With a New Face of Leadership, Nigerians’ll Trust PDP Again

A former Minister of Education under the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, Professor Tunde Adeniran is one with name recognition in the academia. A student of Political Science and product of the University of Ibadan, he is also an alumnus of the Columbia University, in the United States. An erstwhile staff of the United Nations in the mid-seventies, Adeniran once served as Nigeria’s Ambassador to Germany and has been a recipient of many honours for his excellence in public service. Interestingly, the self-effacing cognoscente has his eyes set on the Peoples Democratic Party national chairmanship and has been working tirelessly to realising this dream. Thus, as the party gears up for a convention later in the year, where it intends to elect its new national chair amongst other officers of the executive, Adeniran is leaving nothing to chance either. In this interview with Olawale Olaleye, he took down some of the growing concerns in the PDP, the state of the nation, the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari and the future of Nigeria as 2019 beckons. Excerpts:

Your interest in the PDP national chairmanship has not declined. But a lot of people see you from your academia background. Do you think you stand a chance on this murky turf?
My chances are very bright. Yes, my interest has not declined simply because the circumstances that prompted my interest ab initio have not changed. We saw a party that we laboured so much to found being directed away from the mission and vision for which it was set up and the party is not being run in an ideal way and we felt that in fairness to the polity; in fairness in particular to the members of the party, we need to come in to do the needful – take over the leadership and redirect the party in such a way that it will be able to do what it was supposed to do. We have to take power back to the people by ensuring that certain things are done.
The motivation for the founding of the party was to ensure that we broaden the base of political participation in a manner that at the end of the day, many people will find in it a vehicle to actualise their potential and ultimately an instrument with which to serve the Nigerian people but the party has run into seriously turbulence simply, because so many things went wrong. The party became characterised by impunity, imposition, little regard for due process, the rule of law and we felt that things must change. That was what prompted our interest and of course, with what the party went through, one will see justification in actually coming out to want to help in redirecting the party.

There is no debating your standing within the political class, having served in different capacities, but you are also up against some very heavy forces in the race to PDP chairmanship. Do you think they carry more clout than yourself when it comes to political contest?
You said earlier that because I was coming from the academic background it might delimit my capacity to really achieve dominance within the political class. I believe that because of the experience that I have gained over the years and the fact that I came into politics initially as a participating observer and later on as a resource person, before I even became very active, the network that I have established over the years speaks for itself. I am not going to mention some specific names but none of those aspiring to the same office has acquired practical experiences as mine. I can say that in the last two republics, I have been involved while it is in this present republic that these people have been involved and of course, my involvement has not been on the peripheral; it has been deep.

Many people do not know that when you talk about the past, I have played very prominent roles. When you mention the Unity Party of Nigeria for example, when the late Dr. Tai Solarin was chairman of the electoral team that went to old Bendel State, I was the secretary of that particular electoral panel and so many other areas of operations in the political arena. And of course, by virtue of my training, I understand the internal workings of a political party, the ideals and what we have been having, and it is easier for me than any other person to appreciate what ought to be and what is.

So, it is like some people come in gambling. As far as I am concerned, I don’t have to gamble, because I know the variable intensity of mass political party and what they are capable of doing and why things are not the way they should be and so, based on that I am now able to really go in and do for the people what ought to be done. And of course, because of the roles that I have played in the society – outside the academic world – I have been exposed to quite a number of interest groups, a number of individuals – the lowly and the highly placed and of course, the dynamics modulating the Nigerian political process.

One particular experience that I should like to mention, when people refer to whether one will have sufficient influence, connection and all that is that I was for some years involved in mobilising Nigerians to be involved in the political process and raising their level of consciousness. In the process, those of us who were involved at that time, there was not a single local government area in this country that we did not visit. That is why it is possible for me today, after being part of the formation – some people will say founding father, but I will call it founder or foundation member of the PDP. It is possible for me today, when you mention any particular local government across the country, I can always tell you such and such things are there and of course, when it comes to my zone, I will even move it to ward level and it goes a long way in enhancing one’s chances.

The PDP crisis started a year or two before the 2015 elections and for those who have closely monitored developments, the truth is that in spite of the Supreme Court ruling lately, the crisis have not completely subsided in the party. Now, you are coming in to reorganise the party so-to-speak and it is more like inheriting a huge burden on yourself. How do you intend to tame the crisis in a way that will reposition the party ultimately?
I am mindful of the fact that we have challenges – very serious challenges, but what I found particularly challenging that really interests me is the fact that by virtue of my background and training, I am expected to be, and I assume I am one of the very keen students of crisis management and conflict resolution. I have taught it over the years. I have been involved in resolving crisis and managing it, not just among people and groups, but among nations. I have been on some panels. So, to now handle challenges within a political party, I do not consider it to be a burden as such. I find it fascinating. It is quite exciting.

There is not a single crisis going on or afflicting the party that one could not foresee. I foresaw them and I know why they are happening. I know where they are coming from and I know what the consequences will be if they are not properly managed and of course, because certain things have been left undone over the years, that is why we had to face this type of problem.

It could have been nipped in the bud but because our people took so much for granted, which was unfortunate. Now, the present leadership of the party has done quite a lot in trying to resolve some of these crises but they still need to do more. Wherever they stop, at whatever point they stop, I have the feeling and I believe God will grant me the wisdom and the capacity to be able to handle them. I do not feel that it is something that should scare anybody. I believe I have the capacity to cope with these challenges.

Before moving on to getting PDP back on the track, it is important to look at what went wrong. You know the party was in power for 16 years and all of a sudden, an emergency coalition uprooted it. At what point do you think the PDP got it wrong?
The party has done quite a lot in trying to resolve some of these crises but there is still need to do more. Whenever and wherever they stop, I have the feeling and I believe God will grant me the wisdom and capacity to be able to handle them. I do not feel that it is something that should scare anybody. I believe I have the capacity to cope with these challenges.
The PDP got it wrong as far as I am concerned right from the very moment we deviated from the principles and goals of the party. The goal was to ensuring that we create a mass movement that will be based on due process, rule of law, justice and equity, and above all, internal democracy but when we introduced some elements of imposition, disregard for the party constitution, then of course, problems were bound to come in. That was when it started gradually.
When we started by getting things confused, when people thought that they could arrogate certain powers to themselves by virtue of the position they occupied – disregarding the constitution and many people went along. It is like drawing attention to those things and in less than five years of our operations, the things started gradually and then it spread and of course, at every level, people now started to take a cue from what was going on and the problem of the party, all along, has been that of leadership. If we had the right leadership, we would not have found ourselves in this situation. At the time it started and it started festering, it would have been arrested and of course, redirected in such a way that the crisis that was brewing would not have gotten out of hand.

Since the APC government came into power, there have been several allegations of monumental corruption and this in a way was believed to have pitted the people against the PDP in many ways than one actually. Coming in to correct some of these anomalies, do you think Nigerians can still trust your party again, given the kinds of corruption said to have been perpetrated under the immediate past administration of PDP?
I believe Nigeria people are very discerning and sometimes we underrate them. They know what is going on, they could make a difference between reality and mere perception. What went wrong was undertaken by Nigerians, who are in leadership positions and these people, you will see that those of them, who could be accused as being corrupt, in office and so on, Nigerians know that it is not the exclusive perception of the PDP. In fact, a majority of those who were the key actors in the perpetration of such absurdities have moved to the APC.
But Nigerians know that and they know very well and we do also appreciate that we made some mistake. We are not perfect and there were a few people that you can say are corrupt. We want to put that behind us. And why the Nigerian people will have confidence and trust us is the fact they could see some soberness, they could see that we have shown some penitence. We have been able to come out and admit. We are not saying that there was no corruption in the land, no! But what we are saying is that the corruption presently in in this country is alarming – worse than what used to be.

And in any case, when you look back, the institutions for tacking the corruption were put in place by the PDP regime and this will convince anybody that with where the party was coming from at the time, it was aware that there was corruption in the land and this corruption was something that was bee hiving before the party came in and the party felt this should not continue that was why those things were introduced.

Two other issues I should like to point to on why the Nigerian people will trust the party is that by time they see a new face in terms of the leadership, because they will know that these people have realised their mistake, now they are not bringing back those old faces.

Secondly, when they see what will be put in place by the new leadership, definitely, they will trust us. They will say these are new faces; they have some pedigrees and this is what they are trying to do and all these will happen before we go for the next round of election and the way we are going to go about it, the kind of candidates that we are going to throw up and particularly the process that will throw up those candidates will show that we are now serious and we have learnt from the mistakes of the past.

Is that your selling point for the PDP – the new face of leadership?
That is part of it

The nation is going through a lot of crisis and challenges now. How do we situate this? Do you think it is a function of the style of the administration or they are challenges, whose time has just come?
I believe what we are facing now derived from the fact that we have some key people in government, the leadership of the present administration, who came to power without actually knowing what they were going into. In other words, these was insufficient preparation and what has compounded that is the fact that on getting this and realising that it is the inability or unwillingness to accept the depth and the extent of the challenges they faced, instead of facing them and being realistic and bringing on board Nigerians, because Nigerians are so very resourceful.

We have so many people in various parties and those who are not even in parties. That is the essence of a presidential system. You bring in materials that you can use to get result but there isn’t any willingness or interest and the leadership simply doesn’t really care what the consequences of their action and inaction would be and you see discordant tunes coming – wrong signals, terrible signals, frightening signals – coming from the seat of power.

Of course, problems will not run away unless you tackle them and once you do not also apply the right approach, you are not going to get it right. That is part of the problem of the present administration that we are facing and when you have a problem, you do not appreciate the problem or you do not understand it, then you will have a more serious problem, because the very moment you have a problem and you realise and appreciate that this is a problem, then that is the beginning of the solution to it.

One of the burning issues in the country today is what people have termed restructuring. What is your idea of restructuring?
I have listened to many people on restructuring. I have watched many debates and so on. I have also heard people talk about it, but one thing that comes out clearly is what I regard as conceptual conclusion. Many people don’t seem to understand what they are talking about when they are talking about restructuring and all that. It scares some people and some people even trivialise it. Structural problems have been with us in this country over the decades, whether you talk about the economy, the politics, even social relation but reduced to fundamentals, when we are talking about restructuring.

What does it mean? I will just take two examples, not to take too much time. One is that education is the key of the development of any region. So, if you have restructuring, it will make it possible to put an end to strikes in this country. There is no reason whatsoever for lecturers of University of Lagos or Bayero University, Kano or Port Harcourt earning the same salary and some lecturers either in Ekiti State or Kogi State and so on. People should be able to have that independence. That is the autonomy we are taking about. So, that is part of restructuring.
When things go wrong in Calabar, those who are lecturing or workers in Niger State University or some other places, will not down tool. That is part of restructuring. A lecturer or a professor in a university even within the same state can be earning different salaries. Vice chancellors do not have to be earning the same salaries. But when you have these straight jacket types of arrangement, of course, there are bound to be problems. That is why people ground everybody.
The other area I will like to talk to is in the political arena. Why for goodness sake, should a governor in some states that can hardly generate enough to maintain basic needs and the civil services be earning the same salaries as those of the others? Restructuring will make you cut your coat according to your cloth and you develop at your own pace and you will be able to manage your affairs the way it should be managed, not depended on what is going on in other places and there will be very healthy competition and it should be possible for people to move around. But when you put everybody in a situation that you do not have what could be regarded as true federalism, you have a situation that is akin to having a military type of structure and governance. I mean it is not in the interest of the country. So, without restructuring, we are joking! We are not going anywhere. We should be able to restructure meaningfully and liberate the energies of Nigerians to actualise their potential and encourage people to develop at such pace that would be to the benefit to the people. You don’t tie people down here and there and you do not generate unnecessary tension, because it leads to tension when you bottle up everybody unnecessarily.

Restructure doesn’t mean separating. It doesn’t mean confederation, no! You will have federating units and certain things will be done centrally. There will be less wastage, simply because by the time you limit what is handled at the centre, states and local governments do quite a lot and of course, people will be challenged to tap their internal resources because opportunities will be there for them to tap what has been left dormant. The governors come cap-in-hand to Abuja and once they collect whatever, they go back and share and that is because you are having free money. So, that is the essence of our restructuring.

What is your take on the recent proscription and subsequent desigation of IPOB as a terrorist group? Do you think it was a decision taken in good faith?

I don’t believe that such a decision ought to have been taken. The people in the South-east have great leaders who are patriotic, who are nationalistic and who want to build a strong nation and who really could easily handle what has been going on in that part of the country. And of course, I also believe that if they had been encouraged, they would have done quite a lot in terms of getting the IPOB people to realise the futility of what they are trying to do, because you do not necessarily need to have witnessed the war that took so much out of Nigeria in terms of human life and resources to appreciate the fact that whoever claims to be proud of being an African and is based in Nigeria is doing that, because of what Nigeria represents presently in terms of size, in terms of resources and in terms of image.

When you now say you want to go ahead and be on your own, what it means is that you are not thinking through the implications all along. So, those people are now agitating based on their own perception of what they would like to be. What we needed to do at that time was to have moved in early enough. Why are these people agitating? Address those issues, because they will not go away and the leaders there too will be encouraged to look into all these problems.

The Ohaneze has been very wonderful in looking into the issue and taking position and other leaders too. But it shouldn’t have been allowed to degenerate to the level that it did but then, having degenerated to that level, you do not use the sledge hammer to kill an ant. It is not right categorising such people with their agitations here and there and of course, by the time we deal with the situation approximately through dialogue and so on, people with the type of sentiment that it generated would not have been generated.

Again, one other thing that we should always appreciate in this country, a multi-ethnic society, is that we have to interact and rotate, bearing in mind some underlying differences – that we are trying to transfer allegiance from local peculiarities; ethnic groups to the new nation, and once some people feel rejected, external rejection leads to internal solidarity and people will now see themselves as disadvantaged and it leads to so many things.

Nigeria recently turned 57. Do you think her unity as a country is truly settled and not negotiable?
Nigeria is an ongoing project, we should take it as such and realise that there are serious challenges ahead that we still need to face. I believe that by now we are supposed to have reached a situation, whereby those who are born outside their so-called states of origin, should be regarded as bonifide. I wouldn’t call it indigenes but residents of where they are. They should have equal rights to vie and do whatever they want to do.
Indigenship, I believed that is one of the things that is creating problems for this country and so long as you make distinctions, some people whose parents came from Ogbomosho and have been living either in Jos or Kaduna or their parents are from Kano, they have been in Ibadan for decades and they still will be regarding such people as belonging to some other places, I do not think it is right. We should be able to integrate in such a way that people will have this common bond that this is our nation and that because you regard yourselves as more or less equals, the love that one generates will have a spillover effect on the harmony within the system and the nation, of course, can only grow on that basis.
But, until we take those things that appear to be little things seriously, we will not be getting the type of nation that we should be building and of course, when there is no bond, people will be talking about negotiating relationship. They will be talking about Nigeria still not there. When will Nigeria be there? We have to start taking steps. Some steps were taken on the part by our fathers but we did not build on them. It was possible in those days for someone from the north to be a mayor in Enugu and in some other areas. Of course, in Oshogbo, there was a northerner that won election and in some parts of the north so many southerners. That we should develop.
We should have built on that and type of relationship that existed when you talk about Kaduna, Lagos – those are cosmopolitans areas, the way people are developing and even in the rural areas too. People were integrating, they are seeing themselves as Nigerians, but all of a suddenly, because of the selfishness of politicians, they started using elements that divide people as weapons of electioneering simply, because they want to gain some supports instead of basing their campaigns on issues they are now using such factors as ethnicity, religion and so on and so forth, of course, that further divides the nation and it is not good for us.

So, in summary, I believe that we will get there once we begin to seriously take appropriate steps, but this is not something that can be imposed; it is a way of life and we have to appropriate that and take necessary steps to cement that in the education sector, in the social relations and some other areas and more particularly in the political area. The leadership matters a lot in this regard. The leaders can make or mar, the unity of this country and whether indeed we have a strong nation that we can be proud of and that we can continue to build and pass on to the coming generation will depend on what the leaders do.

One of the issues that were raised during the 2015 election against your party was the matter of security and precisely that of Boko Haram, herdsmen killings, kidnappings and the rest of them. Now, if you look at the APC administration since 2015, do you think it has done anything better than the PDP did?

We all got it wrong initially, because there was this assumption that the phenomenon will fizzle out and there was what I at some point regarded as failure of intelligence. But the very moment it started shaking the country, then of course, the government started doing certain things about it and I could say categorically that the approach was based on the limited appreciation of the dimension that it could take. Those of us who have studied conflicts in societies and terrorism and all that know that the way it was going, it could consume the whole country.

We thank God that in spite of some other short comings here and there, President Jonathan was able to really face the challenges appropriately at some point and he did his best at that time. But then there was need to build on it, but there was disconnect – a gap – shortly after the change of power. If it took some time before the new administration realised that they could not politicalise this thing, we really need to tackle it and then they now started doing something concrete about it.

My own approach would have been slightly different anyway and this is something that you have to defeat the Boko Haram, you also have to win the heart of the people and do those things that led to Boko Haram in the first place and make sure that we do not have Boko Haram in the future or the ones that are on row we clean up effectively. So, what some people regard as regular war will not arise.

How will you rate the current fight against graft? Are you of the view too that it is selective?
I believe that it is selective, because we know what has been going on in this country all along and I believe that people should do things not based on personal interest, what will suit them politically or even economically, but what is good for the country; what is good for the future. The coming generations are watching and in this country, the things that are done today have consequences for the future.
Once you decide to be selective, you are sending a very wrong signal to the society and those, who are coming behind and this is why I have been worried and say we really need to tackle corruption no matter whose ox is gored. And until that is done, I will not applaud whatever is going on, and people are watching and people have been very disappointed about the way it has been handled.

Lastly, as you journey towards the PDP chairmanship, what is your biggest fear and why?
As we are moving forward, there is nothing I can say or consider major or minor fear. Each time I wake up and I am praying, my mind is always drawn to the book of Isaiah that says “fear not, for I am with you” and on the basis at that, I just go on. I do not see any challenges as insurmountable. We have a Caretaker Natural Executive Committee that is anchoring what is happening. I have every confidence that they are going to do a very transparent election. I also have the confidence that we have all learnt from our past and that everything will go very well.

The concern that I have, which I also put into prayers is the fact “that a tree does not make a forest”. I am going to work with a team. May God throw up candidates, party faithful that will be passionate about this party, the way I am passionate so they will be committed to doing the right, to put an end to the absurdities of the past and we will together start a new beginning. I have no control over that but I know that God has control and he would lead our leaders to encourage people, who will truly serve in a different style following due process, the rule of law, promoting internal democracy and making sure that the love of the masses is paramount in their minds.

Above all, that by the grace of God, when we take over power, we’ll truly serve the people, so that people will know that government is there to serve them and that the shortcomings of the past become part of our history.