ANAYO EZUGWU 
Datti Baba-Ahmed was the vice-residential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 election. In this interview, he speaks on President Bola Tinubu’s two-year administration and the readiness of Labour Party for the 2027 general election, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU writes
You have not backed down from calling out President Bola Tinubu’s government as illegitimate and that democracy ended in Nigeria on May 29, 2023. Why do you maintain that position?
A sworn-in government needs to be and must be consistent with the constitution of the country. If I were to open the relevant sections of the constitution to you, they are at variance with the justice served on Nigeria.
So, with due respect to the justice system, it is valid to ask the question: Did the custodians of the law did the lawful? And the answer is simply no.
We do recognise that the courts have the power to do all and everything, but that all and everything must be justice. The Tinubu-Shettima government does not strictly comply with the Nigerian constitution as it is today.
So, it is not out of place for any objective mind to still call it unconstitutional. Mildly, one could say it is questionably constitutional, but there is a big rejoinder to it. Nine out of 16 Nigerian leaders did not buy the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) forms, yet they served their terms.
General Yakubu Gowon spent nine years in office, and President Ibrahim Babangida spent eight years. Their regimes were not consistent with the constitution because the constitution was suspended. The point I’m making is that you could be a president, you could be a head of state, you could be a leader, and you could be a dictator, so long as you are allowed to remain there.
And the big point here is that Tinubu was allowed and is allowed to remain there despite the efforts of people like me. You remember my efforts. I clearly called for Tinubu and Shettima not to be sworn in. And it was legal. It is legitimate up to now. Why? I gave my reasons. Did the Nigerian constitution have an alternative to that? Yes, of course, and it is very constitutional.
Ahmed Lawan could have served till June 9, 2023, and at the point of electing a new Senate President, he acts out the balance of 90 days, during which a second or rerun election would be held because Tinubu and Shettima did not satisfy the demands of the constitution to be sworn in. However, it was allowed. I tried to legitimately form what I called the Constitutional Crisis Resolution Group.
All we had to do was take three documents, the constitution and its results, and the options. Go to Washington, Brussels, London, Addis Ababa, and on May 29, 2023, occupy Eagle Square. Tinubu would not be there today. And the beauty of stopping injustice is that it will not perpetrate itself.
Bad leadership is a virus. What do viruses do? They create more, and they become more and more. So, we should have stopped this before it happened, and legitimately and constitutionally irrespective of the powers, the Department of State Security (DSS), the police. You simply serve a notice.
You see, the word democracy still has a great deal to be understood. When you have a democracy, it means that at some point in time, the people will come out and be the arbiters themselves. Right now, the Nigerian government is a government because it has the army, it has the police and all those security forces surrounding and protecting those in power, while they misrule.
Quality of leadership in Nigeria has fallen to the ground, and that is why anything goes in the country
But the Nigerian people have no propensity to take up their government. That is the meaning of democracy; that behind the Nigerian Army, there is the army of the Nigerian people, who, if you transgress their constitution, will come out against it. Now, bad leaders have realized the incapacity of Nigerians to come together and protect their rights.
That is why I told you that if you cannot practice democracy, for God’s sake, democracy is not for you. There was the hunger protest last year. But when you have 1,000 people doing what a million people should do, they will be trampled.
Looking at the state of the nation, with just about weeks before he marks two years in office, what do you see, and how do you assess those last two years?
Complete disaster! They haven’t stopped the killings. You people reported the killings in Plateau State and many before that. They will not stop the killings. They will not stop the stealing and the wasting of Nigeria’s resources.
They cannot unite Nigeria. We have never had the kind of stealing by government officials in grand scheme.
There has never been, in recent times, a situation, where you have the kind of killings that are happening. We have hunger that is ravaging Nigerians. They promised us security when ousted Goodluck Jonathan’s government.
They also promised peace that comes with it. They boasted that the economy will improve. The whole idea behind the All Progressives Congress (APC) was deceit.
What did we notice when President Muhammadu Buhari came in,; aggravated corruption like never thought before and new dimensions to insecurity.
Could it be said that the rule of law is one of the biggest challenges facing the leaders of this country?
Yes! But to make matters even simpler for you, just to put it very succinctly, the quality of leadership in Nigeria has fallen to the ground. I’ll quickly give you two examples. I’m not making it up.
There is electronic evidence everywhere. A highly-placed official of this government said: ‘Let everywhere burn’ and the next day, there were bombings in his state. Please, go back to the 1980s.
During President Babangida’s time; a military governor just made a passing statement that if he were in service in 1966, he would have joined the coup. Immediately, he was relieved of his commissioning, and that was it. But the minister who said, let the whole place burn, is right now waxing stronger and stronger in government.
Nigerian people are not calling for his head because he’s too rich and too powerful. The president and the vice president are carried away by their 2027 agenda and the relationship between themselves that they cannot call a highly-placed cabinet member who says, let the whole place burn, to order. For God’s sake, is this leadership? Is this the kind of leader we should have?
He is so powerful that as I speak, I should be concerned about what he can do and what he can’t do. Is this leadership or is this brigandage? I’ll give you another example about the way our leaders think.
Peter Obi and I gave scholarship to a 17-year-old tricycle rider who returned 50 million pounds and another elected official stood up and donated N250 million, a quarter of a billion, thinking that it is all about money. Why wouldn’t such people go and steal the resources of their states or of their country? Leadership has crashed. The quality has crashed. Rule of law means nothing now in Nigeria.
Justice can be twisted to fit anything, to the extent that even when the constitution spells out, the justice system can turn justice into injustice because there is nothing the people can do. The message is, look, you’re Nigerians, you cannot come out; you cannot challenge, you cannot defend your democracy. So, we will do what we want to do.
How are you prepared to give vent to what must be your frustration at the internecine conflict between the factions within the Labour Party and the lack of progress in resolving that conflict?
Conflict is in the APC, not in any other party. Why were powers not transferred to Shettima before Tinubu travelled out? That’s that question. People elect leaders; that is individuals, not the crisis in a party.
I don’t like being speculative; be it Peter Obi, be it another candidate that is presented, and I am sure it will be Peter Obi, I’m still with him. The party will still elect Peter Obi, and the problems of Julius Abure and others, will immediately dissipate. But the real problem now is the misruling party in Nigeria.
You have a president that is out there frequently, for long spells, and you have a vice, who hardly knows his left from his right, who has so many questions to answer about the desperation of politicians to get to power.
That is where the problem is. That’s why I’ve told you that the quality of leadership in Nigeria has fallen to the ground, and that is why anything goes in the country.
What do you have to say about reports of a coalition or merger between opposition parties, and do you consider the position of PDP governors as a threat?
The last coalition that was formed; what happened afterwards? Disaster! APC is a disaster for Nigeria. Why do you want to form another coalition? I’m in support of unity. I’m in support of forces coming together. So, I’m in support of a coalition, not the APC kind of coalition.
The second part of my answer to you is that the Labour Party was not a coalition, yet we presented credible data to the Nigerian courts that we scored over 10 million votes over and above the APC and a better Labour Party shall we make. Don’t read a party before the elections. You’ll be looking at the wrong signals.
When the candidates are presented, when they run their campaign, and when we meet at the hotbox, that is when you know the worth of a party you’re dealing with. And if you remember, I always wanted us to be underestimated. Until we beat them and they immediately switched off IREV, until they hand-wrote all the results and did all and all they did, they never gave us a chance.
What do you see now for this country going forward, especially looking at the 2027 general election?
I expect Tinubu to throw in the towel if he is the smart politician that he turned out to be. You know me, I tell the truth. For someone to have organised 2007, culminating in his electoral heist in 2023, that person must be a super smart politician. I’m not praising him at all. It’s not good to be what he is, that I don’t want to say.
But look, he skipped 2007 and jokingly made Atiku Abubakar candidate, made Nuhu Ribadu and somebody 2011, made Buhari in 2015, Buhari won, and then skipped 2019 and then stole 2023.
If he is that smart, everything is there for him that he’s going to lose in 2027. If he is that smart, because everything is there, there are two possible candidates that I cannot mention, and they are the nemesis of Tinubu.
Tinubu’s time has come. It has been proven that APC is a lie. Buhari did not develop Nigeria. Buhari did not provide security. Buhari did not fight corruption. Neither will Tinubu ever do this.
So, going forward, I see APC losing the election. I see Nigerians somehow uniting, listening to what someone like me is saying, that, look, if you cannot practice this democracy, it’s not for you. And then Nigerians will decide to come out and practice democracy for the first time.
When this happens, bad leadership will begin to have no hiding place in Nigeria and then, gradually, we’ll begin to heal our land. We’ll begin to recover. We’ll begin to unite and take each other as fellow Nigerians, brothers and sisters. So, their time is up.
