INTERVIEW: AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq: Why I Can’t Work with Bukola Saraki
By THISDAY
Q: Is there anything personal between you and Dr. Bukola Saraki? Why can’t you work together, he comes into a party, you move out. He is somewhere, you walk away from there? Why can’t you be in the same space?
A: We can be in the same space, but their own space does not accommodate anybody. There’s a glass ceiling in their space, which means you cannot rise up beyond a certain level. And then he is authoritarian, which is to say there’s a leader. As you can see in APC today, there is no leader, everybody is throwing banters and doing what they want. That’s democracy. It’s rowdy with democracy, but when you’re in their own space, there’s only one leader.
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I’m not there to say, one person is my leader. When we joined, Lai was the leader because he was the most senior person in government. Normally, politics in Nigeria, in the state, the governor is the leader unless. I don’t argue with Lai, but he has done a lot to dehumanise me. The treatment he gave me shows that he does not have leadership qualities. Leadership is not what you buy. You earn leadership.For example, a few months ago we had some peace meeting with Lai Mohammed at the Governor of Niger State House. It was the first time Lai Mohammed would meet the Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly.
Is that the kind of person who is making noise about politics and governance in Kwara and you want me to waste my time responding? The Speaker was with me when I was running in 2011 for CPC, so you can see it’s deliberate. Lai Mohammed knows only one member of the Kwara State House of Assembly. . I can’t contest for anything unless they say so. So they pick who contests for the election, but in APC, we say everybody just go and find your space. That’s the difference. We were very close friends when we were younger.
Q: You have been put on the spot a couple of times trying to quench small fires like the Ile Arugbo and Hijab controversy, the corporal punishment to Islamic students, people digging up water in a distressed community, how do you manage these things?
A: Most of them come with disappointment, but then I take a step back and say, what’s the issue here? Like the one about digging for water, it didn’t faze me. Yes, disappointment that in Nigeria today, people are digging up water. It is not my issue, it’s our global issue. It is happening like that all over Nigeria. It is not limited to Kwara, but the irony of it, which is not out there, which nobody is talking about, or know, is that their representatives are people who were there for 16 years. The House of Representatives member from that community was the Chairman of the House Committee on Water Resources for 16 years, until this election when we voted them out. His name is Ahman Pategi.
He was their representative for 16 years and he is from that community, and House. That happens there, then they take the video and ask the media boys to blow it. That doesn’t faze me. My reaction time to that village is important. The mistake they are making is they should wait till the election is close and start highlighting those, because once you highlight those, I’m rushing there to fix it. Once I fix it, I will make it known because you should have fixed it. You were there for 20 years before we came. How come that village is still like that? They intend to use it to blackmail us and say you’re not doing anything, but I’m saying, you were there for 20 years, you had a committee chairman for 16 years in Abuja, and then you do 1000s of constituency boreholes all over.
Saraki was Senate President, commissioning 1000s of boreholes in the whole of Nigeria but that community does not have water. They don’t have an answer.
The flogging one is a national problem. It’s just because it’s highlighted, it’s happening every day. It’s a cultural thing. It’s a private school, it’s not a government school, but we give the license to the schools to operate. Do you take their license, because of flogging students? If you do that, you will rusticate 300 students. The father of the girl that was flogged was standing there. He insisted she should be flogged. He was standing there watching. It’s a very bad thing. That’s why we set up a committee to look into it. The committee also has to look at how we will deal with these issues in the future, and how to communicate to these sorts of schools on human rights abuses.
One of the challenges we have here is, if we take this matter to court, we’ll have no witnesses. The victim because she said she deserved it, because she did bad and committed a sin. The father will not be a witness. What witness do we have? The video clip? Yes, we can push them to the court system. But the important thing is without witnesses, we can’t get something out of it.
They will argue that it is a fake video. Whatever the argument is, the important message is to get into the system and say, this must not happen again and wherever it’s happening, they should stop. There will be sanctions. We will withdraw the licenses of any school that does that again. So I won’t want to preempt the committee, but they have eminent jurists and Islamic leaders. They will give us a report, which we will now debate and act on. Going forward we will react and manage these fires as they come. That is important. Some of them will be deliberate, some of them will be used to show that the state is out of control, creating perceptions, and so on.
Why are there these things? It is because they erroneously felt that we used propaganda to get them out, forgetting that people were not getting water, children are sitting on floors in schools, they’ were not getting reading materials, the system has collapsed. That was why they were voted out. They think propaganda is what we use. They believe they will use propaganda against us. It’s not working.
There are areas we need to step up, like the central issue of stomach infrastructure. We need to step up our game in that area because there’s inflation, possibly due to the exchange rate, partly due to post COVID-19 issues, where farmers have abandoned their fields and so on and economic issues. It’s not an issue created deliberately by the government, it’s just part of the economic processes. There’s no country in the world that doesn’t have this inflation. It’s all over. It’s all over Nigeria, not just Kwara. We already started food distribution on a non-partisan basis in every local government. That is going on. Some people just want cash in their hand, but we believe the important thing is to feed yourself. So we’ve started with food distribution across the state.
Source: Thisday
