Dr Adebayo Orire, a former All Progressives Congress governorship aspirant and patron of the Tinubu Support Organisation in Ekiti State, tells ABIODUN NEJO that rising insecurity threatens the 2023 elections
There were fears that the APC might lose the June 18 Ekiti governorship election, but it won. What was the source of the fears?
I actually had my reservations about our winning because of our performances in government, the rising influence of the Social Democratic Party and Segun Oni, and the supposed initial lethargy. I actually said we might not win except the election was rigged, but as things worked out, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu won the presidential primaries, and his rumoured support for the SDP was automatically cancelled, and there was the bandwagon effect of his winning the primaries.
Very close to the election, the APC actually worked very well because failure was staring us in the face and because of the might of the federal and state governments, the SDP could not match the APC on the field. That was how we won and, indeed, there was a victory.
What will Ekiti people miss about the Fayemi administration when it leaves office in October?
I know there will be nothing much to miss in the outgoing government and that is why I think the incoming governor, Biodun Oyebanji, is moving around the elders, doing some peace-keeping visits and getting the who-is-who to support him and cooperate with him. If he does things the way it has been done in the past few governments, we might be worse off.
Specifically, what should he do differently?
He has to approach the economy differently, make sure there is investment that can yield income-agricultural investments, industrial investments, tax reorientation-and he has to grow the economy. Ekiti State used to be a peaceful state, it is no more peaceful. He has to approach security differently, he has to generate employment, and even transportation has to be addressed differently. Things have to be done differently, more pragmatically, more realistically for the government to pay off. What we have had in the last two governments is deplorable.
You said the bandwagon effect of Tinubu’s candidacy worked for the APC in Ekiti. Why didn’t it work in Osun during the governorship election and what is the implication for the presidential poll in the two states?
In Ekiti, it is clear that the APC, the PDP, the SDP, and other parties will vote for Tinubu in the majority. Tinubu’s support organisation is very strong in Ekiti; it penetrated all the wards, all the polling units and everywhere in the state. We have worked so much. Even when it was almost a taboo to work for Tinubu before the primaries, we were already solidly on ground. Tinubu will win Ekiti hands down.
In Osun, the outcome of the governorship election was actually a result of the crack in the APC. It started immediately after Governor Gboyega Oyetola took over. There was a rift between him and his predecessor, Rauf Aregbesola.
Since the two groups would not reconcile, there was a top-to-bottom crack in the party, and because Aregbesola had a lot of backlog of debt and ill winds which Oyetola could not substantially ameliorate, the Osun people wanted a change. But when you talk about the TSO, it is not an APC affair. The TSO comprises people who love Tinubu in the PDP, the APC and other parties. I see a situation where Tinubu will win a landslide against Atiku Abubakar also in Osun State.
Some people are kicking against a Tinubu Presidency in 2023—why are you supporting him and why do you think Nigerians should vote for him?
We have three leading presidential candidates—Peter Obi of the Labour Party, Atiku of the PDP and Tinubu of the APC. I don’t know much about Obi, but Obi has been tagged as a pretender. People have said and are proving that all his claims to sincerity of purpose and not wasting government funds are all a ruse. His party does not have structures. I do not know of any good structures of the LP in Ekiti State, nor do I know of any in Kwara and Ondo states.
Winning is not about campaigning on social media. I went on a presidential campaign to about 10 states with Atiku during the Action Congress of Nigeria days. I can tell you, if we vote normally, Atiku cannot defeat Tinubu. Atiku’s track record of performance in the office does not support him. You know what Obasanjo said about Atiku when they were together?
Although I like Atiku, he cannot withstand Tinubu. We all know Tinubu’s track record in human capital development, industrialisation of Lagos State, transformation of Lagos, estate development, leadership development and you know how he has become the most influential politician in Nigeria in the last 20 years. We all know him for his cerebral acuity. There are a lot of reasons why he is still the best. There are also many reasons why people may oppose him, such as party lines; when you are in another party, you may say the white is black.
Again, he has some co-contestants in the South. It was a plan. Every other contestant in the APC primary was a plot against his candidature, and those people will still be there throwing banter, though by proxy. The people who planned those protests had an agenda, and that agenda is still active, so there will be many people who have something to say about him.
What are your thoughts on the issue of Muslim-Muslim ticket in the APC as the agitation against it has continued with 2023 election campaigns around the corner?
A Muslim-Muslim ticket is the normal thing when you are calculating figures. A politician is concerned about figures; he is not concerned with sentiments. You find out that the Northern Muslims are more than the Northern Christians; that sentiment is rife. The South does not bother about your religion as such, even in Tinubu’s house, there is a pastor. In my family, there are Muslims. The southern part of this country does not worry about whether you are Muslim or a Christian. We can accept Muslim-Muslim or Christian-Christian. In the Middle Belt, they are mostly Christians, but the Muslims still have more influence on them. So, if you take the core north – North East, North-West, and South-West – and divide the Middle Belt into Christian and Muslim, the figure will still be overwhelming in Tinubu’s favour during voting. My own worries are not on the Muslim–Muslim ticket. A lot of things are happening. Tinubu is pacifying the Christians, but that is not the issue.
So, what is the problem?
The issues are what are happening on the ground: the Fulanisation problem, the cleansing problem, and Tinubu’s chances of winning. These are the things that should be germane to our minds.
Is Nigeria going to last till the date of elections in 2023? If it does, what is the stand of the Northern hegemony about Tinubu’s candidature? It is not even in the South alone that people are agitating that there should not be elections in 2023. Some Northerners are saying there should be no elections too. It is not even the Yoruba nation’s struggle, the IPOB struggle, or the South-South agitation; it is the state in which we find ourselves. Are we really ready for elections? Is Nigeria going to be better off for it when there is an election? We must actually sit down and think about all these things and see what we can do about them.
With Tinubu, the APC can produce the best candidate for the time being. He has crossed the hurdles. Even the majority of forces in the APC did not want him to win the primaries, but he won. Are those forces still willing for him to win the presidency? These are germane questions.
What is the basis of your fears over the 2023 general elections?
See the insecurity, banditry, assassinations going on with impunity. The Federal Government seems to be doing nothing about it. The issue of marginalisation in top government positions, the infiltration of arms into the South-it is an open fact that you see trucks coming in with hundreds of Fulani people either from North Africa or North West Africa with arms, charms and new motorcycles caught in Lagos, Ilesha, and Akure, caught in the East, caught in the South-South.
Every one of them is going into the bush, with no specific address. What is the purpose of this reckless influx of people, this issue of a tribe infiltrating the bushes of the southern part of Nigeria? If you go to your town, you will see Fulani people there with their cattle. They know the nooks and crannies of your town more than you, especially in the bushes, and they go about with AK-47s and dangerous weapons—they are not going hunting lions and elephants; they use the weapons freely on human beings; they destroy farms, kidnap people, take ransoms, and kill. Can you imagine a raid on the train; a raid on the land? We even heard reports that there might be raids on the sea. We have not declared war, but they have declared war already.
Don’t you see Nigeria winning the war?
It’s not that our soldiers can’t defeat the bandits or terrorists; after all, they went to Liberia and won the war there. Let our security forces get the nod to attack them. What about the warped constitution? You want to put in RUGA, the Water Bill, you want to do so many things to make sure that these people from the Sahel and other North African countries infiltrate this place. We heard the rumour of the NIN racket where non-Nigerians were given national identity cards. There is a conspiracy of silence to evil; a conspiracy of tribalism; a conspiracy of the ruling hegemony; and there is a conspiracy of expansionism, all against the existence of a corporate Nigeria.
That is why you hear the Yoruba nation shouting, the Igbo shouting, the South-South shouting, the central shouting; everybody wants to go. Nigeria is not working. Are we really together? Is that a country? Boko Haram is killing people, Nnamdi Kanu is held up in prison, Sunday Igboho is sent out of the country-is that a country? Do we really have equal rights? Are we being treated with the same law? The issue we have at hand now is actually not an election. It is about the corporate existence or dissolution of this country.
