In the first part of this interview, the ADC presidential candidate, Dumebi Kachikwu, talks about his plans for Nigerians if elected in 2023.
Dumebi Kachikwu is the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC). In this interview with PREMIUM TIMES' QueenEsther Iroanusi, he talks about his plans for Nigerians if elected in 2023, the crisis in his party and how he intends to address the crisis.
He also talks about the William Jefferson scandal of 2009 and how Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president who is the presidential candidate of the PDP, was indicted for receiving bribes from a US Congressman. He talked about his role in exposing the scandal and why he played it.
Read below excerpts from the interview:
Q: This is your first run for public office. Why did you choose to go for the top one, the presidency?
Kachikwu: I think it is a wrong notion most Nigerians have about offices and they feel that if you want to be president, you need to be a counsellor first or local government chairman first. That is absolutely untrue. You should run for the office that you feel best suited for. There are some people who will always be career politicians who want to have a progressive rise through political ranks, that is their path.
When you look at someone like me, why am I running for office? I am running for office at a time like this because I feel it is the patriotic thing to do especially in a season, in a time, a generation where our country has failed spectacularly and where we see people who ought to run but they are not running, people whose hearts are failing them and that is why they are running.
PT: Before you released your declaration video, you had said even though you may not win, you would want to make a statement. Does this mean you are really not going for it?
Kachikwu: I think I am one of the only candidates who is running because he wants to win. I don't believe Nigeria can afford to have some of the people who are running, who are actually leading the so-called contenders in the affairs of this country. So I am running because I intend to win the election. I am running because I intend to put together a rescue team that will salvage this country from the mess we find ourselves in right now. I am not running to make a statement, I don't need to add "presidential candidate" to my resume, it does nothing for me. I am running because we have about 40-50 million unemployed people in Nigeria. The official inflation rate stands at 20 per cent which means unofficial might be double that.
I am running because minimum wage is at N30,000; meanwhile, for the person who earns N50,000, his salary will not go beyond one week. I am running because our borders are open, our roads are not safe, tonnes of people are being kidnapped, our streets flooded, the blood of the innocent is running because our economy has failed spectacularly. I am running because we are a nation in distress and I am running because few men are willing to step up and do what needs to be done. That is why I am running.
PT: But these are problems. What are your solutions? What do you intend to do?
Kachikwu: I am a builder, when you build, you, first of all, have a checklist of what the client or you want from the building. In this case, my checklist is the problems of Nigeria, where we need to go as a nation. That is what I am looking at and that is what I am then going to use to design or the architect tire of this building will need to do.
Our problems are foundational and also solutions are foundational. So when you are building, you start from the foundation, the people. Where did our problem start? We are peoples of Nigeria, a geographical expression, we are not the people of Nigeria. We are not one so we are divided. In this room, we have people of different ethnic groups and our loyalty or our fidelity is to our ethnic group, tribe or religion; not to the nation Nigeria. That is why you find every weekend people have town hall meetings but there is no Nigerian meeting. That is our biggest problem and therein lies our biases as people. So we need to start from there, who are we as a people?
One of the first things I will do as Nigeria's president is to bring the Nigerian people together. Thank God we have a lot of youth who are now interested in a new Nigeria, in making sure that Nigeria works. We need to change the narrative and have a new architecture, a new charter, who we are, what is the common dream or vision we want for Nigeria.
Once we have that and say this is our vision for Nigeria, we then have to take it to the next step and frame a Constitution that binds that vision. Then we now have a people called Nigeria. When you do that, when you discuss things like federalism, issues like state police and what have you, there is no longer suspicion because people now see themselves as one people.
Now, our current issues of security stem from the fact that the president's body language, to a large extent, seems to say to people that I support a certain ethnic group over another. It is okay for people of a certain ethnic stock; wherever they are they can come to our borders and take over people's lands and do whatever they want.
It also stems from the fact that we are economically challenged and people out of desperation will do anything to survive. It also stems from our biases, our division as a people. Then, of course, we have the typical problem of security where they are people who are just pure evil all the time. So those are the challenges why we have security issues. How do you deal with them?
First and foremost, as president of Nigeria, I will lead the war from the front, I will lead the issue of security from the front not behind. It's not about making speeches but doing what needs to be done. I will make sure Nigeria is a country for all Nigerians and all people who want to be part of Nigeria. I will ensure that our security agencies are properly funded. I will bring on board 200,000 men and women from the civil defence and police to complement our current war efforts. If you understand what is happening, the terrorists, the bandits are recruiting every day because they are getting cash from all their activities. Our military when they want to recruit 10,000 people, it takes them almost a year or more to do that. They are not recruiting at the same pace as these terrorists who are well-funded.
Our current structure is that President Buhari is operating a $100 billion internal security budget, the same thing President Johnathan was doing. Nigeria is the only country at war where every day the headline news does not discuss the war.
So in the short term, bring onboard 200,000 thousand people and in the medium term we have to plan the war like the war is long term, not short term. Which means we start recruiting today. It takes about seven months to train a soldier, it takes about three years for a soldier to be battle ready which means that you need to start today so that in three years' time, you have these people battle ready.
We are dealing with insurgency and insurgency is a thing of the mind and all the factors I mentioned earlier. You so cannot think you can wish it away. You have to plan for the long term. So medium to long term, we need to recruit massively to get more people onboard in the military.
Now, every smart nation understands that if half of the 50 million people who are unemployed in Nigeria, were working today, they are just paying N10,000 as taxes. Twenty-five million people pay N10,000 as taxes every month, do you know what that does to our economy? To our coffers as a nation? Do you know the multiplier effect of the efforts of 25 million people into our economy? But you have a government that does not care that you have this number of people unemployed. So we have to go back to the basics and understand that our people are the major assets.
Instead of looking so much at deepening our oil and gas reserves which are ancillary to the people, you start investing in the people. What will I do as president of Nigeria? I have to look at the subsets of our economy and see if you want to be an engineering-based nation like China.
All our youths leave the villages because they feel the villages are poor. But if farms are working, if they are producing and making money, nobody is going to come to Abuja or Port Harcourt or Lagos. Nobody will do that because they are making money, they are living a good life in those places.
Then also we need to look at the issue of corruption in various entry points of our economy, ports and customs. Today you have to understand that the cost of importing goods, where the majority of our middle class or those who want to start business, where they have to go through is really expensive. We have to have the willpower to tackle the corruption there if we want to get our economy right.
In Nigeria, the minimum wage should be nothing less than N180,000. Minimum wage should be the starting salary. It is actually very small but it should be the starting salary if we understand that our people deserve a fair wage for a fair job or effort. If we understand that this is the standard of living Nigerians should have, then we start planning everything from answer to question. How then do you now support an economy that pays the average Nigerian N180,000 as a starting salary? But if your mindset says to you that in Nigeria, it is okay for somebody to take N30,000 home as a minimum wage, you will never make any plan or plans that support people to go out of poverty.
PT: Will you put the minimum wage at N180,000?
Kachikwu: I am saying that Nigerians are our assets and if Nigerians are our asset, I need to build a new Nigeria that ensures that Nigerians are comfortable. Nigerians must be comfortable, they must live a quality lifestyle.
But a government that says people should be paid N30,000 is a government that says my people should be poor, my people should suffer. I can take sector by sector but let me tell you this. If you look at our challenges in education, in healthcare, in infrastructure, in a lot of areas, I will tell you what I propose to do. One of our biggest problems is the fact that those who lead us are disconnected from those they lead.
If I am Nigerian president, the first thing I will do when the National Assembly is sworn in is to send them a bill I call the Nigeria Patriotic Act. It is a bill of equality, it is a bill that says we the Nigerian people are in this together. If we suffer, we suffer together, if we succeed we succeed together.
So it simply states that every public servant or civil servant, every director of a company whose licence is derived from the government such as my company, banking, telecoms, the mining, what have you. It states that you and your family must use public hospitals only. It states that your kids must only use public schools. It states that in your house you cannot have a borehole or generator. It also states that when you travel you have to travel by road unless it's an absolute emergency.
Take tourism for example, are you aware that the same water we go to Miami, we go to Spain, we go to most parts of the world for tourism, that same water runs through Nigeria? That is that same bar beach, that same water, that is the same Atlantic Ocean. We pay thousands of dollars to go to these countries to enjoy tourism there, to sunbathe in front of water that passes through our country. Why? Do you know that tourism pays some of the best wages in the world? Where are our hotels, where are the resorts around our coastal ways? Where are they? We are not forward-thinking and again it is because of the quality of leadership we have in Nigeria.
Need I speak about power? I have told you what we need to do to get the right attention to power but beyond that, if you look at the model used by telecommunications companies, it is the same model we need to take to power. We need to start having more gen posts in all the states. Start generating power in the states, start distributing power in the states, and more people getting involved in that sector.
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PT: Before we leave your manifesto, some candidates have refused to disclose their strategies on how they will tackle insecurity but you just did. Don't you think releasing details of your strategy may jeopardise your plan?
Kachikwu: Absolutely incorrect. What I said the Nigerian government must do is let Nigerians know the truth about the war, the situation of the war. Security is also propaganda. Don't let the bandits or the terrorists be the ones doing the propaganda, telling you how they are killing your military.
You guys also do your propaganda. You must let the people know we are winning this war. But if you keep quiet and there is a vacuum of silence, people imagine all sorts. You must give me accurate updates. That is the only way people will believe.
PT: How long will it take you to achieve these things? Because many people who have run for second term use the excuse of wanting to continue unfinished work.
Kachikwu: It's very simple, they are immediate and they require adequate planning. So if I were the Nigerian president today, I would start from the foundation which is about revising our curriculum because you are not planning for four or eight years, you are planning for the future.
I will revise our curriculum to support the direction I believe the country should be going to - that is in the area of education. I will start getting our people to use the polytechnics to start training some people.
Nigeria has those skill sets here, we just need to train those people. We can't export Nigerians to the rest of Africa. We can be the best carpenters, the best electricians, the best farmers, we can be the best people who are framing this POP what have you. Why bring in people into Nigeria when we are lacking jobs because we don't have people who are adequately trained? So we then need to use our polytechnics to start training and retraining people in that area.
If I tell you that Nigeria as a nation, has 200 million people, we should have our own version of Facebook, or Twitter, or what have you. We should have our version of freelancers or fibre that creates jobs we can export overseas. How long is it going to take to develop a platform that we know? Probably nine months to 14 months.
While you are doing that, you start training people, start training people on a different idea or vision of what they could be doing. Yahoo is not the way, this is what you need to be doing. From planning to cultivation in most things we are talking about, you will need at least a minimum of two years.
