Why Nigerians Should Rise Against Political Class, by Baba-Ahmed

Hakeem Baba-Ahmed is a former Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Political Matters in the Office of the Vice President. The erstwhile spokesperson of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), in this interview monitored on Arise Television by ANAYO EZUGWU, speaks on why he left his position, hardship in the country, insecurity and other national issues

Tell us why you resigned as Special Adviser on Political Affairs in the office of the Vice President?

I went into the position with very high expectations. I desperately hoped that President Tinubu would be successful, so I went in there to work for him and for Nigeria, and I believed that we could work.

I was made to understand by the Vice President, who was the catalyst to my going there, that there was space to work and there was a job to be done.

And I knew, having campaigned so vigorously for eight years against the incompetence and the damage which President Muhammadu Buhari did, that his successor, who also pushed the country to the deep end and promised something close to a revolution, as President Tinubu, was going to follow through and really take Nigeria through revolution and change it, at least in his first term. So, I went in there with high spirit, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out.

What was it like working at that level; what was your job as Special Adviser on Political Affairs entails and whether your advice was actually being taken?

On paper, it was a great job. I mean, it was a huge responsibility to be the political adviser to a president in the office of the vice president. It was an enormously important job on paper.

But it depends on if it’s actually actualized in real life. It wasn’t. It was very frustrating. You have to understand that the structure of the Nigerian presidency has been virtually the same, maybe, since 1999 or even during the military era. The number two is always at a certain disadvantage.

So much of what the number two does depends on the chemistry between one and two, the configuration, the power dimensions, the nature of the cliques around the president. So much depends on what the number one does. If the president doesn’t really feel that the office of the vice president is central to his success or useful, you just set it up.

We’ve seen that many times. And basically, this is what I met and what I left behind. There wasn’t much to do. I wasn’t used to sitting idle. And there was a lot to be done. If I had been involved, I could have offered my humble advice or opinion but I wasn’t. And I couldn’t just be collecting salaries and just sit down and do nothing.

There is a report floating around that Vice President Kashim Shettima is being steadily and systematically isolated by the Tinubu ring or clique of supporters in the presidency. Is that a fact?

No, I didn’t see any evidence of that. Like I said, it’s not peculiar to me. Many people who had worked with vice presidents went through the same experience I went through.

The vice president, as an official recognised by the constitution as the number two citizen; how busy he is, how active he is, what he does and what he doesn’t do, substantially depends on the disposition of the president. I know Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s first time; he was incredibly busy.

When he fell out with President Olusegun Obasanjo in their second term, he was virtually non-existent. I also worked with another president whose vice president was idle for a substantial amount of time until the president died. That’s Goodluck Jonathan and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

I think to answer your question; the vice president’s office is either busy or not busy entirely depends on the disposition of the president. I know that the personal chemistry between the president and the vice president is excellent. I hear this from the vice president and I believe him.

Sometimes almost to a fault, Shattima always says how great the president is and he’s a good man. On one or two occasions, I’ve said to him, but if he’s so good, how is it that we see so many of the wrong things going on. But he will defend the president with his life. I know this for a fact.

But that it is the way it is set up. You also need to understand that the presidency is a lot more than the president and the vice president. There are very powerful aides and there are other people who intervene.

They can decide whether both of them work well or they don’t work well. They can decide whether the number two would be active or not. That’s how powerful they are.

You got along well with Vice President Shettima; what did he say to you was the reason you remained idle and weren’t being used as you ought to be?

Well, like him, we wait for our time. We wait for opportunity.

You can count the number of politicians who are literally holding the country to ransom. In Political Science, we call it state capture. Not more than 2,000 people are running this country politically and it’s all about them

We wait for someone to say, do something. I think in his own case, he filled up some space, his own space. He did well. I think he represents this government well. He’s an extremely intelligent and hardworking person. I’m very loyal to the president. But that doesn’t necessarily reflect on all of us.

There were quite a number of absolutely brilliant people in office. I have met some incredibly good people. The President is very good in headhunting. And on his side of the presidency, it’s incredible the quality of people that he has there.

It’s unfortunate, however, that they are not being put to use. I just happened to be the first one to jump, or I don’t know whether I’ll be the first one to jump. But I was the one who said, no, I got to do something better with my time and my life. There’s a country to be fixed. And if I can’t fix it, serving and working for this government, what you call the cocoon, I can do it outside.

Is it true that that you were appointed to give the Tinubu administration Northern credibility, especially after a contentious election?

If there was, I wasn’t aware of it. But I like to believe that on my own merit, I deserve to be appointed adviser on political matters. I didn’t need an additional regional stamp to become an adviser. And I didn’t see any sinister motive. People say, oh, they wanted to keep you quiet, they wanted to buy your voices and everything. I mean, I started that job, I think, when I was close to 69. I’m 70 now. So, I know a little bit about it. I knew what I was doing. And I can tell you that I didn’t see any sinister motive or a trick involved in appointing me.

You wrote an open letter to the President, suggesting that he has a closeddoor style of leadership, is indifferent to complaints about ethnic bias in appointments, and frequently runs the country from abroad, whilst attending to personal matters. You also said that he has become something of an isolated leader, heading an insular administration. Don’t you think that sounds pretty strong? Well, it would have been easier if it was just about me. Am I busy? Am I lazy? Am I just going there to the Villa to feel good?

I had a nice title; adviser to the president. So, if it was all about me, quite possibly I would have stayed longer. But I felt I could have been a lot more useful to the country and to the administration. II don’t like to sound boastful.

I believe I had something to offer, which was the reason why they asked me to go there and not to sit idle and watch a lot of things go wrong. You don’t have an opportunity to fix them.

You don’t have an opportunity to engage the president who has all the powers to be engaged. You don’t have any channel. I saw the vice president virtually every working day. We talked; we discussed the country but Nigeria requires a lot more than talking with the vice president.

I think part of the problem is that the President never really had time for people like us. I’m not sure he had time for a lot of the people working for him. You quoted part of the letter that I wrote to him. I used the language very carefully. You said I used the words – insular, isolated. Those are not words you use casually.

The President really is genuinely isolated. Whether it is by choice or by circumstances we don’t understand. The bottom line is he ought to be available to a lot more of the people that he has trusted either to run ministries or departments or to advise him. He isn’t and that’s a problem for the country.

Not so much for him. But it’s a lot because the president of Nigeria is a hugely powerful person with a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.

So, if he’s not going to look for solutions to problems from people that he had appointed, there are only two options left. Is he getting advice from the wrong people or is he getting no advice at all? And there are other issues that I raised in my letter.

I said somehow, I just think when I use the word insular, it really was about when you hear people close to him speak about Nigeria, it’s as if we live in two different worlds.

That is the most frustrating thing for me. We would leave the Willa, we would go home, we would and watch real people and we would sometimes drive around. We see and we mix with poor people. We know how desperate the country is, how difficult life is.

The insecurity level, how high it is. People are losing hope, asking what is the value of this democracy and sometimes they say: What are you doing there, we thought with people like you, we wouldn’t be seeing some of these things? Are you guys really advising the president about some of these things?

And it all amounts to this idea that the President is either not interested in getting advice, or he’s getting advice from the people that he hasn’t appointed officially to give him advice.

Either way, when I use those words, insular and isolated, very carefully, I believe if President Tinubu was more open to suggestions and advice, and if he has higher quality of people handling sensitive positions for him, and he makes himself available to them, and you talk to him, and they tell him what they think, I think the country will be better.

Are you going to join the new coalition that’s being talked about?

At this stage, no and I hope even in the future, I doubt it. I have very serious misgivings about all this talk about coalitions, and all this jumping from one place to another. I think these are signs of just how degenerated the political process has become.

And it’s a very sad thing for Nigeria today, as we speak, a country that has never faced more problems than we have, that its leadership entirely, the whole spectrum of leadership, is all running around looking for places to continue to run the country aground.

I am referring to the entire politicians, all of them without any difference, those in government, those trying to get into the government, those jumping guns, and those looking for coalitions, the whole lot. I mean, you can count the number of politicians who are literally holding the country to ransom. In Political Science, we call it state capture.

They are not more than 2,000 Nigerians who are running this country politically and it’s all about them. It is worrying more for the country because the way we are headed, we have a choice between the bad and the worse. There’s absolutely no difference. They have no shame. I’m sorry to use this word. Our politicians have no shame.

You leave this party today, and tomorrow you move into another one. And if someone were to ask you, well, what has changed? The only thing that has changed is your party. You’re the same person working with the same kind of people, and the only people who you have no respect for are 99.9 per cent of Nigerians. So, it’s all about them.

It’s all about keeping power or getting the power you lost. And it’s all about milking the country. So long as these guys are going to continue to be the people who determine the fate of this country, I’m afraid we’re going to continue going downwards.

Is that why your advice to the President is to step aside and not seek re-election in 2027?

Absolutely! I honestly and sincerely believed that if I had sat down with President Tinubu before I left, that is what I would have said to him. I would have said to him, President Tinubu, I think you achieved a lifetime ambition.

He had done great things to become president. He had done great things to make other presidents. It hadn’t worked in the past. Finally, it worked. He had done many things for this country.

The best thing he can do is not to run for 2027. The best thing he can do now is to look around, get good people, to find younger people, people in their 40s and 50s and 60s, people with a lot of experience. People with passion and anger in them and the zeal to actually rebuild this country, to give it a future and step aside and he can do that with his party.

The moment the APC brings out a Nigerian who is in his 40s, I believe many other parties will do the same thing because no presidential candidate in his 80s or late 70s is going to start contesting for the presidency with somebody in his 40s.

It has happened before and we need to begin to show some respect for young Nigerians. We’ve messed up their country enough and we need to have some faith in younger Nigerians because they can fix this country.

The suggestion you made that the President should not run again in 2027; is that a view held widely amongst the circles that you move around in?

No! I think the reason why people don’t even dare think that is because they think there’s nothing that is going to stop President Tinubu from running. It doesn’t matter what the merit of this alternative is.

Even if he doesn’t want to run, some people will make him run for their own sake. I happen to know that there’s a huge amount of interest in what happens in 2027. There’s a huge amount of expectation that something must change.

The problems of the northerner are the problems of the person in the South, and there is no part of the country that can actually say, we can get a presidency that is ours. Even the South-West, in spite of what appears to be a favourable disposition towards it, cannot claim that

There is interest in getting, perhaps, new thinking, new strategies, and there’s a lot of determination not to repeat the same mistakes.

People’s consciousness is rising, perhaps, a combination of the suffering between poverty and insecurity, and the idea that people think the North just exists as voters, not as citizens entitled to all the good things that happen to everybody. Some people will say: ‘It’s the North.

Don’t worry about it. When it comes to elections, we know what to do with them.’ People are quite angry, very angry. So, there are two things. President Tinubu can choose to run or not to run. In my letter I said, if you run, you can win but I don’t see any value.

What you will do is you are going to continue to preserve failure and disaster; if you fail and you lose, your successor is going to wipe out everything you did in the last four years, within the first one month. That is the level of bitterness that exists between this small cycle of politicians. They hate each other. They are together only because they all have to gang up together.

They don’t want to be accountable for what they did while they were in power. The only way they can remain safe and in their homes is if they are in or near power. They hate each other, but they are forced to stay together. So, it’s virtually about 2,000 to 3,000 people against the rest of Nigerians and they are playing the ethnic card. They are telling Nigerians it’s North and South.

There’s no such thing as North and South anymore. The problems of the northerner is the problem of the person in the South and there is no part of the country that can actually say, we can get a presidency that is ours. Even the South-West, in spite of what appears to be a favourable disposition towards it, the zone cannot claim that.

Are you saying that nobody can speak monolithically about the North?

Nobody should speak monolithically about anybody. There are just two classes of Nigerians. The politicians who think they can continue to fool Nigerians and the rest of us. That’s basically what it is. Just look at it. I admit I was working for some politicians.

But I was working for the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, who I believed came to power, even if it was a mistake, when he said on May 29, 2023, that subsidy is gone.

I mean, like a lot of other people, I said, this is incredible. We all knew the subsidy had to go but if he had the courage, later, of course, he said it was an inspiration or whatever. If he had the courage to say, I’m removing the subsidy, you must say, we’re dealing with a revolutionary here. I just wish that fire, that inspiration had been sustained all through.

And I had no doubt about joining him. I was worried because a lot of people said to him, don’t do it, said to me, don’t do it, don’t go there. But a voice inside me said, no, no, no, no. I think maybe we are on the verge of something fundamental. We can change the way this country works. That’s why I went in but I left because I realised there was no fire.

Did you find some elements of good leadership in President Tinubu and was he at some level a progressive leader as many who knew him when he was governor of Lagos State seemed to think?

My definition of a good leader would be: a leader who has real vision, not just to become president, but to use that presidency to fundamentally change those things that needed to be changed, some of them very difficult and sustain that change, lay the foundation of that change beyond the time that you are in power. So, the power is not just an end in itself, it’s about changing lives.

That’s my vision of a good president. I saw a man who laboured really hard, worked very, very hard to become a president, who started on his first day by saying get ready everybody, put your belts, we’re in for some turbulence, but in the end, you all thank me and then nothing, we went back to normal.

It’s an anticlimax which we shouldn’t have at this time. In economic management, in managing security, in managing national coexistence, I didn’t see the kind of change that we required by 2023 after President Buhari left this country completely wrecked.

We needed a president, who will really shake Nigeria and say to Nigerians, listen, we’ve come from a very difficult journey, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, have faith in me, I’m going to do this and he then creates an environment that makes it doable.

Then he engages Nigerians. He doesn’t just send out press releases. He has an engagement strategy. He talks to the people. He meets the people. I don’t know when the last time President Tinubu visited the North, if I can’t even remember or the South-East or whatever, except for campaigning.

Look at the South-East, the zone has been virtually just a part of Nigeria. Nobody is thinking about the fact that you need to reintegrate the South-East. It’s a vital part of Nigeria.

There’s no political thinking in this administration. You need to rebuild the trust and the confidence of Nigerians in each other. If this country is going to survive, we must stop this business of these people are dispensable. We need to reunite this country.

We need to give young people hope. We need to let them know that this country actually is theirs and that they can live in a country that is safe, in a country that progresses, a country that will give them some hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re not doing that. That’s why I’m hoping that people will rise against the political class now. We need change and it can happen.