Chief Daniel Ulasi is a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In this interview monitored on Arise Television, he speaks on the decision by some opposition figures to insist on zoning the presidency to Southern Nigeria ahead of the 2027 elections and the role of zoning in party politics, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
What is your thought on the idea of zoning and why is zoning such a big deal when the emphasis should be on competence?
I want to make a reference to events before the Nigerian civil war. For almost five to six years, Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa was the prime minister of this country, and Nnamdi Azikiwe was the first governor general and later president, a non-executive president so to speak.
But at least it gave a sense of belonging to people from different parts of this country, that they have a say. So, the idea of zoning is a concept that gives one a sense of belonging. It goes down to local governments.
If there are about three or four communities in one local government, you don’t expect that one particular community will continue to produce the chairman of that local government. It is not constitutionally wrong, but it is morally wrong, to the extent that those other people don’t have a sense of belonging, for whatever it means because we’re in a country where people think that you go into government just to share money.
So, everybody has a tendency to want to be there. Unfortunately, that problem of corruption has become genetic. Nobody thinks about anything else except how to make money and we have to correct that impression. To answer your question directly, zoning is not a constitutional matter, but it’s a matter of convenience that gives everybody a sense of belonging. It also shows that every zone has somebody competent.
When Atiku Abubakar is talking about competence; he has a degree but there are thousands of people who have doctorate degrees all over. There’s no local government in this country that you don’t see persons who are very qualified to want to help the affairs of their people. So, what we’re saying is that let’s give every zone a chance to be part of the system.
You said something quite interesting that everybody wants to get in there or wants their zone represented to be able to get money. Is that the purpose of politics and governance?
When you see a society where people take a vow for unsurpassed devotion to stealing instead of unsurpassed devotion to public work, then you see why people are struggling to get there. I will give you an example. In a local government where there are three, four, five towns, and they see Mr. A and Mr. B with nothing, not a Volkswagen, they watch you go into a council and after two years, you are driving an SUV and building a house in your father’s compound.
This is what is happening. Political parties are only platforms. It is the individual who personalizes the political party, who goes in there to deliver the goods.
So, if we have a wrong individual with a wrong conception, then we are finished. So, what I’m saying is that if we have people who have no other reference than a nomenclature, no values, no love of nation, no love of even their own immediate people, then we have fundamental problem.
That is why they are shameless in a society where water is not running. They are free to come to their villages with two, three SUVs and stay in the village. After three days, they go away again. Nobody will see them. When the next election comes, they come sharing money
Will you say that zoning has promoted inclusion, sense of belonging and fairness or is it just to serve the interests of certain people?
We have just developed a new argument. I’m not discussing whether zoning helps to develop. I just mentioned a sense of belonging. People believe that nothing is functioning. People are not working. People just go there to steal money. And I use the word steal, unfortunately, because it’s evident in our country that people are not working.
There are very few examples you can give of a project that is started and completed. In this country, more than 80 per cent of the projects are abandoned. Nigeria is the only country where you hear the word ‘abandoned projects.’ What does abandoned project mean? When the project money is misappropriated and it is not completed, the next budget, they make a new arrangement to put more money.
So, when you go round this country, you see roads that we started working more than four or five years ago, they are still uncompleted. You would have expected that every zone would have very competent people to represent the interests of their people. But you now see that most of the people doing this stealing are PhD holders, very brilliant people that the society has spent money, either with scholarship to train.
Zoning is not a constitutional matter, but matter of convenience that gives everybody a sense of belonging. So, what we’re saying is that let’s give every zone a chance to be part of the system
They come back and they give them an opportunity. The first thing they do is they drive big cars, build beautiful houses. So, nobody has any reference hope about the educated and the uneducated.
That is why the common people, when you go on campaign, they tell you, this is our turn. You remember when the president said it is his turn, as if it’s his father’s compound. And all of us were looking, he grabbed the nomination, and he’s president of Nigeria today.
How can in any normal society, somebody open his mouth and say that something is his turn, a democratic process. It’s your turn only if you win. We don’t have a constitutionally laid-down zoning process in this country but it would have been nice if we have that, so that everybody will have a sense of belonging.
If you go there and spend four years and you don’t help your people, they will hold you accountable because we don’t hold anybody accountable because it’s not in our literature to hold anybody accountable. Everybody goes there to share money. Unfortunately, we don’t have water to drink. If they have ability to control the air we breathe, only God knows where we would have been.
Can you explain why somebody of the South East extraction has not been president of Nigeria since we returned to democracy?
I think I’m in a competent position to explain that. Coming from the aftermath of the civil war, the rest of the country never trusted – let me use the word Igbos – because more than 99 per cent of the Igbos occupy the South East. They believe we are revolutionary and that we might have a tendency again to want to exit from Nigeria. But it’s not true. People forget what led to that civil war.
What is the problem? The same problem that led to that civil war; look at what is happening in Zamfara, there’s a near civil war going on in Zamfara. Most of the governors in Zamfara, Kebbi and Brono live in Kaduna and some of them in Abuja and that’s where they are ruling their people from.
Once money is sent, they go there, pay salaries and disappear. We have not sat down to fundamentally have a dialogue about the problem of this country. Why is there Boko Haram? Why is there IPOB? There are many parts of this country that have one problem or the other. Recently, Plateau State has been overtaken. So, we need to have an honest dialogue. This is what I expect leadership to do. For as long as we believe that we want to have this country as Nigeria, we have to develop love.
If I don’t love you, there’s no way I will appreciate what you are doing. We don’t have love in this country. We have a fundamental revision to do of our disposition in this country to know that we are people from one family. Somehow God has put us all together. It is for us to reimagine how we make it work. If we can’t make it work, then let us sit down and discuss the alternatives.
Atiku Abubakar said that the North has only done 10 years since 1999 and that the South has done 18 years. What do you think of that in terms of the larger picture and the North-South politics that we try to play?
We don’t have a democratic centralism like they have in Russia. We have political parties in this country, and by implication, every political party is supposed to have its candidate, if they so desire, in all the elections. Therefore, if President Bola Tinubu is in APC, and they have decided to give him a second chance, the other parties are free to also field candidates for the election if they so desire, to run for the presidency.
If the President is doing well, let him make a broadcast outlining every promise he made before 2023, and which one he has started and completed. Maybe, it’s not what you say outside government that you say inside government, but we have a right to know whether you have been able to fulfill the promises you made to us.
