Why third force can’t succeed in Nigeria- Dara

Dr John Dara two-time presidential candidates says no third force can succeed in Nigeria without the capacity to uproot existing political structures nor will corruption and insecurity cease without radical electoral reforms. He spoke to Abdulrahman Abdulrauf and Patrick Andrew.

You suddenly disappeared from the political radder, what really happens?

Well, I am a frustrated politician because my obsession is about necessary changes in the polity. Unfortunately, most of the politicians they just want to get elected into positions or make money from public offices, so it does not really matter to them whether Nigeria is moving forward or stagnant. Most of the time my obsession with reforms for necessary changes makes me sound like the odd man out. So I just felt maybe I should spend more time on my business and my family like way I will not experienced any feeling of frustration. But seriously I believe election season is over, let those who have been elected have the space to govern that is why I have had to stay back and look at our way of life.

Isn’t that self defeatist?

No, there is nothing defeatist about re-ordering your priority. It is actually a way of ensuring that you are not a victim of the system. In the hierarchy of needs people have all kinds of priorities but the ultimate is self fulfilment and you can be fulfilment without holding public office and in so many other ways. So what people like me feel is first of all you need to know what are your priorities in life are and focus on it.

Politics to me is just an opportunity to offer one’s self for service and if say I want to serve you and the people don’t serve us so what’s your problem? Then serve in some other ways because there are too many other ways to add value to society and I am very active in the church as a leader and I know many indigent people that we cater for , I know how many people I pay school fees for. The scale may be smaller than if you were to give direction for Nigeria but I will be fulfilled and satisfied seeing so many people benefitting from my private services. So it is not self defeating but as I said people put themselves in an unnecessary tension because they keep chasing what is not likely to happen.

You have attempted twice to seek a platform to give Nigeria direction first in 2011and then in 2015 but it didn’t quite work out, what was your experience like?

In the case of NDP, I was the visioner for the party, so we funded the party together so it was not difficult to be the flag bearer but it was not broad-based enough to make people accept it.

The second attempt on the platform of the SDP it again because I felt there was something fundamentally wrong with the PDP and APC and that we needed a third force. In fact some leaders of the SDP just left here before you came who are saying I should not abandon the SDP and that we can still a party out of that and still go on see what we can do for Nigeria. But my idea was that we needed a third force. Even before the idea became very popular many were saying we needed a third force. That need is still there but we need to think of a more creative way to solve the problems of Nigeria.

I believe in 2023 both the APC and PDP will have bigger problems than they are currently having but that is for another day, but for me the experience garnered in those two attempts are good for me because it will enable me speak with authority and experience what will work and what will not work.

ne of the main things that I thought we could overcome was challenge of funding. It is clear to me now that we need a lot of money in other to build a third force. You need a lot of money to win a presidential election. I knew the theory of it but the practical experience is completely different from what you know in theory. We have about 187,000 polling units and a presidential candidate needs 187,000 polling agents on the day of the election. If you pay them N1000 as stipends for that day that’s N187m even more. But it is not viable to pay them just N1000 otherwise their loyalty will shift so you need N2to N3000 for each of the polling agents.

The big parties had more than one or two so that when one wants to go and ease himself, the other one is standing by. So you can imagine therefore that for agents alone the implication contrary to what is stated in the Electoral Act you need close to a N1 billion on the day of the election. So the way to go about it is to pretend that it is not coming from the presidential candidate but the party that appoints agents, so it is not in the books. But in the contest of Nigeria, the candidate is the sole bearer of the cost.

Where will that lead us as a nation because monetising the nation’s politics has become a disturbing phenomenon and the consequence has remained that we don’t get the right materials for elected offices?

It is not only a problem for Nigeria to solve  but is the problem of democracy because it is an expensive system. In the Chinese one party system once the leaders choose you as candidate you have won the election and they have a system of training leaders, mentoring, and grooming before they finally choose you to play one role or the other. You find out that most of the time it is round peg in a round hole. People combine managerial know-how with political savvy. Sadly, the open democracy that we practice or copy from the West is a costly system.

The way you mitigate that especially in a parliamentary system is that you run from the small constituencies. You become the Prime Minister having won your local constituency election as a member of parliament, then your colleagues now choose you as first among equals and that makes it also cheaper. Unfortunately of the presidential system of America is already influencing them too. A lot money is changing hands too even in parliamentary and intra-parliamentary elections in the West. Of Nigeria knows how to copy the wrong thing and makes worst than it is elsewhere. The election of National Assembly leaders that recently took place there are stories of a lot of money changing hands. That is the sickness of democracy.

I believe the way to mitigate that is to build alternative political platforms based on certain ideals. I don’t want to say ideology but ideals. That is the main reason people like us are saying rather than complaining that PDP tickets are too expensive. Not just the expression of interest and nomination forms but the stories going round is that for you to be a governorship candidate you may have to spend N500m bribe at the National Secretariat. In America, when Obama (Barack) became president and his senatorial seat was vacant the governor of Illinois was heard on ‘phone trying to sell the ticket and he was impeached. So they have checks against all this extreme behaviour but there is no such check here.

People will laugh at you saying so you want to be governorship candidate yet you are not ready to spend N500m at the secretariat, How? Are you serious? If you don’t have N500m to spend at the secretariat how will you get money for your general elections, your campaigns?  This is to show you that we have a way of rationalising our bad behaviour. Now, APC particularly with the leadership of Muhammadu Buhari was seen as a likely different alternative but it is now in the open that it is the same, same as the PDP. That vindicates those of us who said look we need a brand new parties based on ideals to get a new kind of leadership from the onset to make sure things work.

We have experimented by trying to use the SDP but the officials we met there are the product of that kind of reasoning so for them the more we were bringing people in the more they saw it as opportunity to make money and soon the experiment collapsed.

I am happy you said the experiment collapsed, building alternative platforms will still be leading us to having more political parties, at present 93 parties is that not unwieldy, I don’t want to use the word madness?

Well, it’s unwieldy and I think we need some legislation or even constitutional amendment that would limit the number of political parties. The idea of multi-party democracy is to make sure that people have several alternatives. I would think there is a measure of arbitrariness in determining how many alternatives do we use. All I have been talking about is third force, in other words if we have a system that says we must have five political parties, one can only hope  that one of the five will be healthy and then everybody who cares about such ideals will move in.

But we won’t have five parties like late Bola Ige called ‘five fingers of a leprous hand’ in other words all the five were useless. Right now of the 93 or so parties that we have the practical reality is that we don’t really have 93 political parties but only three parties because the total score of all other platforms is less than 1 million votes in the last general elections so there are not a third force. 

There was not a third force among any of them. To build a third force will require that we start early to achieve membership recruitment that will glaringly be a threat to the existing order.  And then the nation will know that we now have a clear option but all the other parties existing now are no alternatives to both the PDP and APC. In fact, there are one and the same. I can tell you for free, I tried to make the SDP an alternative but it didn’t, l tried to make ASD and alternative it still didn’t work and I tried to make NTP an alternative still it didn’t work. It does not mean that you can’t get it

right. It’s like the talk about failure at least you learn how not to do it through your failures. So I am convinced that Nigeria needs alternatives to APC and PDP.

There was an attempt to have a third force prior to the 2019 general elections, what really happened?

It is not about talking and calling yourself a third force. You can only be a third force if you have a clear ideological framework. You can only be a third force if the leading players are not part of the old order, you need new leadership, new faces. You can only be a third force if you have the capacity to mobilise, if you have money. To build secretariat in the 36 states of the federation and the FCT . Even if you were to rent in each one of them and furnish them that will cost you an average of N10m and that amounts to N360m. If you don’t have the capacity to raise N360m to start with the National secretariat that will probably cost even more so you are already talking about N500m. To build infrastructure is not what is stopping at the state level but also be able to do it at the local and even ward levels.

It is usually at the ward level you find somebody making space available: someone’s house or even a school premises can be meeting point but at local government level you need a secretariat upto 774 LGAs, so it requires funding. When people were talking about it the other time those pre-conditions were not met. They don’t have structures. I will not join anybody to talk about third force unless I can see that you have the resources to build a third force. Now I know what it takes to build a third force.

We are just through with the 2019 general elections, from your perspective did it meet the ethics of conducting fair, credible and transparent elections?

The answer is a big no and it’s unfortunate. But it is not worse than the election of 2007 nor 2003. They were designed to be rigged and they were rigged. And the riggers were practically all players. It was a scramble for who can out-rig the other. No sincere politician who would tell you the 2019 elections were free and fair and credible. For instance, you don’t to go to the sun to know that the figures returned from Borno, Yobe and even Zamfara were magical. It’s not possible but is not to say that every state did not play their own hanky panky.  But there were glaring ones.

The Uwais report recommended ways we can conduct proper and credible elections, the Ken Nnamani committee recommended ways we can have free and fair elections. By choice the political class did not implement those recommendations because everyone was saying if we have free and fair election will I make it back? So, I think for President Buhari the biggest legacy that he can give to Nigeria is not to place on record that he fought corruption because corruption will always be there. What will kill corruption is free and fair election. When everybody knows that the people now really have the power to choose and to remove their leaders then you will be more careful about how you behave and in fact even how you treat your family members because they create a scandal and embarrass you, you will now know the electorate have power.

As it is today, the electorate don’t really have power as long as you have enough money to buy their votes, but electoral officers, but those who will write the figures. Do you know you can win election in Nigeria as the most hated man in your community you can will if you have more money to spend. That’s no election.

We don’t need to deceive ourselves, electoral reform is the most urgent need of Nigeria today, it’s neither corruption nor security the fact that bad people get elected and the thugs and criminals saw it that it’s not good that get elected why should they not become kidnappers, armed robbers? Once ethical standards are compromised in electoral process law and order is the first victim. So in my opinion the best legacy that President Buhari can do for Nigeria and go home and be sure that his name will be written in gold is to ensure that our electoral system is virtually rig-free and it can be done.

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