WHY I IGNORED SARAKI’S PLEA TO STAY IN APC, BY BELGORE

Before leaving the All Progressives Congress (APC) for
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Mohammed Dele Belgore used to be a leading
chieftain of the opposition in Kwara State, having been the governorship
candidate of the defunct ACN. He left APC alongside his associates and supporters
when the former governor of the state, Bukola Saraki, and his group defected to
the APC. In this interview with journalists, the former governorship candidate
gives details on why his group took the decision, which he described as
inevitable, and why the PDP will win the 2015 election in the state.
Excerpts: 

How do you feel being in the PDP after your defection
from the APC?

I believe that our decision is in tune with what people
wanted. We are in a party where the people feel they have a fair chance to
participate in its affairs, to pursue their aspirations and where they feel
that the forces that held them back in the past have departed. On a general
basis, we are quite comfortable where we are now.

At what point did you arrive at the decision to leave APC
and what prompted you to take the decision?

It was never easy. It was a difficult decision that took
us months to arrive at, but the turning point for us was when we felt we had
exhausted all remedies for equity and justice within the APC and when the
clamour for us to leave had reached the peak. We can no longer continue. It is
not about me, as I have always said. It is not just Dele Belgore on his own
deciding that he was going to change party. It is not only Dele Belgore alone
who started it, who has been in this struggle since 2010; it was a collective
decision based on collective and mutual consideration, and it got to a point
whereby we had to take the decision that we took…..Continue….

Did you write the leadership of the APC on your position
before you left the party, and what was the response?

Well, I didn’t myself write personally because, like I
said, I didn’t have a personal grievance directly; but we wrote as a group. As
a large part of APC, we wrote petitions, but none of the petitions was even
acknowledged.

Senator Bukola Saraki recently said he came to you and
appealed that you should not leave APC for the PDP. Why did you not consider
his words?

Well, he gave a piece of advice, and I said “thank you
very much; we will consider it”. We considered, we weighed it along other
factors and we decided to take the decision we took. We took a decision that is
in the best interest of our supporters.

Can you disclose those other factors you weighed the
advice against?

There were factors; for instance, you mentioned one of
them that we started the APC; we nurtured the party to such a position that it
became very attractive, so it wasn’t easy to turn your back away from that.
That was one of the factors. The other thing was that our first priority was to
try and force a change within. The third factor is the overall interest of our
supporters, and we found that they have switched off APC. Then we also looked at
what were the rules upon which we were going to be playing, where the rules
were fairer, and we concluded that the way APC structure was set up was already
predetermined as to the outcome they wanted to achieve, and that was not
acceptable to us. So, those among other things were the factors we took into
consideration.

As you are working for a change in governance at the
state level, the APC is also prosecuting that project at the national level.
Why did you not remain in the party so that if the change at the national level
is accomplished, you can be regarded as part of those who worked for it?

All politics is local and we start with local
consideration. The local consideration is that the APC arrangement was not in
our community interest and was not in the interest of our supporters and our
cause. So, irrespective of what was going on at the national level, we first
took consideration of our local interest and local circumstance. Having now
decided that our local interest is with the PDP, we then joined forces within
the PDP to support the party all the way to the centre. What APC was doing at
the centre did run counter to our interest in the state and therefore it is not
acceptable. You first work at your local base then you support the national. We
are in the PDP now; we are now committed to the success of the PDP at all
levels under the leadership of the President. We are committed to success of
PDP at all levels, but we first start at our local base.

What is the local interest?

It is simple; people have advocated for a change from bad
government. They have advocated for a change from a system of patronage for
select few to a system of meritocracy for the wider number, for equal
opportunity for government’s attention, government’s resources and for a political
space to be open up to everybody whereby there are no second-class citizens in
the state. As regards people’s aspiration, there should be no limit to
individual aspiration. You should not have to be going to somebody’s place. We
want a breakaway from a fiefdom system of government that we run under a
democratic setting. It is an aberration to have a fiefdom system of government
under a democratic system. That is what we constantly advocated and that is
what the people have been agitating for. Go to the people and you find out that
that is the cause and that cause has not changed. That cause is constant. What
is happening now is that we are now teeming up with like minds who share this
belief but whose voices were not heard because certain characters were in the
PDP that suppressed them. Now that those characters have departed, we’ve found
a common bond in that to be able to propagate that cause.

But would you have left APC if your request that the
structure of the party in the state should not be handed over to Saraki is
yielded to by the national leadership of the party?

Well, correction; we never personalised any of these and
we never picked up Senator Saraki or anybody else. What we said was that there
should be a level-playing field, such that everybody then tests the level of
his popularity within the party and goodluck to whoever emerges as the winner.
That’s what we’ve always said. We never singled out any one person. Let me
borrow Chief Mike Ahamba’s analogy which I found extremely graphic and useful.
He said that the APC arrangement is like a 100 metre race where you put your
favourite runner at the 60th metre point and you ask everybody to go to the
starting block. The result of the race is predetermined. It is that
predetermined nature that we strongly advocated against, not about any
individual.

Would you say it was wrong to make the sitting governor
the leader of the party in the state as APC seems to do?

Nobody quarrels with the governor being a leader, but let
him be a notional leader, okay! Even where you have full congress in a party,
you don’t automatically give the governor certain positions; you don’t
automatically say he nominates the chairman, you don’t say in an exco of nine
the governor automatically gets five positions. What you do is that you
recognise that the governor is the leader of your party, he puts up his
candidate presumably because he is the governor. He may have more support, more
resources, wherewithal and what have you, then his candidate emerges. So, being
a governor by virtue of his position, the position already confers him with a
lot of implicit advantages, but you don’t say that the governor is the one that
brings the chairman. Of these nine positions, five are automatically the
governor’s. You predetermine the result.

The Kwara APC seems to be claiming that majority members
of the former ACN members remain in the APC and that the exit of your group
from the party is not felt.

Personally, I will rather talk less about the APC because
we’ve moved on. But my simple reaction to that is: why is that so much interest
there in the APC in our leaving the party? Several press statements have been
issued. People have been sponsored to hold press conferences. Why does it
bother them so much? If our supporters did not follow us, if it is good
riddance as they claimed, then they should be more than happy that we left. Why
are they expending so much time and resources attacking the fact that we have
left? We merely exercised our democratic and constitutional right in the same
way as some of their own people did. So, I’d rather not talk of APC anymore
because we have moved on.

There is this fear in some quarters that as the PDP is
attracting bigwigs into its fold, the party may suffer internal crisis over
leadership tussle. What is your view on this?  

The presence of strong personalities can only make a
party vibrant, so that is a good thing. I can tell you confidently that we are
all working towards a common cause and what is that common cause. One, moving
the PDP in the state to that strong and vibrant party which will control the
affairs of the state in 2015 and also building the party to win the
presidential election and elections for National Assembly seats in the state.
We are all working together towards that. Whatever competition that may emerge
later, which is natural, would be healthy; but there is a common purpose. So,
it is a good thing that we have all these important personalities and it is an
indication of emergence of a vibrant party.

In case there are many of you seeking to clinch ticket of
the party for governorship race and you are asked to shelve your ambition. How
would you likely take it?

Well, I happen to come in for that purpose; but if it
does, we would do whatever is necessary to be done in the overall interest of
our common objective which is to bring about change in Kwara.

What is the prospect envisaged by the PDP in the
state? 

The prospect is that we will win at all levels. That is
our objective.

Part of reasons APC is citing for its confidence of
winning the 2015 election is its claim that the number of people who registered
as its members recently outnumbered that of the people who voted the government
elected in the last election. What is your comment on this?

Even when they give you that figure, you question that
kind figure. You can never get the membership registration exceeding the
popular vote because people who came out to register are people who want to be
member of your party. At the election, the majority of people who vote are not
members of a party. So when they tell you that they register members exceeding
the number of people who voted in the last election, then you must know that is
phony. And then, what figure are we looking at? They have given about three
different figures. The evidence on ground is that the turn-out was very poor
and they then had to resort to all sorts of disinformation. Civil servants and
other people were cajoled to go out and register. If they had this number, they
won’t need to. If you have 384,000 or whatever figure they are saying
registering for you as a party, go to sleep, you don’t have to campaign for any
general election; just tell your party members to come out and vote and that is
okay; you don’t need the populace anymore.

Why do you believe PDP would win at all levels
considering that APC, at present, controls government both at local and state
levels with legislative houses?

Go back to 2011 and election results of 2011, you will
see quite clear that we challenged almost all of these positions. In our view,
they didn’t win all of these. When you say part of it is that they won all the
local governments. In that process, you also included Offa which is a recent
memory; did they win there too?

What do you feel about the centenary year the country
just celebrated? 

At a time like this, people generally lament the state of
the nation; but let us give ourselves a pat on the back that we have stayed
together in the multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi- ethnic amalgamation of
Nigeria. Holding together and making progress is an achievement. Also, since
1999, we have a democratic government; that in itself is an achievement because
more people are getting involved in governance. Of course, we could have done
better; there is always room for improvement. We could have done better;
Nigeria still needs to find its feet and its proper position in the comity of
nations.  There are giant strides, but we do have something to celebrate
in this centenary.

How do you think the country can overcome the terrorist
attack which is especially being persistently experienced in the North East?

It is hard in those areas to make meaningful progress, to
have a kind of social and economic development that the people deserve. So the
menace of terrorism has to be tackled. We shouldn’t play politics with it. They
should look at it as a cancer in our society and in the world. Let us rise
above politics. Let people of all divides, religious and political persuasions
put heads together and tackle the menace. It is not one man’s problem. It is
not the President’s problem. It is not the government’s problem. It is not
problem of any governor of the particular affected states. It is our problem.

What do you think the country should do about the alleged
failure of Cameroun to cooperate with us on the fight against the terrorists?

If it is true that Cameroun is harbouring militants and
not cooperating with the Federal Government of Nigeria to rout terrorists, then
first of all the matter has to be taken up at the highest level, at the
presidential, European level. If that does not achieve any result, we then have
to show our might as a large and more powerful of the two countries. We can
easily suffocate Cameroun by shutting our borders to them, by blocking trade.
We can bring them to their knees if we have to, but that is the last resort and
we hope they do not push us to it.

Besides, if they fail to do something, that menace of
terrorist may come and affect them. It is like riding on a tiger’s back. 
The day the tiger is hungry, the first person it may turn to may be the one
riding on its back. You may be going around saying, you have got the tiger’s
protection, but if the tiger is hungry, the first person it turns to may be
you.

Source: Daily Independent