By Akanni Alaka
Tope Fasua is a businessman, economist, writer and the presidential candidate of Abundant Nigeria Renewal Party, ANRP, in the February 23 presidential election. In this first of a two-part interview with Akanni Alaka, he spoke about his performance and that of others considered to be ‘outsiders’ or third force candidates in the election, the performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and Nigerians’ poor understanding of governance and their show of love for their oppressors.
Contrary to expectations, the so-called ‘third force candidates’ (you are one of them) performance was very poor in the presidential election. Indeed, the total votes of all the candidates in this category is not even up to those scored by the two leading candidates in some of the big wards in the country. In your opinion, what went wrong?
It was a combination of several things. For one, the battle line was probably drawn as one between Atiku and Buhari, so the voting was done along those primordial lines as it were. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise the way things turned out. But mind you, a lot of the guys who you would call the so-called third force actually stepped down for one of the two before the election. At least, 52 of them stepped down out of the 73 candidates. And after that 52, I know that Atuejide Eunice also stepped down for Atiku, then Oby Ezekwesili stepped down for nobody in particular, someone like Donald Duke also had court cases with Jerry Gana, which went back and forth. So, the whole thing actually turned out to be a charade. We cannot actually say that we have a good contest. Of course, people stood up and said they are ready to contest for the presidency of the country and I think that is laudable because it is not necessarily the first time that you contest that you are going to win. Sometimes, you have to try and try again. Every other party – apart from PDP and APC – could only score three per cent of the votes, which is quite discouraging. But that also tells something about the electorate – if all of the works done by people like Moghalu, Sowore and Durotoye – those three who really struggled and myself, I know that I was little bit behind them because I didn’t start early and also because I was a bit of private personality and so, it took me a while to embrace all that politicking and, of course, I didn’t have access to the kind of money that some of them had, but we worked hard. I went to as many as 32 states of this country and I documented everything I saw. I know it was going to be tough for me to convince those I saw to vote for me the moment I was meeting them because in marketing, they say that in order for you to be able to sell anything to someone, you need to contact them and pitch to them an average of five times. Yes, there are few people who were outliers and the moment they see you, they want to vote for you. Then, a few more people, they see you the second time, then, they say this guy, I am seeing him for the second time, then they vote for you, a few more, the third time, fourth time – the mean may be about around the third time. But by the time you are talking to people about five times, they begin to say, ‘what is he even talking about?’ So, did we have the opportunity of interacting with our people five times averagely? No, we didn’t. Did any of the candidates have the opportunity of visiting a state five times? Hardly. So, it was obvious that we are not going to be able to convince people to vote for us. The majority of Nigerians are also unlettered and poor, so, the challenge becomes even bigger because they are used to a few people – they know Buhari, Obasanjo and they started to know Atiku and here you are, you are coming with some very fantastic idea, but you are an outlier, they have never seen you before, so it was a bit of hard sell. But again, whatever you will achieve in life, the most important thing is to start and most times, we never know whatever it is that we start is going to end up. But what mattered most is that you start, keep going and once in a while, you get lucky. The other thing I will say is that a lot of the election results we saw were fraudulent. And that was obvious – when you start to see some kind of numbers, coming from some areas, it was like this election, unlike the other was a case of people having strongholds where they can write election results for you. So, you have a scenario where someone will say I am holding this state. And in that state, I have compromised everybody beginning from beginning to the end – the result that will come from there will be so skewed in my favour and nobody will be able to tell how I managed to get those numbers. So, in the core North of this country, we saw that kind of advantage, playing for Buhari, in some parts of the South, we saw that playing for Atiku. But because Buhari is in government, what they did this time was to kind of lock down the South to a large extent because they know they may not be able to write results in those places. But in the North, a lot of the results were written and merely allocated to people because you cannot tell me that 2.5 million people voted in Kano and you were able to count it in one day and in Lagos, you are struggling with less than one million people. It is the same thing down to Kaduna. It is even the governorship election that showed that properly. You see El-Rufai having over one million votes and his opponent, having 800,000 plus in Kaduna and then, there were other people who also contested with them. And then, in Lagos, you are struggling with less than one million. So, I think this election just showed how desperate people have become, how indeed, politics has become the only thriving business for a lot of our people and how a lot of the country is run by all sorts of funny people – criminals, cultists and so. But I believe that it was important that we came out and stood to be counted.
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So, you agree with those who have described the 2019 elections as the worst conducted in the country?
Invariably, I didn’t want to go down that route in the beginning because I am not sure if I can compare somewhere along the line and say it is the worst because that will take reviewing all the other elections we have had in the past. In psychology, there is this bias in which we believed that yesterday is always better than today. But someone pointed out that as a matter of fact, in 2015, about 200 Nigerians were killed in that election. I know that this time around, we have lost close to 150 people. So, whereas, you cannot justify even one person dying in an election, it is tough to say whether it is worst. But what I can say was that the presidential election looks like it was sane in many parts of the country. But the governorship and states Houses of assembly’s election was totally insane. And as we are speaking now, there are still places in Nigeria that are under different kinds of lockdown. There were places where the elections were totally hijacked, there were places that were militarized as a result of that election. We have all these challenges all over the place. So, I will not say it is the worst election, but certainly, not one of the better elections that we’ve had. And I think also, the real expectations was that we were going to have an election that will take us forward, but unfortunately, this election obviously took us backwards and revealed Nigerians for whom we are – that we are still a backward country where people are ready to kill others simply because of political power and all of that.
Was the poor performance of the so-called ‘third force candidates’ in the presidential election not a confirmation of the argument by many that instead of going it alone, the candidates should have put their resources together and joined forces behind one candidate to confront the flag bearers of the two major parties?
I will say it bluntly – it is easy to just sit in one’s room and be conjuring things – why didn’t they do this and that. Unfortunately, many Nigerians that belong to that class, who don’t do anything for themselves, but only point the finger. At least, these people (the presidential candidates) have stood up to say ‘here we are, send us.’ So, there is nothing wrong if all they are able to do this time around is to stand up, because we never had them before. Unfortunately, Nigerians are not very easy people to govern, but it is also true that we get the leaders that we deserve and the Nigeria of today is a product of each and every one of us – the coagulation of the things we stand for. Unfortunately, I think we have a lot of people who don’t think properly in this country than people who think properly and, therefore, you have Nigeria. And it was among the majority who are not straight thinkers that we have chosen as the leaders of today. So, all I have to say is that the people who came out to contest came out and, if for now, all we can get from them is that they came out to be counted, then, next time, let’s see if they can come together for Nigerians to choose one person. The truth is also that even if they chose one person, they might not have won. There is very little likelihood, because part of the problem is that when you choose one person, everybody goes home and leaves that one person to do all the work, all the spending. But this time, whether they were deluded or not, at least, a number of people actually spent their money and you never knew who they touched. And chances are if this time around, the government didn’t do the right things, Nigerians would have seen that they actually made a lot of mistake in 2019. However, the difference between this and what those people are proposing is that at least, in this one, we would have seen that Nigerians have more than one option – and that is very important. More than one option of people who can actually make that difference – at least, there were at least 10 candidates who stayed till the end, who had great ideas. They were coming from different angles – some of them were core capitalists who believe that we can use market forces to turn our country around, a few of them tended to the left, like Sowore – and believed that, “I can pay workers N100,000 minimum wage, go and think about it.” So, they gave us something to think about. So, if we hadn’t stepped out, Nigerians would have had the normal very simple options with no garnishing – that option would have been government by the thugs, the criminals and the cultists. When I went out to campaign, l realised that what used to be campus fraternities have now made it to the streets and a lot of the so-called grassroots is run by those people. I went to a place and they told me that look, Oga here is the leader of Neo Black Movement and I said “that was supposed to be Black Axe’ and they said, “Yes, the man is an Axe man.” And, of course, the man showed up with a braid on his head and the person that was telling me this happens to be in the security services. He himself is in the group and I was surprised. I asked him, “you are supposed to be in the Police?” and he said that is the way they run their area. You can imagine what an innocent person will have to go through to make sense to this kind of people in this kind of environment that we are talking about? So, if we have put up one person to represent one of us, the issue would have been that they would have beaten that person and we would not be able to show the array of talents that we showed. Number two, we may not have been able to show the array of ideologies that we have. The person would have been going out just to talk about his own ideology. For example, if you ask me who we could put up like that, I would have suggested Moghalu because I think he is a little more mature than, many of us, age wise, he is also quite driven. He believed that he could have been the president, he spent quite a bit of money, worked hard, travelled to places and all of that. But I have a slight difference with him on ideology. He was talking about core capitalism, market economics, entrepreneurial economics, venture capitals and so on. But I have a view that this can’t work where you have 90 million extremely poor people – you can’t begin to tell them about market forces. You need to find a way of pulling their hands up, apply some sorts of shock treatment that takes them from abject poverty into a level where they can begin to be productive so that they can be part of the contributions to the GDP. Then, if we know that we are in the trajectory of growth and a lot of people understand that they need to be productive and add to the economy, then, they can bring the market economics, entrepreneurial economics into the mix. So, if he had gone alone, what we could also see is a scenario where the voice of the youths would have been totally represented by market economics, without any other option coming from somewhere. And that would have also been the case if we have had a socialist. So, the whole idea of coming together also means necessarily that we would have been able to mesh our ideologies and actually agree. And one of the most difficult things to agree on is to actually drop your ideology for someone’s else. But the same Nigerians will say we have no ideology – but what we have in the raft of people contesting were different ideologies, no matter how slightly different from one another, but that slight difference is very important to people. I, personally, as an economist, would not want to be represented by a core capitalist. Neither would I want to be represented by a core socialist who says now what we need to do is for the government to give everybody everything for free. No, I believe that somewhere in the middle is where the thing is and tried to convince people to accept my position and even if I will lose the argument, the concession that I will give for my ideology would be well thought out. I will say okay, fine, if I wasn’t wrong, I will say this is not workable now. Let’s look at what we can do. But this can be a very long and arduous process and I believe that we didn’t have enough time to go through all of that and there is nothing wrong if in the next four years, that’s what people are talking about and trying to put together.
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But do you have any regrets about your participation in the presidential race?
Absolutely none.
So, generally, how would you describe your experience and what next for you?
No regrets whatsoever. It is a very exhilarating experience, I learnt a lot and if I had my way, I wouldn’t do anything different from the way it played out. I know I could win from day one. But what I needed to do was to basically travel around Nigeria, to see things with my eyes. I am the only one who went as far as Yobe State by road. I went to the Boko Haram places – Benishek, Damaturu, all of them were under Boko Haram lockdown before. I went down to Kebbi, Zamfara and Sokoto. I passed through Talata Mafara where a lot of people get kidnapped and butchered on a daily basis. I was just lucky – I put God to test and I thanked God that it actually quite worked out. I went down to the South, I went to Oyo, I went as far as Saki, which is four hours out of Ibadan. I went also to the Calabar axis. I couldn’t get to Bayelsa, but I have been there a bit earlier. One of the things I was able to see is that Nigeria is truly beautiful and I saw that Nigeria was a proper country because when I went to Yobe, a friend drove me there and when I was coming back, I used a gold car and I did all of these without hiring one policeman one day. I toured this country and I didn’t capitulate to the fear that ‘haa they are going to kill you,’ and you start hiring guns and make yourself obvious. I preferred to go to a place incognito than to go there with 10 people around me and a lot of that is self-deceit anyway. I don’t believe that rushing into a people and intimidating people will make them vote for you. Even if it will, that’s not my style, because, after all said and done, I want to be able to be back to myself, to who I am, like I am sitting down here now. I don’t want to feel that there is something I am missing because the 10 mobile policemen they gave me have now gone. And I don’t believe that is a good way of investing my money anyway. One of the things I also did was that I visited a lot of public schools. What I did was that anytime we are going to any of these places, randomly, I stopped the convoy of my three cars and say “look, I need to go in here and see what they are doing.” And I was able to spot a lot of difference. One of the things is that in the north of Nigeria, there is not much teaching going on in the public schools. Number one, the discipline is not there, they put a lot more discipline, time and rigour on Islamic education than they put on Western education in the public schools. For some reasons, the culture of this Western education has not even taken root till tomorrow there. But what has happened is that the more privileged out of them, especially all these politicians, they understand the value of Western education, they send their children to private schools, they send them abroad for top notch education. But the elite of the North don’t care about what happen to the children of the poor people. A lot of them are still walking to school at 10 o’clock. I am not even sure they discipline them in the school and then, by 12, they are ready to close for the day and go home. And between that period of time, very little teachings go on. And in all the schools I went to in Katsina, Kebbi, Zamfara and so on, I didn’t see any teaching going on, even at 11’oclock in the morning. Many times, you will see a block of six classes and there will be no teacher around. When I went to the Southeast, I saw that there was teaching going on, the teachers put on some rigour to their work, even though the children don’t have shoes. Of course, they were less neglected than the children in the North. In the North, you will see the meaning of neglect – the parents don’t even bathe those children for days and I have been wondering why is that? You don’t have a right to do that. And I saw that it was actually child abuse – those children were being abused in their millions. The fact that you have children doesn’t make them yours. We have to begin to get to that level in this country. I don’t care; we are not talking about whether you can have many children here, but once you have those children, you must know that they are human beings in their own right, and to that extent, you don’t have a right to do and undo – you cannot kill your own child yourself, you should also not neglect your own child – it is a criminal offence. So, the leaders of the North, the elite are burying their heads in the sands in this regard, and unfortunately, including the president. But I believe this is something we need to deal with in this country. In the South-west also, there was rigour going on in terms of the training and teaching. I walked into a class near Alabata in Oyo State and as I walked in, the teacher was talking to one girl and was actually appealing to her to be coming to school. The girl said they didn’t have any food at home, that’s why she couldn’t come. But the teacher said, “Just come, I will help you. If it is food, I will give you, if it is money, I will give you.” All of these children were there, they didn’t have shoes to wear in those places. And this is 2019 Nigeria, a country that has access to everything and that is a big shame.
I was looking at South Africa budget today and I saw that as a nation, they budgeted 1.2 trillion Rand for education in the next three years. That is N30 trillion – N10 trillion every year for education in South Africa. And the entire budget of Nigeria is N8 trillion and that N8 trillion, they will usually only implement 35 per cent, so you asked yourself, where are we going in this country? And I believe that our most important resource is human being. So, since I came back, I am in the process of opening three different NGOs around those issues that I saw, which are of utmost importance to me. One, on primary school education – I am looking to going around to collect used children’s books so that we can take to some of those schools that have been abandoned. They don’t have libraries, there is no money for textbooks and some of them have never seen comics in their lives. It is a serious problem. Then, around tertiary education, I have an initiative and around environment as well.
How would you assess the performance of INEC in the conduct of the election, because I saw you making demand for compensation for the expenses of political parties after the abrupt postponement of the presidential election from the chairman…
There should be some form of compensation, even though unfortunately, the INEC chairman sometimes takes things for granted and sometimes, he speaks as if he can just generally wriggle his way out of everything. If INEC is spending one naira extra, as a result of that postponement, he should know that every party and every contestant is also spending one naira extra. So, the electoral law says don’t fund political parties, we understand. But it doesn’t say make them incur extra loss. It was as if INEC had got to that point that they believed that they were hardboiled, battle-tested and there is nothing you can do and that is unfortunate. Maybe, it is when we take them to court that they will sit up and understand the obligations they have. The man brushed aside the question on that day. But I was actually trying to assist them by letting them know that it is not every time that you need to get to legal controversies and cases and so on – understand that you have an obligation, and fulfill that obligation. They eventually conducted the presidential election. I will say maybe they performed like 65 per cent in that one, but with the result, the process and the optics of the second set of the elections, I am not sure that I will give them pass mark anymore. The second set of elections was a total shame, full of brigandage and in Ondo State where I am from, according to records kept by OSIWA and a few other organisations, more than 27 people were killed there.
But is that principally a problem from INEC or politicians who in their desperation to win elections resorted to the use of thugs?
I like your point because indeed, it was not just an INEC issue. But they also dropped the ball in a few instances. Let’s go back to the presidential election. According to records, there was a difference of 1.6 million between the initially announced number of registered voters of 84 million and the ones announced on the date of the election when the results were being counted, which was 82 million. Where are the 1.6 million votes? Two, there was a difference of 900,000 between accredited voters and actual voting when in actual fact, accreditation happened at the same time as voting. So, we do a lot of magic around elections and figures in this country. People would always find a way of justifying numbers. Yes, maybe, they were accredited and refused to vote and they can’t be accounted for even in cancelled votes. By the time you add 1.6 million to 900,000, that’s 2.5 million. Perhaps, the challenger of that election has the grounds to make his case. However, whereas I cannot stop the gentleman from pursuing his cause, I am not particularly on his bandwagon because I believed also that he is a beneficiary of that fraud. I am not going to say ‘let me support the lesser thief against the bigger thief’. Both are thieves and both have run this country in the past and the reason why that election is also being challenged by that contender is because he also saw that a certain instrument of rigging that was available only to ruling party was deployed. But I know that the entire election system is totally compromised and INEC cannot play the ostrich for too long and say it is not our fault. Of course, it is not only the politicians, but the Nigerian people who showed a certain level of devaluation that is totally disheartening. Nigerians showed that ordinary elections cannot be done without killing themselves. Nigerians showed that they weren’t interested in anybody’s ideas, but in those who have been able to oppress them. They showed that they are already suffering from Stockholm syndrome – falling in love with their oppressors. They showed that they did not care for ideas, that they were not ready for change, they showed that it is whoever that could amass the money that they would follow. For example, there was a certain gentleman from the East of Nigeria who won a Senate seat with one of the new parties, and he scored 88,000 votes in a senatorial area. And the presidential candidate of that party who also happened to have been one of the most hardworking could not get 21,000 votes nationwide – the same election, the same time. You now ask yourself how were that votes gotten? And that same person, a very famous guy in this country, with all his ten fingers and ten toes in different deals is owing AMCON N160 billion, which he has refused to pay. Nigerian taxpayers’ money has been used to bailout banks so that people like these guys can be free.
Again, almost 20 governors are going into the Senate as a retirement home on the bill of the people. So, what that tells you is the elections were a joke at the end of the day and the joke is on Nigerians. And Nigerians have shown that they themselves don’t even understand what time is it, they don’t care, and they don’t seem to understand what is going on.
Yes, INEC has part of the blame, but at the end of the day, they are the ones saddled with supervising all of these things, but we must also agree that Nigerians too have major part of the blame.
- Watch out for Part 2 next week
