Washington, DC — Major General Muhammadu Buhari, leader of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), who was defeated as a presidential contender in April's elections in Nigeria, declared Thursday that he would not recognise Olusegun Obasanjo as the president of the country.
Obasanjo won with 61.3 percent of the votes. Buhari came in second, with 32.6 percent. An 11-member European Union observer team described the election as "marred by serious irregularities and fraud - in a certain number of states, minimum standards for democratic elections were not met." A 22-member Commonwealth observer team, said however, "We know that in most of Nigeria, a genuine and largely successful effort was made to enable the people to vote freely."
Since the vote, Buhari and the ANPP have been arguing that the elections were the most fraudulent ever held in Nigeria. And in five south-eastern states, Anambra, Abia, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo, the ANPP says nothing that could meaningfully be called an election even took place. The ANPP has called for "mass action" and with that call, both fear and rumors of possible political violence have spread. According to Obasanjo's PDP, citing a newspaper report, in a May speech, General Buhari called for "[Indira] Gandhi and [J.F.] Kennedy treatment" of President Obasanjo - a statement taken to mean assassination. "It is beyond power, lust and desperation. It is an incitement to murder," said Nigerian author and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka.
Buhari and the ANPP are waiting for a decision by the courts on their accusation that massive vote rigging, other fraud and intimidation secured victory for President Obasanjo. A decision might come by late summer, ANPP vice-presidential candidate Dr. Chuba Okadigbo told allAfrica.com in an interview Thursday: "we are going to win," Okadigbo declared. It is an opinion few in Nigeria and elsewhere share.
Insisting that it is part of a struggle for democracy, Okadigbo said that mass action is necessary and will take place. Depending on the outcome of the challenge to Obasanjo's election, such action could even "increase in tempo and scope," he said. Furthermore, said Okadigbo, frustration could cause the political pendulum of mass action to swing "from nonviolent to violent." Asked whether he could be considered a future presidential candidate, Okadigbo, answered with a straightforward "yes".
He spoke with allAfrica.com's Charles Cobb Jr about the election and the ANPP's efforts to overturn the results. Excerpts:
Although any number of election observers have pointed to irregularities in various places around the country, no criticism I've heard or read suggests that the final presidential outcome would have been different had those irregularities not occurred. That said, the reports of election monitoring teams from the European Union (EU) and Commonwealth on the election are a little different from each other, with the EU much more critical of the election than the Commonwealth report. What accounts for the difference?
Well, let me begin with this significant, or sometimes they say, "substantial", difference. The question is, what do they call "substantial," and based on what evidence? Is the evidence based on empirical, verifiable facts or is it just "substantial" in their imagination? If they say there has been monumental electoral fraud, intimidation, corruption, etcetera, how do you begin to calculate the substantial difference between zero elections - no elections and fraudulent election; what do you call substantial?
The EU Observer team was much larger than the Commonwealth Observer team. And the Commonwealth team was an official team from the Commonwealth group of nations which were guests of the Federal Government of Nigeria that is a member of the Commonwealth. They didn't go around actually. If you look at their own report they said there were limitations both in terms of their own personnel on the ground and in terms of places visited. So, quantitatively and qualitatively the work of the Commonwealth team was of significantly inferior purpose, and their work can not be compared to the much larger work done by the European Union which has a larger number of staff with highly placed European Union officials. The Commonwealth observer team did mention that there were large cases of fraud in the election. You can look for the details in the work of the European Union that went to more places, had more quality staff, had more access and more people on the ground.
The other part of my question was, even acknowledging fraud, and acknowledging manipulation of results or perhaps even outright thievery of ballots in some places, did any of this really affect the outcome of the presidential elections? Perhaps it had a greater impact on the political numbers of the legislature?
According to the EU, there are cases of fraud identified by them in 23 states of the Federation. Many of them in states with large populations such as Kano and such as the River States. If you take together the numbers coming from 23 states out of a nation of 36 states then something significant has happened to the body politic and to the numbers in the country. Take for instance Anambra state where there was no election, there was a "allocation" of figures. To say Obasanjo won there, to say Obasanjo won, or in Enugu state from which I come and from where General Ojukwu comes, - that I won just 17 percent even in my own little government - is outrageously fabricated and bizarre. It never happened before and I don't see why it should happen now that when I seek the vice presidency that that is when I start losing the votes when I have been getting them routinely since 1977. And I didn't do anything particularly wrong, nor did my party. How come General Obasanjo who did not do that well earlier, and who did not do anythingfor our people can now take those votes and put them as a quantum which makes up [part of]the presidential election results, giving this fiction that he did not significantly alter anything. How can Obasanjo win 87 percent or thereabouts as he claimed in Anambra state? What did he do in four years in that state? From where did this love develop? Even a poet cannot describe how he won that place.
Now go to Kano. It has the largest population in Nigeria apart from Lagos. If you remove millions of votes from Kano or Katsina from where General Buhari comes and they were told that general Buhari lost the election in his state because of the wonder-man called General Obasanjo, these are significant alterations, significant falsifications by Obasanjo. Take the case in Ogun state, the president's own state. On the same day the gubernatorial is held and the PDP winds up with 623-some thousand but on the same paper the president has 1.2 million. That's a significant exaggeration of figures. But when they want to talk about these so-called substantial differences they count in the 1.2 million as "substantial" votes, whereas they are actually "questionable" votes.
If the elections has been properly held, General Obasanjo would have been beaten 4 to 1 in a straight match. He has no basis for claiming victory, none! If they knew he could have been victorious they would not have done this elaborate manipulation process.
Almost immediately after the election you - your party and others - called for mass protests...
Mass action not mass protest.
Okay, I could be reading this wrong from the distance of Washington, DC; you can elaborate. Nonetheless, the government said it was a virtually treasonous call to action.
That is absolute hogwash for the government to call mass action treasonable. When they have a rally, that's mass action. When the opposition has a counter rally, that becomes treason; that's absolute hogwash. They're getting too panicky.
Well, there didn't even seem to be complete unity among the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties on the issue of mass action and I'm wondering whether that same lack of unanimity on mass action extended to the legal action, or is everybody in agreement that there should be legal action taken?
We are not all in a church, you know, with sets of dogma. The polity is a dialectic of conflicting views and they arrive at points of reconciliation and then action is taken. I would not like to be in a political situation in which everybody is simply nodding his head and saying, "Yes Master." That's not what we want. That may be what the authoritarians in the government system want.
Now, with respect to mass action. I have noticed that many people who talk about it do not know what it means. The freedom Nigerians got from British rule was gotten through mass action. The honorable Nnamdi Azikiwe employed the principles and tactics of mass action to enlighten the people of Nigeria on the need to be free of colonialism and neocolonialism. We are all products of Nigerian freedom as given to us by our founding fathers through [their] participation in mass action. Democratic movements the world over are based on mass action. A large number of people constitute a mass. Actions taken collectively on behalf of those people to seek or to criticize; to protest or to procure things which are in their interest is mass action. It begins nonviolently and may progress to the violent dimension depending on the way and manner government authorities respond to those demands and those pressures. The entire democratic process the world over is centered on mass action. America became free on the basis of mass action. It is there in the [United States] Declaration of Independence in the script of Thomas Jefferson that when a people find that a government which is supposed to help them pursue life, liberty and happiness is doing the opposite, then the people have a right to alter or abolish that government. Napoleon Bonaparte was a product of mass action. It was by mass action that he put down the anarchistic nature of the French revolution and thereby enacted a democratic process. It was mass action that led France to send troops under General Lafayette to help America defeat British colonialism.
So, we are saying: We know you are a manipulative, fraudulent government, a usurper government [but]why don't you go for elections, proper elections if you say you are a democrat? Why are you afraid of elections? Why do you use Byzantine instruments like the Election Commission, police, army to run elections? That is clear proof of the malevolent, evil nature of that government and that party - the clear-cut determination to produce election results other than the results given by the people and their votes.
If you look within the structure of the PDP, some [of its] people picture mass action as the jumping out into the streets with machetes or guns shooting everyone in sight and they are afraid. That is hogwash! But if the government goes out and starts to do the things it says it is going to do [in response to mass action], to go and repress, to go and punish [opposition] leaders, to put false charges on them, to intimidate them there may be a reaction in the direction of violent mass action.
It's mass action that made Black America free. I saw it here when I was a student. I joined in the protest movements under Martin Luther King. I belonged to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with Stokely Carmichael. I was here. I marched with them. I don't think I was being treasonable, and the American government did not think it was treasonable. If [Obasanjo's] people have this predetermination that protests mean violence, and in that phobia react maniacally, well...
Do you expect President Obasanjo to respond positively to [your] mass action given the kind of majority he has just won in the legislature?
He does not have a majority; that is a contrived majority if you want to call it that. Put "majority" in quotes. We say there were no national elections. He [Obasanjo] has what he has over there and he calls them assemblymen. He can carry on but he cannot succeed. Take my state, Anambra. There are two sets of victors, both in the same party. The party puts up candidates for elections which they say they held but which were never held. The Independent National Electoral Commission (Inec) gives them certificates of victory and then about a week later they are called back to give back their certificates and new people are given their certificates. Now, who is my legislator? Granted that maybe my party did not win, but who won in my state? We don't know.
You don't trust the agency with the responsibility for declaring the winner?
The agency declared two winners. The agency gave two sets of certificates for three senators and 11 members of the federal house of representatives.
This may be a good point to move to discussion of the legal action that is under way. Do you have any reasonable expectation of winning this? And I am not clear as to what structure is being appealed to. Is this an actual Court or a Commission or what?
The constitution provides that [the challengers] of elections to state houses of assembly, to the national assembly and to the election of governors will first go to electoral tribunals and appeal to the federal court of appeal. For the presidential election you go to the court of appeal and can even appeal to the Supreme Court. We in terms of the presidential election are at the federal court of appeal now and will go on to the Supreme Court.
What sort of timetable?
It's slightly woolly. It is not very clear now but I expect by the end of July.
And what do you expect at the end?
Well, optimistically, and I must start from there, we are going to win; in which case there will be fresh elections, more properly managed with different procedures.
I understand the need for optimism. But you are a sophisticated politician, so realistically, what do you expect?
In the first instance we decided to go to the courts with respect. We have great faith in the courts. If we are to share that faith we had to go to the court and the tribunal in the first instance to see if the rule of law will be maintained. Hopefully it will be maintained.
In the second instance, when people go to these courts and these tribunals we are putting the courts and the federal government and the Inec before the bar of international public opinion. The public should be able to know the truth.
Thirdly, if the courts fail, where the executives have also failed and where the national assembly in situ was fraudulently put in place, what options do our people have? Go to bed? I doubt it. Hail the monsters? I doubt it.
You're predicting what, then?
Mass action will increase in tempo and scope, inevitably. And depending on how the government reacts, the pendulum may swing from the non-violent to the violent.
And we're back to the same old unstable Nigeria riven by conflict that became familiar over the last two or three decades?
I told General Obasanjo that in the very beginning, when I was in exile in England from 1983/84 to 1987/88, I did a complete review of the Nigerian polity and came out with a book called "Power and Leadership in Nigeria." I pointed out that the most destabilizing factor in Nigerian politics is the second term syndrome: I want to be elected at the executive level, again. This makes the first term simply a preparatory ground for the second. People do very little work because they are busy campaigning continuously, and bungling as they do because they confuse government work with campaign work.
I also proved in that book that anyone who tried [to stay in power too long], failed. When the civilian government of Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa replaced itself in 1965: [there was a] coup. And when Gowon shifted the transition forward: coup. When General Buhari did not discuss the matter of a transition program: counter coup against his government. When General Babangida moved the transition goalpost, coup. When Shagari replaced himself, coup. When General Abacha tried to do the same; to perpetuate himself, to go beyond his promise of how long he would be in power, almighty God took care of that one. Now I do not see anything spectacular or significantly creative on the part of General Obasanjo and the PDP to alter this iron law of Nigerian politics. I have predicted what would happen. I told him to his face personally when we belonged to the same party. I have said it everywhere. It is part of the decisions made already by the Nigerian people and parliaments that...no one can be in executive office more than one term. Having broken that iron law, he must face the consequences of breaking that law. I didn't make it [but] it is my duty as a scientist to observe phenomena which repeat themselves with clear regularity. So, this government, consistent with that analytical procedure will fall -- will fall.
Before its term is over, you are saying?
Yes. Yes. And after the election, I took my time to look around. I withdrew for one month. And I wrote him [Obasanjo] an open letter in which I reminded him of these phenomena and asked him to listen to the opposition with more sense, not to be brash because brashness shall visit him also. But all of his predecessors fell into the same death trap, system collapse. And the way to get away from it was not by being unnecessarily brash, boastful and intimidating. These things that he is doing now do in fact speed up the process of system collapse.
I take it that you are issuing, right here, a warning.
I have been issuing it. I have been issuing it. I have repeated this warning over and over and over.
You began this part of your discussion by saying when you were in "exile" in England. Why were you in London?
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I was the political advisor to President Shagari [in the civilian 2nd republic 1979-83]. The government that was eventually [installed] by General Buhari had put practically all of the opposition in jail. But some of us had at one point or the other the opportunity to escape and get into Britain.
More recently, you were impeached while president of the Senate.
The question of the impeachment of me as president of the Senate is a different matter. It was a frame-up. In the course of time, the Senate itself absolved me in full session, live on television, with apologies. Embracing and apologizing and reconciling. Secondly, the federal high court in Abuja quashed the reports. I went through the judicial process too. many people thought I should not bother. I said, I shall bother; let it be on the record that I tried even if I failed. And I went. It took a long time - over a year before the final pronouncements were made declaring the [Senate] report concocted, a violation of my fundamental rights and therefore quashed. And the so-called Oyofo report similarly quashed because something cannot sit on nothing. It has been a fine bye-bye to those bad days of harassment and intimidation and false charges.
Finally, you were the vice-presidential candidate with Buhari who himself once took over the country in a coup, and indeed, provoked your exile. That to some was a surprise, given your background. And is that political relationship [with Buhari] a permanent relationship?
First and foremost we have been taught in church and schools that an error made doesn't mean that an error must continue. We have been taught to forgive trespasses. We must keep an open mind but not an empty mind.
Secondly, for many more years than civilians have been in power, the military has been in power - upwards of 29 years or so. There can be no doubt that the military as a part of the Nigerian polity is a fact, and a political scientist must face facts, not emotions. President Shagari, whom I served as an advisor, has said that there are only two parties in Nigeria: all the political parties together as one party, and the military as the other party. The way to have a balance is to find a happy manner of balancing of what I call bullet and ballot forces. A balance of bullet and ballot forces must be attained before there can be stability in Nigeria, and indeed, in many other African countries.
The other aspect is that General Buhari has been a man of interest to me - and I said so in exile - because of the coup that made him head of the government. I told him, "General, do you know that you jailed me?" He said, "well, if you only knew how I became head of state you would know that the decisions are not mine, fully mine. Twenty-four hours after the coup there was no head of state; as to what took place, it is still too early to make public to Nigerians."
"Put [the fact of your detention] aside," he said. "You know, doctor, that I too have been in detention for three years. I have suffered what you have suffered; perhaps more. That is one of the reasons I am in politics. We hope that there shall be no further need for this sort of thing to happen again. Let us pray."
Now, as to my relationship with Buhari, I have never served a military government, even in an advisory capacity throughout my political life. But we were headed for a political constitutional government, not for a military government, in an arrangement that I found also consistent with my general theory of a balance of bullet and ballot forces. One of the terms of agreement between the general and I are that whereas he will be executive president with all the power going to him that is constitutionally provided, he will devolve to the vice president legislative matters, national assembly affairs in order to see that there is balance and harmony between the executive and legislature as was not the case under Obasanjo in his first term of office when I was president of the Senate and we had quite a series of disharmonies.
So, we have achieved a kind of balance of the ballot and the bullet. Buhari is no longer a soldier and I believe he will remain a politician. And so long as it is conducive to the interest of our people, those he represents and those I represent, and collectively the Nigerian and African people. Yes, the relationship will continue permanently. I do not expect it to degenerate over the months or years. I believe he will improve and so will I; so it is a permanent relationship.
