Festus Keyamo (SAN), Minister of State, Labour and Employment is the Director of Public Affairs and Chief Spokesperson, Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign Council. In this interview, he speaks on the manifesto of his principal, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and other issues. TEMIDAYO AKINSUYI brings the excerpts:
With the campaign now in progress, what should Nigerians expect from your party’s presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu? In other words, what will be the thrust of your campaign?
The full agenda and the details in terms of the micro issues are all contained in our manifesto. That manifesto of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be released anytime from now. We are putting finishing touches to it. The manifesto had always been ready. So, let me first of all clear that up. It has always been ready. Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been ready to govern this country many years ago. So, he has always had this document that is like to be his vision for the country. However, because of changing circumstances, because of the dynamics of the economy, and the dynamics of world politics now, we just have to tweak it a bit to also bring it up to date with present realities. That is exactly what we are doing and that document would be released anytime from now.
But, let me be clear, without going into the micro issue, that the vision of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is to ensure that the templates of progressivism, which is the major fulcrum of the APC. Progressivism is a clear and simple definition of a government that pays more attention to intervening in the lives of the very poor and the middle class. A government that believes more in government intervention in the lives of the very poor, middle class, rather than the other people who would rather want a free market economy and whatever happens to the poor is their business in the free market economy, that is the basis of progressivism and so, all the policies of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be tilted towards that. Secondly, the thrust of infrastructure that President Muhammadu Buhari, virtually spent his energies on will be given attention. So, infrastructure development will also be one of the cornerstones of the policy of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, because in the promotion of infrastructure, then you can create more jobs. Not only in terms of direct employment, whereby people will be employed to build this infrastructure but to also make it easier for people to carry on their economic activities, that is the secondary effect of it.
For instance, we make good roads for, farmers to bring out their goods from the villages to the urban centre, sell them, go back to their villages and live a good life. You can also stop the rural-urban migration, where the urban areas are becoming too crowded. People can remain in the rural areas and live a good life where they have the same type of infrastructure that you have in the urban areas and so it makes for all-around development. So, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, like I said, without going into the details, is also going to continue the infrastructural revolution, roads, rails, bridges and towers.
One other trust again will be agriculture, because, in our quest to diversify the economy, the first bus stop is agriculture. That is also one of our major resources in this country, in terms of foreign earnings and job creation. If you look at the recent gross domestic product (GDP), our recent GDP went up about 3.1 per cent, making it 3.25 per cent or thereabout, which is a massive improvement from what we read before. Look at the components of that GDP, agriculture contributed about 24 per cent to that GDP and that is a massive leap in terms of inputs to our GDP. We also need to tell our people that that is not even our target. Agriculture should be bringing in not less than 50 per cent of the country’s economy, but previous governments paid less attention to agriculture, if not even for the problems of the farmer-herders crisis that we faced, it should have gone beyond that. But even in the farmer’s herders crises, we were able to push it up to that point, where our approach made the biggest input to the GDP.
So, that’s the summary apart from all other issues that would be contained in that manifesto, which will be the thrust of Asiwaju’s vision. That is why you hear people talking about ‘agbado’. I like the ring of that. The other people think they are mocking the president and we laugh when we hear them call our president ‘agbado’ president.
The last president that was ever associated with farming and ‘agbado’ and all that, was Olusegun Obasanjo in 1977. Remember Operation Feed the Nation (OFN). After that, no other president had taken that order from the former president. Maybe because Obasanjo was also a farmer, he was pro-farming when he opened the Ota farms. And, you know OFN was a big booster then before oil also came in and people began to grow lazy and left the farms.
Buhari is one of the presidents that pushed many people back to the farms again. Now, with the fertilizer initiative, the rice mills that came back again, the banning of imported rice and all of that, people were forced to go back to the farms because they knew that they could earn a lot from rice production. So, people went back to the farm. So, the ‘agbado’ president will also revive something close to Operation Feed the Nation if not more than that.
One of the contentious issues in the country since 1999 is the issue of restructuring. What will be the position of your principal to this, as we go into the campaign proper?
That will be contained in a manifesto. We believe that there would be some kind of restructuring, but in terms of the contents, the extent and the scope of the restructuring, we should wait for the manifesto. But, just to let you know, like we have been saying and people have not been listening over the years that it is also a function of the National Assembly to also ensure that it happens. It is not something that an executive president can do with an executive green biro. But, don’t forget that within his scope of powers even when there was liturgy on the part of the Nationals Assembly, give credit to Buhari that he pushed for it in many ways. He signed the executive order trying to grant autonomy to local government. Not only local governments in terms of the administration but even in terms of the state assemblies and the judiciary, too. What more could you have done as president to say within the scope of my powers and when it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court struck it out? It said it was beyond his powers, which shows the anxiety of the president trying to make it happen at all costs.
Restructuring does not happen overnight, but let us have this kind of phased restructuring to say look, the autonomy of certain institutions of government, or levels of government should begin to function optimally let us see how it will work. People talk about unemployment and security and all that. It’s because we fail to restructure. That is, they say Buhari has failed in security and Buhari has failed in employment. But, they forget that it is a function of three tiers of government. Local government should employ, and state government should employ.
Let me also come back to this issue of restructuring, whilst it is true that by the constitution of Nigeria, the president that heads the Federal Government should be the Commander-in-Chief, people keep insisting and we have also insisted that for the Commander-in-Chief to function, other tiers of government, they have their component with the full security architecture. What is that component? You are giving security votes. If it is true you have components, why are you giving security votes? I am not being partisan. There are state governors who don’t go to the villa but they handle security in their states. They don’t bother. They don’t even blame the Federal Government. They just handled it because they have security votes. With your components, what is your duty in that security architecture? The security votes you’re given are first of all used to douse tension within your states. You call major non-state actors, bring them in, and use those votes to bring them in, not to put the entire burden on the Federal Government. It is only when they go out of hand that you call in the Federal Government but the governors should be asked if they have played their role up to this point.
Don’t you think your principal has formidable opponents to contend with in next year’s election and how can you assess his chances?
To understand the craft of Asiwaju, who do you, think, would have done it? Look at the other candidates. All they did was a search for tickets, jumping from party to party, they were searching for that golden ticket to work as president, they never sat down to build any structure, they never sat down to build any coalition till tomorrow none of them— once it happens, they went off. They are looking for tickets. Atiku has never built anything. He has never attracted his people to say let us do this; people have never believed in his capacity to do that.
Peter Obi is even a smaller fry when it comes to that. After he finished in APGA he left. After he rose to become the vice presidential candidate in the PDP that was the highest he could go. He saw the sign and left for the Labour Party. So, at every point in time what Obi did was use platforms to rise and run. Asiwaju has built from scratch. He took his time, and patience, he knew where he was going. You must give it to him the craft in that man’s head from a one-state ACN he started to build a coalition. He took his time. Don’t forget that he had the ACN in his palms in 2007, he was the leader, and he built the party. So, he would have just picked the presidential ticket and said let me begin to test to see how popular I am. He refused to, so he gave it to Atiku.
What will be the focus of your principal in the area of fighting insecurity?
You can see that the security situation has improved in the last few months. The Federal Government has renewed its efforts. Unfortunately, as I said, 365 days in a year, in a whole 364 days, you will see beautiful things happening but only one attack on the Correctional Centre the whole gains of that government go that year because that is how the mind works. The major thing for example this year that we keep talking about and that has set us back in terms of the psychology of people is the train attack and secondly the correctional centre attack. These are the two people who used to say the country has collapsed