• APC full of propaganda
• Jonathan, Buhari surrounded by corrupt politicians
• Speaks on his relationship with Tinubu
The leader of Oduaa Peoples Congress (OPC), Otunba Gani Adams, has declared that the increasing popularity of the presidential candidate of All Progressives Congress (APC), General Muhammadu Buhari, as a mere propaganda which he said the opposition party is grounded in. In this interview, he also described President Goodluck Jonathan as a democrat who is in the midst of corrupt politicians.
What is your impression of the ongoing political campaigns?
So far so good, the parties have succeeded in discrediting each other and that is expected in a political campaigns. So there is nothing new.
How would you describe the overwhelming support for General Muhammadu Buhari, the same man a lot of people called a religious fanatic and rejected at the polls in 2011?
I do not see overwhelming support for Buhari yet; it is all propaganda. The opposition has a very strong media team against the ruling party and don’t forget that with the kind of propaganda that has been unleashed in the past three months, no one expected that President Jonathan will get the kind of crowd he got when he campaigned in Kano and Kastina (those are the core north). I think that it is out of frustration that some of them stoned him in Bauchi. If he was not doing well there was no need for anyone to have stoned or thrown sachet water at him. Go out there and vote against him. Why stone him? I didn’t believe that he could pull that kind of crowd in the North. That shows that with the propaganda, the opposition is deceiving Nigerians, which is not working in the mindset of the people. When he came to Lagos, the entire Lagos was jam-packed and he has not gone to Port Harcourt and Yenogoa, he is yet to campaign in Cross River, Edo, Delta, Ondo and many other places. It is going to be 60, 40 ratio because you cannot rule out the power of incumbency at the dying minutes. I give 40 per cent to opposition and 60 for the ruling party. Don’t be surprised that a week to the election, most of the parties will adopt Jonathan as their candidate. I foresee Labour Party and Accord Party adopting the President and they will work for him in their states. So when you are talking of overwhelming support for Buhari, though the support he has now is more than what he had in 2007 and 2011 but is not what can be described as overwhelming. You know that people like Tinubu (Asiwaju Bola) are very good in media. Tinubu can sell stone as bread, using the media. He has that strategy. He will turn stone to bread through media. But luckily, people still have their conscience and you cannot because you want to get their sympathy you now foment security threat in your region to discredit a sitting president. People have their own views and they know what to do at the right time. What of the Christians who are being maltreated in those zones? In North Central, Christians are about 75 per cent and with the Boko Haram experience, they won’t vote for Buhari; I am telling you sincerely. Even in the North East, like Adamawa and other states, we have a lot of Christians. In the North West, Christians are in the minority like 10 or 15 per cent. And most of the people who got appointment, who are contractors, who are in parastatals in Jonathan’s government will work on their Muslim brothers and sisters to vote for him. In South East, there is no doubt that Jonathan will get nothing less than 90 to 95 per cent of the votes. In the South South, no matter how people pretend about Amaechi (Rotimi), he will get 90 per cent there. In Yoruba land, it will be 50/60 because the way PDP is moving with Jonathan, those who will vote for Jonathan will be more than those who will vote for APC. In Lagos, 90 per cent of non-Yoruba will vote for Jonathan and there are also a lot of Yoruba that have sympathy for him for what he has done for Yoruba nation and the more they attack him in the North the more sympathy he gets. So, I think that APC will work harder to catch up with the ruling party.
You said that if he has not achieved they won’t stone him in parts of the North, can you point to what Jonathan has achieved?
A lot; I am not the spokesman of Jonathan but I will just tell you a few. Apart from Shagari, Shonekan, Jonathan/Yar’Adua and Gowon there is no other person on that position that was not accused of state killing. Jonathan has been in that position for six years and you cannot link any killing to him. Tolerance is the bedrock of democracy sustenance; he is tolerant; he is mature. If you don’t push him to the wall, he will not respond to your criticism. Until they are showing his achievement, you will not know that he has done a lot. Yesterday, I watched a programme on TV where Vice President Sambo commissioned a railway line from Port Harcourt to Makurdi; the rail transportation that has been abandoned for a long time by successive governments, this man revived it. First time in history, Nigeria became the biggest economy in Africa. Despite the fact that he has a strong opposition at the National Assembly that does not allow most of his bills to sail through, despite the fact that he has a security challenge, almost 15 per cent of the country is affected by the Boko Haram activities. Most of the major highways are in good shape now. Privatisation of NEPA, most of the past governments have tried it and failed but Jonathan has done it and power supply is improving; and talking of restructuring of Nigeria, do you know how long we have been shouting that we need a national or sovereign conference? He just woke up on October 1, 2013 and told Nigerians that he is ready to organise that conference. And after four months despite the pressure by the opposition led by Bola Tinubu, he started the conference with opposition from all angles. Yet the conference was concluded and 633 issues were recommended. We finished the conference at the peak of political campaigns when no politician is interested for governance. That is one of the reasons the recommendations have not been discussed. I don’t want to turn myself into self-appointed spokesman of Jonathan but the truth is that he has achieved a lot. The evil we know is better than the angel we don’t know. I don’t have issues with Buhari but I have issues with a lot of people who surround him. Governors who get a lot of allocations but have achieved nothing in their states can only deceive some people but not all the people. With time, the truth shall come out. I was one of the people that criticised Jonathan that Yoruba is marginalised and that was before he made a Yoruba son his chief of staff. I did criticise him openly that Yoruba was seriously shortchanged. At the end of the day, he made a Yoruba his chief of staff and you and I know the power at the disposal of a chief of staff. Though I will be the last person to say that Jonathan government is not corrupt because most of the people that surround him are highly corrupt but compare them to those who nearly sink a state and who surround Buhari and who are shouting change and yet do not want change in their states. They want to stamp out corruption. I agreed that Buhari is not corrupt but can he run the government alone? This is not military regime that he can just arrest somebody and use decrees two or four to keep somebody in detention, set up a tribunal to try the person. You can’t do that in a democracy. And if he becomes too rigid he will be impeached. So let us be very careful the way we buy into anything we see on TV. We know this people; we know what they have, their assets.
Let us leave politics for now. One thing that struck me when I stepped into your compound is the absence of mean looking members of OPC at your gate. Why is this place so free for anybody to access?
I am a man of the people, a democrat. This house is built for the people. In the evenings children in the community will come in; the food we cook in this house is not only for us that live in the house. Even the owners of the houses that surround this my house have asked me to buy them but I asked them ‘what will happen to those living in them? Will I tell them to pack out? Pack to where? Well, the fact that you walked in unchallenged does not mean that there is no security. There is, but they are not intimidating and most of the people that move around in this community, we know them and we watch everybody’s step. Even as you drove into this community we saw you and know that a stranger is in our midst. We deliberately made entrance to our house simple so that people can reach us unhindered any time. It is when you have access to us that you can tell us our shortcomings and we can also know your problem; the one we can solve we will and the one we can influence other people to solve we will do it. And at the same time, I am the head of an organisation of about six million people so if I shut my gate, I won’t know when some of my members will come; my grassroots members most of whom my security men do not know. And that will affect my leadership. So, this is the house of the people and most of the people that come do so without appointment except for a few like you.
Source: Daily Independent
