Jonathan Really Mismanaged Nigeria - Fayemi

News that the All Progressives Congress (APC) defeated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the March 28 presidential elections might appear stale. But do you recall the role a former governor of Ekiti state, Kayode Fayemi, played in Buhari’s victory?

Just to remind: he led the team that conducted a rancor-free convention for the primary election of a presidential candidate of the APC in Lagos. Last year he was denied a victory at the June 21, governorship election won by the PDP candidate, Ayodele Fayose. However, Fayemi remains a popular politician.

In an interview with New Telegraph, he talked about how he has been coping since he left power, his expectations from President Buhari, how the former president Goodluck Jonathan mismanaged Nigeria, bailout for states and efforts by Governor Ayodele Fayose to nail him.

Read the excerpts of the interview below:

Life out of office

As you will recall, it was not quite one month after I left office that I was saddled with the responsibility of heading the presidential primaries committee in December 2014. I moved on from that to working in the campaign from January 2015.

My heart sinks when I see what is going on back home in Ekiti and the destruction of all the interesting and well-regarded initiatives of our government like the social security scheme which has now been cancelled by the government there and which of course plunges all those elderly indigent people into further deepening poverty.

On Governor Ayodele Fayose’s abandonment of his programmes in Ekiti

I was in Ekiti two weeks ago and in some of my visits around the state, I had people come around to me to say how it has been difficult for them to feed.  I can tell you that of the 132 communities in Ekiti, there is no single one that did not benefit from our community self-help support programme. Of course, this is not a governor that really promised anything; so you cannot hold him to anything. He never told them that he will do anything, so, if he is not doing anything he is not really breaking his promise to the people.

Expectations from President Muhammadu Buhari

President Buhari is already changing Nigeria. One of the interesting things I found out is that Nigerians follow their leaders. The truth of the matter is that once Nigerians see sincerity of purpose in their leader, they do tend to follow in the footstep of the leader. Not much has really been done by our government yet; not even much is known about the policy direction of this government, yet the body language of this government is very clear.

People are responding to body language; they are not even responding to policy yet. They are responding to the body language of the leader because only few people are in government in Nigeria today. President Buhari, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, Femi Adesina, Shehu Garba and a few others. The people in government are less than 10. The positions to feel in government are about 5,000, yet Nigeria is changing and I can give you concrete proofs. Electricity, what have you noticed in your house? We haven’t done anything beyond sorting out the contract of the Manitoba that was stuck with the previous government and that is transmission. We haven’t done much.

This 4,000 plus megawatts were there. I was a director, representing South-West in the NIPP power project initiative. We already have 5,000 megawatts of generating capacity since 2013 but instead of getting the 5,000 megawatts to serve the Nigerian people, what we witnessed in the last two years of Goodluck Jonathan’s administration was a dwindling of the megawatts almost to 1,800 by the time they were leaving. The only thing that has been done; the GENCOs realised that a new Sheriff is in town and this new Sheriff does not brook nonsense.

The pace of Buhari’s presidency

I think we have such a president and he is not going to be a dash; it is going to be a marathon because a lot has been damaged in Nigeria. Nigeria has been hollowed out by the departing Goodluck Jonathan government and its agents. They have nearly destroyed the country and almost left us with a carcass. So, it is going to take a while to turn it around but one will know that the new Sheriff in town will not brook any compromise or any malfeasance or infraction. Even from his own side, he is not going to.

The fact that you are an APC chieftain or you are a Buhari family member is not likely to get you a reprieve in this government if you are caught with your hand in the cooking jar. It is not going to help you.

So, I will like to think that we are in for tough love but you know what tough love is. We all smack our children when they are not doing well, not because we dislike or hate them but because we want them to be better at what they do and to even rise above whatever achievements that we have accomplished in life. I think that is what Nigerians are going to get from the president. He is not likely to be smiling at us every day. He is not given to responding to media stimuli the way the people in media will love. But he clearly loves Nigeria and he is patriotic about the country and he is going to turn out to be a major turning point for our country in terms of how he is going to make Nigerians also part of this change fundamentally.

There would be a lot of hope to join on the way and there would be a lot of challenges to confront. It is not going to be a smooth sail but he never really promised us a smooth sail. I think what he promised is that he will put all his heart and mind to it and give Nigeria his best.

Policy direction of Buhari’s administration

We are a social democratic government and we run a very clear platform. When you read the APC manifesto, ‘Rebuilding Nigeria’, you will see that it is about building a society, where nobody is left behind. That is not what we have seen in the last five years. The government that left office actually divided this country; created a tinning, mindlessly rich, criminally wealthy percentage of Nigerians and plunging the majority of Nigerians into a further depth of poverty and miserable. And we are not just divided on economic terms; we were divided ethnically, religiously and regionally.

That is what the Jonathan administration did to Nigerians. And when you look at some of the things that the president is already doing, you will know that this is not a man given to promoting the hegemony or agenda of a particular ethnic group or religious interest. For him, it is about improving the lots of the ordinary Nigerians.

Goodluck Jonathan’s mis-management

In the case of many of the governors, you also have to deal with the fact that the last five years of the Goodluck Jonathan’s administration was riddled with all sorts of financial irregularities, illegal deductions from the federation account and that also affected the states. By the time we took the Jonathan’s administration to court over the Excess Crude Account (ECA) and the illegal deductions from the federation account which also affected the states. The rough estimate of how much each state was owed ran into about N15 billion. Even when the Supreme Court said we should go and settle out of court, the federal government ignored us.

Corruption and Fayose’s attempts to nail his predecessor

Fayose has looked everywhere in Ekiti for a way to nail me because of course I am uncompromising, I don’t believe he is the right person for the state and I also believe that he is going to end up being an agent of retrogression for that state. So, since there is no meeting point between us, naturally given the mind set of an average retrogressive politician in Nigeria, they have been looking everywhere.

It is true I built Ekiti Government House because there is no government house in the state. I built the cheapest government house in Nigeria today. You can undertake an exercise; go to Kaduna and see the N10 billion government house that my brother, Nasir El-Rufai, just inherited or go to Plateau and see the N9 billion government house there and compare them to Ekiti Government House that is N2.1 billion. There is no N50 million bed in Ekiti Government House.

There is not even a N1 million bed in Ekiti Government House. The records are there but you know for Fayose, anyone who knows him, knows that he is a jester and rabble-rouser.  In fact, the first time Fayose got to that government house, the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Hen! Ha! Fayemi sise ni bi yi o (Fayemi has worked so hard here). How did he do this?”

But he quickly did a double thing with his people and said we cannot go out and say this man has done all these; so, let us flip it over. He said he was not going to stay there; you go and ask Ekiti people where he stays now? His family is there, which is his right as a governor.

Insurgency in the North East

All his trips have been associated with that; G-7, America, Cameroon, Benin, Chad, Niger, all associated with ensuring that we build a regional coalition to rout Boko Haram. The president has also gone as far as saying: ‘I am not averse to even negotiating, as long as I am negotiating with credible representative of the insurgents. Anything that will help me to bring back the girls; anything that will help me to return back the internally displaced persons back to their families, anything that will help me to restore the economy of the North East, I am ready.’ And look at the speed: $2.1 billion from the World Bank, specifically for the North East.
More details on New Telegraph.