INTERVIEW: Why PDP will win in Kwara after ‘Oto ge’ – Bolaji Abdullahi

Bolaji Abdullahi is the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for Kwara Central senatorial district in next month’s elections. A former Commissioner for Education in Kwara State and former Minister of Youth and Sports, Mr Abdullahi says he is the best and most experienced candidate for the senatorial seat serially held by members of the famous Saraki family. The patriarch of the family, Olusola, was the first to hold the seat (1979 to 1983), followed by Gbemisola (2003 to 2011) and then former Governor Bukola (2011 to 2019).

In this interview with PREMIUM TIMES’ QueenEsther Iroanusi, Mr Abdullahi talks about his experiences as a former commissioner and minister, his plans for constituents of the Kwara Central District and the PDP’s chances of recovering the state it held for 16 years before it was swept out by the ‘Oto ge’ movement in 2019.

Read excerpts from the interview:

PT: You initially ran for the governorship ticket of the PDP in 2018. Did you accept the Kwara Central senatorial ticket as a consolation prize after the party zoned the governorship ticket to the Kwara North Senatorial District?

Abdullahi: Well, I wouldn’t call it a consolation prize. You are right, I was to contest for the governorship because all my life, I have always seen myself as an executive person, someone who likes to solve problems. Every day, I want to wake up and solve a problem. Especially in my time as Commissioner for Education. It made me realise what was possible in terms of helping children to learn. If I hadn’t become a Commissioner for Education, I would probably not be a politician today. That was what made me realise what was possible. You know, when you have executive powers.

I came out to contest for the governorship position. And of course, in politics, there are always considerations. So my party decided that it is in its strategic interest for the governor to come from another part of the state. And it is the same consideration that informed the decision for the senator from Kwara Central to also come from where I come from. My party believes that I would be the best person to win. So that is why I am running for the Senate.

PT: You said if you were not commissioner for education, you would not have become a politician. What would you say was or is your focus and how would being a senator help you to pursue that?

Abdullahi: The four years I spent as a commissioner made me realise that people in government can actually do a lot. And with the work I did in those four years, sometimes I ask myself questions like ‘what if I was the chief executive?’ I knew the limitations as a commissioner but I was only lucky to have a chief executive that understood the vision and was willing to back the vision.

I have told myself that if I was the chief executive who actually determines what goes into the budget, imagine what I can do. For me, education is everything. Mention any problem and I will tell you how it connects to education and how it can help to solve some of these problems.

As a senator, I will probably be able to influence my colleagues to escalate the issue of education through the legislative agenda because I don’t think we are paying enough attention to education. I suffered from the ASUU strike. My children too suffered from the strike. If we don’t do something now, it is possible that their own children will suffer too.

So Nigeria’s education system from bottom to top still belongs to the last century. No progressing country in the world still does education the way we do it in Nigeria, except countries like us. I’m talking of education at all levels.

Of course, the essence of getting the higher education right is to determine the kind of economy you want to build as a nation. At the moment, we are not doing enough of that because we are not asking the right kind of questions. That’s why I am saying when I become senator, I will be able to push this more aggressively than it has been done in the past. And hope that it will gain traction because if we don’t fix this, we are not going anywhere as a nation.

PT: We have over 20 million out-of-school children and then there is the consistent ASUU strike that you mentioned. as a lawmaker, your influence will be limited to the passage of bills and motions. How do you plan to influence implementation?

Abdullahi: The work of the legislator is representation, legislation and oversight. There is so much that we can do with the laws that we are not doing. But what I have discovered is that Nigeria has legislation for almost everything. But the question is implementation.

For example, Nigeria passed the UBE (Universal Basic Education) law years ago to make basic education universal and free – one of the best laws for basic education in the world. But how can your law say basic education is compulsory and you have 20 million children out of school and nobody is paying for violating the law?

You say the law is universal, which means wherever a Nigerian child is, you have to provide basic education for them. But that’s not happening. You said it should be free but I know that children are still being sent home from school for as low as N4000. The question now should be if the law has served the purpose for which it was constituted.

We talk about 20 million children who are out of school but what we often miss is that there are about 40 million children who are in school, who are not even getting education, which is even worse. Attending school is one thing and getting education is another.

Now, to get quality education depends largely on the economic and social capacities of the parents.

My point is, after over 20 years, it is about time to review the UBEC law and that is one of the things I would like to push for. We would ask ourselves if the law is serving the purpose for which it was created and if not, what can we do to make it enforceable? There are many other things but that is my own inspiration.

PT: Where do you stand on the new policy to teach in local languages in schools?

BA: Language is a tool to communicate ideas and meanings. I think it has its benefits. When I was a commissioner, I stumbled on a class where the children were being taught how to read time in English and they were struggling to understand. We divided the class into two and asked that one half be taught in English and another half be taught in Yoruba. The latter understood faster.

There are, however, more complications to deal with. How do you teach chemistry and Pythagoras Theorems in Hausa or Yoruba? It is not a new thing. Professor Babs Fafunwa was a minister of education and he started a conversation around the mother tongue as a medium of teaching. The truth is, we have not developed the tools and vocabulary of our languages enough to the extent of using them to teach in schools. We can experiment with it but that is not the priority now. There are more urgent issues to deal with.

PT: You were also a minister of sports. Is there any unfinished business you would want to pursue in that sector if elected senator?

Abdullahi: First, youth development. If you ask me, that should be the most important ministry in Nigeria but I think the government still has not understood what to do with that ministry. My experience as a minister was that people only remembered the ministry of youth development when they needed to mobilise youth for political activities. I think there is a lot more work to be done in terms of how the ministry is structured and the responsibilities that it is allowed to handle.

It is even worse now when you merge it with sports. I think it is a wrong move to merge the two. So, if I had my way, I would try to mainstream the ministry of youth development so it is no longer seen as an area of ministerial posting but as a sector that can actually be used to jumpstart the participation of young people in national development and promoting competitiveness among young people.

For sports, a lot still needs to be done. I think we are too focused on the glory part of it – you know, winning medals, winning trophies – that we are actually not doing the real work that needs to be done to develop the sports sector as an industry. And that’s why you see that even in terms of glory hunting, we still continue to come short.

When I led the team to win the AFCON in 2014, some journalists came to ask me to rate sports in Nigeria and I said 4/10. They were astonished, especially because we just won the AFCON. But I said 4/10 because until Nigeria becomes the default country to win tournaments like this, until we are able to develop a system that guarantees results and ensures that each time Nigeria files out, Nigeria does well, our work is not done. It was not so much of a prophecy but since then have we won anything?

PT: So what would you say is lacking?

BA: System. There is no system. We are in too much of a hurry. You hire this manager, he loses two games, you sack him and start all over again. What is the strength of the technical department in the Nigerian Football Federation? Everything that goes on in our national team, should start at the technical department. Do we even have a technical department that can say it is aware of the work that needs to be done? I don’t think so.

I think that is one unfinished business. I will be happy to work with whoever will be the minister to cause this change.

PT: Your political family lost out in 2019 through the ‘Oto ge’ uprising. What has changed in Kwara State that makes you confident of victory just four years after?

Abdullahi: In politics, things can change so quickly. Many times, people have voted out what they think is a bad government and eventually end up with a government they don’t need and that was what happened in Kwara State in 2019.

The APC people that came promised them everything, including the moon, but were not able to deliver. They over-promised and delivered nothing. And I am not just making a political statement, they delivered nothing, you can check.

Kwara State is probably the only state where the governor has spent three and half years and billions of naira and has not commissioned one project. They do not have a single elected local government chairman.

We are not just saying it. In 2019, the slogan was ‘Oto ge’, now it is ‘Osu wa’, which means we are tired and fed up. We are confident that the people have had the benefit of comparing. We have learnt our lessons. And I can say part of where we get our confidence is that we have benefited more from our failures in 2019 than the people who won from their victory. Because shortly after they took over, they began to expose themselves.

All the people that banded together for ‘Oto ge’ have all fallen apart – Lai Mohammed is not talking to the governor, Gbemi Saraki is not talking to the governor, Hakeem Lawal is in SDP, and so on. So what you have in Kwara APC now is just a tiny rump. So, that is where we derive our confidence from. Plus, the people have seen that we are not as bad as they thought.

PT: You served under the Bukola Saraki administration. I want to believe you still look up to him in the political space. He is, however, not on the ballot for the first time in many years. Do you think his absence on the ballot will affect the PDP?

Abdullahi: It can, in the sense that it now gives him an opportunity to have a panoramic view of the entire process. It is actually of benefit to our political family rather than a disadvantage. He is now able to play the role he should be playing as our leader. He is able to view things more dispassionately.

Another thing is, when you compare the candidates that the PDP is fielding with that of other parties, without sounding immodest, I think PDP has a better quality of candidates. No other person in my race from another party has had the kind of experience I have. Not one.

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And if you come from zero and have never held any public office before, it is not possible. And this gives us an advantage. There’s also the fact that Kwara Central, where I am coming from, has a history of electing to the Senate only a particular kind of people. Right from the Second Republic. And they have all done very well, including Dr Oloriegbe. Regardless of party differences, he has done very well. I think he is not on the ballot because APC appears to have a disdain for educated people.

PT: You were in the APC. If you win this election in PDP, would you share some of the glory with APC? Will you say APC had an influence in terms of network, antecedents and the like?

Abdullahi: It’s possible. We are all human beings, we are friends. People have moved forward and backwards several times. But the point here is that there is a distinct difference between APC and PDP and I have seen both sides. I can tell you that PDP is the party structured and set up to run government despite its limitations.

If you look at the last 16 years, almost every institution in this country was created by the PDP. And that is why we achieved very poorly as an opposition party because opposition is not what we are set up to do. And APC as an opposition party was fantastic. See the evidence in the last seven years. They are not set up to do government.

Yes, I was in the APC but we have all come to a point of realisation that the way we were headed was not the right way. And so, you go to where you belong.

PT: I read a piece where you said you are worried about the electoral process and possible manipulations.

Abdullahi: I am largely confident but the thing is every law is as good as the people implementing it. I have no doubt about the capacity of INEC to deliver very good elections. And for me, many politicians are complaining that the new CBN policy on cash withdrawal is going to affect the election. Well, maybe because I don’t have a lot of money, but I think it is good because now you cannot bring cash to buy votes on the queue on election day.

PT: But you know both APC and PDP are guilty of this?

Abdullahi: I am only saying with this policy, people who want to buy votes will have to make transfers and when you do that, it means it can be traced. For me, I like it, because we can then campaign on the strength of our ideas and persuade the people to vote for us. Anyone contesting elections should contemplate two possibilities – you win or you lose. If you are not able to contemplate the possibility of losing, then you are not ready to be a politician. The major thing is to tell yourself that the reason you are doing it is because it is bigger than you.

PT: Do you have any other fears?

Abdullahi: No. I don’t have any fears. Like I said, it is win or lose. I want to be seen to have run a very good race and by that I mean, within certain moral standards that I have set for myself that I don’t want to fall below.

Also, I want to be ready. When I win, I want to be ready to serve the people. Because people no longer trust that when you get into office, you will do those things you promised. So they front-load their requests now. And that’s why you find people like us fixing boreholes, classrooms and the like. I think it is wrong, it is not the way it is meant to be.

I tell my colleagues that the responsibility we have is that when we get into office, we should try to restore the trust of the people in politics and politicians so that people coming behind us will find it easier to campaign. I don’t nurse any fear. The worse you can do to yourself in a race like this is to add anxiety.

PT: I am curious to know what you are telling the people of Kwara Central right now that should make them want to vote for you.

Abdullahi: It took me a while to articulate the ideas of what to promise because as a lawmaker, your primary responsibility is legislation but the mass of the people don’t make a distinction between legislation and executive responsibilities. They want to pay their children’s school fees, they want to fix their roads, classrooms, boreholes, they want you to pay for burials and so on. So if you go to a community and say ‘vote for me, I’m going to make laws’, they will look at you and say what is law? And Yorubas believe laws to be something you use to punish people, not to help them.

So, first, with my understanding of the challenges my people are facing…the biggest challenge today, for instance, is poverty. So whether you are going to address the issue of poverty through motions and policies, you have to do it. You have to talk to the people about multidimensional poverty – health poverty, educational poverty, etc.

And the things that drive poverty – lack of skill, lack of access to credit, lack of jobs. So by the time you address these issues, you are also telling people that you will implement the delivery of skills, access to credit, enabling the environment to do their businesses. And these are within the possibilities of what a lawmaker can do.

PT: Before I let you go, the Football League Management Committee that was introduced under you, was declared illegal, what are your recommendations to revive the committee?

Abdullahi: It is unfortunate that anyone would say the LMC is illegal. Yes, when we left, a lot of things suffered but you don’t throw away everything. If you are going to throw it away, what are you replacing it with? I think the minister was not properly advised on that. I think they have set the process back many years and it is not good for Nigerian football.

The reason we set up the League Management Company is to make the league more efficient. If the LMC approach was no longer making the league as efficient as it should be, then set up something that will make it efficient. In the end, what matters is that we have a league that is respected and that is efficient.

I think there are a lot of things to be done but you know Nigerian sports and politics, you have to learn to play the politics.

PT: There are four legislations that I would want to know where you stand if elected into the Senate.

1. State Police.

Abdullahi: 100 per cent.

PT: Gender equality.

Abdullahi: 100 per cent.

PT: Rehabilitation and reintegration of repentant terrorists.

Abdullahi: I would need to know more about that. I don’t have enough information to be able to commit myself to that.

PT: Social media regulation.

Abdullahi: I would need to know more about that as well. Because we need to be realistic enough to know that we need some kind of regulation. Whether it is by means of government regulation, I don’t think so. I don’t trust the government to regulate the media but I don’t trust the media to regulate itself. Because we have proved incapable of doing that over the years. Now the question is what do we need to do because we need some kind of regulation.

I look at what goes on on the internet these days and I am appalled. In journalism school, we were taught to beware of race, religion and region. But today, you see headlines like “10 northerners intercepted”…so we need some kind of regulation.