Felix Morka is the National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressive Congress (APC). In this interview monitored on Arise Television, he speaks on allegations that the ruling party is attempting to weaken the opposition and other issues, EVINCE UHUREBOR reports
There is a rumble in Nigeria’s democracy, with all eyes fixated on your party, the APC for deliberately plotting to weaken the opposition. How do you defend that under this watch of your government? The government of President Bola Tinubu has done no such thing as your question suggests. Our party has done nothing to interfere, meddle, disrupt or undermine activities of opposition political parties. We’ve done no such thing.
Quite to the contrary, all we’ve done is focus on our own affairs and organising ourselves as we are required to do. Just recently, we completed our convention process, that was the culmination of all of the congresses down from ward to local government to state and zonal to then the national convention. We’re doing exactly what our constitution requires us to do and even the laws of the land expect us to do. Now, the problem here is that the opposition is not doing the same. They’re simply shooting the breeze.
They’re not taking the time to figure out what their processes ought to be and to execute them, so that they can strengthen their position and make themselves competitive. There’s a reason that this democracy is also called competitive democracy. It’s not, you know, some type of goodwill engagement. We can’t leave our business and become obsessed with the business of the opposition or even extend any kind of assistance to them to manage their internal affairs.
The dysfunction within these parties is the real problem, not the APC, not Mr. President. The inability of these leaders who have congregated in, for example, the ADC and who clearly appear to not know what they are doing because they are focused obsessively about winning power and don’t have the time or the patience to manage their parties, to focus on their internal systems, to build it strong and build it ready to undertake political engagement.
APC cannot be held responsible for that. And when you speak about shrinking political space, now listen, we are here. In the last one week, I’ve done maybe over 10 appearances, more than 10 appearances, quite frankly, responding to the very bogus, baseless allegations made by the ADC, for example.
The ADC, they issue more press statements than any other party in this country. Sometimes 20 press statements in a week. I monitor them. I respond to a few of them. But the point I’m making is that that is also an exercise of democratic freedom. Right now they are holding siege to the airspace in this country. You say, look, let’s not, you know, speak and, you know, sort of vilify the ruling party just because we’re the ruling party.
There’s nothing about the ruling party that suggests that we must then become the victim of this sort of idle talk by the position of people who are not interested in organising themselves. Now, the latest crisis in the ADC, how did it happen? We are not Bala Gombe. We didn’t file that suit. We didn’t stop them from engaging with their own member to, you know, meet him and assuage him and, sort of somehow make him okay, so that he can disengage from what he’s doing. They haven’t done any of that.
Are Nigerians wrong to believe that there’s some sort of conspiracy and coordinated effort to weaken the ADC?
They are absolutely wrong. Anyone who believes that would be wrong because you’re focusing on the wrong thing. I think it’s just pointing fingers at the ruling party.
There’s nobody who has advanced any shred of evidence or substantiation to show that APC has any hand in the ADC crisis. It’s not enough to just bandy allegations around, otherwise we can all become victims of crimes we never committed.
And it’s unfair as well because as a ruling party, we’re also entitled to constitutional liberties to engage and to call our meetings and to organise ourselves. So, whoever is making the allegation should be able to prove and show why they believe that the APC has a hand. It’s not enough to just say because we’re the ruling party, therefore, we’re the ones responsible for the decadence in the opposition parties.
We won’t leave our business and become obsessed with the business of the opposition or even extend any kind of assistance to them to manage their internal affairs
Now, let me remind us of something. In 2019, our party was also unable to field candidates Zamfara and Rivers states for the governorship to states assembly elections. We couldn’t because we had some internal crisis in both states and the courts intervened.
We were barred from presenting candidates even when we were at that time, the ruling party. Muhammad Buhari was the president of this country but we did not muscle INEC into reneging on that decision. We simply accepted it as our fate because we knew we had that problem internally.
Now, what is so difficult with ADC and even the PDP to accept that they’ve made mistakes on their side and to figure out how they can recover from it rather than simply set everywhere on fire and blaming the APC? We refuse to be victimized in that manner because we’re not responsible for their mess.
Some other rhetoric has been emerging, like very strong allegations coming from the PDP that agents of your party have gone ahead to bribe the leadership of INEC with a plot of land and some other goodies. What’s your response to that?
That allegation coming from the PDP is utterly ridiculous. I mean, how do you offer INEC a plot of land? What plot of land do you offer INEC? Where is that land located? Who offered it and in whose name? I mean, INEC is an entity, a government agency. These guys are looking to throw up every kind of mud and hoping that it sticks.
If you look at what is going on in the ADC, for instance, somebody went to court, the ADC was invited to court and asked by the judge to come show cause why the order of injunction that was pending before that court should not be granted. The ADC didn’t bother to answer that invitation by the court.
They appealed but there was nothing to appeal. They went there and simply just wasted six months, by which time everything about this case could have been sorted at the Federal High Court. They wasted it and then when the Court of Appeal gave judgement that was valid and absolutely justified they began screaming like the APC has done something to them.
But a statement credited to Mohammed Aruna said that an INEC official received $50,000 cash bribery from the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory…
That’s a criminal allegation. Giving of bribe and taking of bribe are both criminal allegations. So, I think he should do Nigerians a favour and hand that individual who collected money, according to him, to the police for investigation.
This just makes no sense. So, PDP can say what they want to say. If the PDP knows who gave bribe and who took bribe, they should come out and tell Nigerians and not these spooky allegations that they make just to foster conspiracy theories.
Why should Nigerians re-elect the APC looking at the situation in the country right now, with inflation, insecurity and poverty rising?
APC should be re-elected and APC has been very successful in all the elections we’ve had so far since 2023. We had the off-cycle elections; we won handsomely in those elections. And let me say that it was Nigerians who voted in that election. We’ve had the constituency elections around the country and APC won the bulk of those elections.
We had the FCT elections and APC won massively. It was Nigerians who voted in those elections. So, my first response to your question is that when you approximate, as you just did, to suggest that Nigerians are so disenchanted and determined not to vote, it’s not really consistent with the facts as we know it today based on the most recent elections even after 2023. So, there’s no basis to speak or suggest that Nigerians are in that place where they are ready not to support the APC.
There’s no empirical evidence to support that. Why would Nigerians not support the APC? The President has done what many presidents before him, if not all the presidents before him, couldn’t summon the political will to do. I’m not minimising their contributions, but I’m just saying that this president has done something extraordinary over and above what his predecessors did or were willing to do or were able to do.
Let me draw your attention to the promise President Tinubu made to Nigerians during the 2023 elections, when he said that Nigerians should not vote him for a second term if he does not fix power in the first term. How would you defend this in the face of an obvious failure of the power sector, grid collapses, decay of infrastructure, and poor power supply to Nigerians?
The issue of power is one that has challenged this country for a very long time. You know that whatever the president said at the beginning or during the campaign, he offered his very good will and well-intentioned commitment to tackle the problem of power in this country, and he’s doing just that.
Our generation and distribution of power has increased under the watch of this president over and above what we had previously. Have we achieved universal power, access, availability and even affordability to every Nigerian? No, we have not. But power has improved significantly, even when we still remain challenged by the provision of power in Nigeria. You just talked about decadent infrastructure and all of that.
The power grid and the power system and all of the equipments and infrastructure that support and undergird power in this country were allowed to rot to a level that was just incredible. So, a lot of the work has been done in areas where they are excavating equipment and replacing them with new ones.
You will have downtime; there’s no gain saying that fact. In my district in Delta State, I know people tell me about power, but on further inspection, we found that a lot of that is coming from the power companies literally excavating and taking out old, decadent systems, systems that were rotten, to install new equipment.
And in doing so, some of them are very complex and they take time to do. I’m not minimizing the challenge that Nigerians face when it comes to power. I’m not at all trying to do that. But I’m only trying to underscore the fact that these are not things that are dictated into existence.
They require physical investment of time and energy and resources and technical investments to actually grow our power capacity to where we need it to be. So, I just urge Nigerians to remain patient. The commitment is there. Just recently, a lot of the backlog of debts which was owed in that sector, over N3.3 trillion, they’re now beginning to pay down and I think that this will help the system to recover nicely.
