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Adamu: APC is determined to win 2023 elections

For several months, the All Progressives Congress (APC) was in turmoil over its national convention meant to elect a new leadership. In this chat, the new National Chairman of the party, Sen Abdullahi Adamu, shares his vision for the party with ONWUKA NZESHI and indicates that his core mandate is for the ruling party to win the forthcoming general elections

 

Earlier today you received your Certificate of Return as National Chairman of the APC. What next?

 

 

We’ve concluded our national convention. We’re grateful to you all, especially our party members for their cooperation throughout the process. We’re grateful for the seeming positive change of attitude in APC. We’re trying to rekindle this spirit of oneness in the interest of our great party. Regarding what we are doing now, the convention is over and we are trying to settle down.

 

Today is the fifth or sixth day after the convention. I received my Certificate of Return today and we are in a hurry to get started because the elections are around the corner. The primaries of the parties will start soon.

 

Mr. President said the party will refund the money to those contestants who lost out to the consensus candidate in the chairmanship race. Have you commenced the process?

Well, we’ve started meeting with them. I’ve met with Saliu Mustapha and I’ll be meeting with George Akume on Monday. It’s one of our major tasks. We must take deliberate steps to heal the wounds that might have been inflicted on our members in the course of the contest. They wanted to win.

They wanted to serve the party but along the line, the decision of the party on consensus prevailed. We need to forge that understanding and encourage them to put the interest of the party first and above personal considerations.

 

In your inaugural address at the National Secretariat of your party, you made a declaration that: There would be no room for failure.

What informed that statement?

 

Yes. There won’t be room for failure. This is our first mission. The very first mission is to work against anything that has the potential to bring failure. I thank God that so far in my life, from political activism in my days as a student to date, I have never led a failed mission. I’ve never captained a failed ship. If there are things that are posing as problems, I try my best to fix them as best as I can and that is what we will do.

 

With the enormity of the job and the trust that President Muhammadu Buhari has placed on us, we have no  excuse. We are going to ensure that anything we need to work will be provided and any atmosphere that is cloudy, we will clear it as best as we can. We shall face the election as one party, one family and confront our adversaries or opponents as one united party.

 

We’ve faced elections before when our President today was not a President and we won. He took the oath of office with the Constitution and the Koran and as a Moslem, he will not do anything that will contradict the spirit and letters of the constitution.

 

He has two terms of four years each and he’s about to complete the final term. He has made it clear that he won’t contest again and that means that we will not be having an incumbent, somebody on the saddle of power from our party on the ballot as we face the next election.

 

But what gives me some solace and courage that we will lead the party to victory, is the fact that this President has done well and needs to have what we call soft landing. We want to make sure he lands positively or what the pilots in the Air Force call positive landing.

 

We want to ensure he lands positively because whether you like him or hate him, he has done well. We do know as APC members, that he has legacies that he has worked for and we owe him a duty to ensure that these legacies are not only recognised but sustained as much as possible.

 

Now to do this, we have to win the forthcoming election. He will not be completely missing in our ticket. We hope to take along the positives of President Muhammadu Buhari and bring his spirit and mind to bear on whoever will fly the party’s flag for us to win the election. So we are not completely without a father in the APC ticket because his spirit will be very much with us.

As we go into the election, there is no better way to say goodbye to him in a very loving and passionate manner than to hand over the reins of power and governance to another APC member. It is a job, we believe that will be done.

It is not rocket science. It is about working together, trusting ourselves and whatever obstacles that might be on the way, we do away with them as quickly as we can. We just have about 11 months to go.

So there is no time to play around; it’s time to work and we are going to work hard by the grace of God. There is no option, no option whatsoever. It is to go there, do it and win it. That’s what we are going to do.

Even amidst the security challenges?

Yes. Security challenges are there but nobody has ever emerged where there are no challenges.

There are challenges, no doubt about it but we’re working on it. Each time we lose one soul, we don’t like it but at this point in time, these things are happening not because the government is not doing enough but because of the nature of the challenge.

For us, nowhere and nobody is going to beat his chest and say that these incidents won’t take place when you are dealing with an unconventional warfare, terrorism  and guerrilla tactics.

You won’t even know how they occur, or when they occur. In conventional warfare, you can have clues as to the direction of your enemy based on operational experience. But this one is coming with tactics that are not in the books. This is a township and this is a time when most of them are sleeping. You know that much.

This is a railway line, but you can’t say that you have the capacity to monitor whatever happens along the route 24 hours, every day. A person who is criminally minded is ahead of you. Nobody will tell you that he has that power and he is ahead of the criminals, unless he is part of the criminality.

So, you become compulsorily reactionary, not because you want to be, but the circumstances have forced you to be reactionary. Well, the only thing that we are doing the best we can as a government is to see that we develop some new ideas and prepare our fighting men and women to respond quickly when things happen.

Where we can forestall, we make sure it doesn’t happen. Now, when it happens, that’s against our wish; then our response should be good enough to scare or to flush out whatever that is left of those that are behind the acts. So the elections will happen.

There is no way we can stop the electoral process because of security challenges. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has already announced the timetable and it is not    only the APC that wants to go for that election. Every political party that is going to contest the election will face the same problems.

 

Which option will the APC adopt for its primaries under your leadership?

You want to know which of the three options namely, direct, indirect and consensus, we will adopt. These are not fixed beacons. These are options that the party has and the party will fall into any of the three when the time comes. It is not like it is already decided and just waiting to happen.

These are guides as to the methods we will adopt for choosing our candidates for any election. This is what the Electoral Act provides but when we get there, whatever election is before us, the party will decide which of the options we are going to adopt in nominating our candidates.

 

Your party claims to have a membership strength of over 40 million. How do you intend to manage such a large number of people?

I agree with you that managing such a large number of people is a challenge. But, it’s a family and I believe that like any social group, we have our own problems, some of them known, some of them we don’t even know but they just come up. Every single act we perform, problems come along, but there is no problem that will come that we’re not on ground to solve.

As chairman of the party, I’ll lead the team to solve them as best as we can and be sure that before we get to the election in 2023, most of these problems would have been solved. But again, the issue of problem solving is a work in progress. Any day, anywhere, there is no social group of human beings that is problem free and the issue of problem is very relative.

Some of the problems are hidden. It is those who make their problems public that you know but there are those who are sitting on their problems and such problems are just waiting to manifest themselves.

So there is nothing unusual about problems, but what we are hoping is to be        sure that we solve these problems. I intend to meet with the leaders of the party at various strata in order to see how we can approach most of these problems.

How tough are you going to be? Are you going to sanction party members that drag the party to court?

I’m an ordinary human being. I do know that there are litigation problems waiting to be attended to and we will attend to them the best way we can. I do not yet know the depth of the problems in those litigations. I don’t know who is claiming what or the issues in dispute between the parties. Until I know that, I don’t want to tell you how we will deal with the issues.

You can’t solve a problem without knowing the nature of the problem. Some of them are just discontentment and when we find out that that is the case, we will try to resolve it as much as possible. But, I also want to remind members that the party is a voluntary social order. We all volunteered to be part of the APC and this party has set for itself, rules and regulations.

We have our own constitution. We have methods by which we are supposed to do anything in the party and we want to discourage the practice of members taking the party to court. When you go to court, you’re only laying your flanks bare and your adversaries will take advantage of it.

That’s what we don’t want and we will see how we can get sincere party men and women to abide by the guidelines that we have made as a party. It is wrong to take your party to court. Even in those developed countries, you don’t see party men taking their parties to court.

 

It is only here that we take pleasure in taking our party to court and some of our colleagues, lawyers encourage this to happen. A good lawyer is the one that settles his client out of court. He will still have his briefs, but he will make better friends if he settles the matter out of court. Each time you go to court, somebody is winning and somebody is losing and the conflict continues.

 

This was the reason why the party advised members who took the party to court to withdraw their cases, bring the substance of the cases to us and let us see how we can resolve them.

Were these cases in court not part of issues the Committee on Reconciliation was supposed to resolve?

Unfortunately, that was not what was intended when the Committee on Reconciliation was set up by the party.

There is nobody that will tell you that with the number of members that we have, the number of branches that we have and the events that have taken place over a period of time it will take two months to solve all the problems. As far as we are concerned, reconciliation is a work in progress.

It is not something you rush and achieve results at the snap of your fingers. Sometimes, our perception of freedom and rights is a little faulty.

There is the need for us to pause and look at these things again. For me, with our    level of development and understanding of what democracy is all about, we need to guide our democracy. I believe that we should have guided democracy.

Some of the things we do here in the name of democracy, freedom and rights, Americans don’t do it; the English don’t do it; the French don’t; the Irish don’t do it and the Japanese don’t do it as well.

Whoever that is in a democracy in the civilized world don’t do some of the things we do and we can’t accept some of the things they do in their countries. For instance, in the United States, when a serving elected officer leaves office before his due tenure expires, the governor of the state can just nominate anybody as a replacement to go and serve the remainder of the tenure.

 

You can’t do it here. If you do it in this country, you won’t believe what will happen. So there are things that I think we need to know very well to be able to make this democracy flourish.

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