doing that for Tinubu to
inherit. I don’t believe that. They have an agenda. That
is why I said the story is not told because the election
has taken place, the story will unfold when the
administration comes on board.
Are you saying that you are impressed with Jonathan’s
performance?
Yes I am. I think APC ran a fantastic campaign. They
hired Obama’s people and they controlled so many
different things. So, a lot of things were simply
propaganda. And part of the problem with the PDP was
that they had it so easy for so long that they did not
know how to campaign anymore. So, they thought that
it was just going to be another cake work, and this
was a different issue for them. Many of the things that
Jonathan did, his people like Reuben Abati did not talk
about it. People just did not know anything until some
spirited efforts were made at the last-minute during
the extension. That was when they now told people
what had happened. But within the framework of
Nigerian presidency, Jonathan is a good president if
you compare him with others who had occupied that
position.
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