MAHMUD JEGA BY VIEW FROM THE GALLERY
In nearly eight years as Minister of Aviation, he failed to get Air Nigeria off the ground. But in one fell swoop last week [or, as one of my reporters once wrote in a feature article, in one swoop fell] Captain Hadi Sirika got many things, not launched into the skies, but flat on the ground. He demolished the central mystique of the Buhari Administration, namely the anti-corruption fight. He demolished the Presidency and INEC’s strident campaign against vote buying. He demolished APC’s claims that it came to correct the political and governance “rot” left in 16 years of PDP rule. He demolished all claims that recent electoral reforms have improved Nigerian politics. He demolished CSO and international partners’ exhortations that votes should count in next year’s polls. And he demolished all hopes by pro-democracy activists that issues, not money, should determine election victory.
It was at a fund raising dinner in Abuja on Sunday last week for APC’s Katsina State governorship candidate, Dikko Radda. Incidentally, Katsina is President Buhari’s home state, so there was the assumption that clean, money-free politics will kick off from there as an example to the rest of the country. The video clip from the event that went viral on the social media did not cover the whole event, so maybe some context was missing. But it was as damaging as anything I have ever seen on the Nigerian political soap box in more than 40 years.
Sirika said, “Even if you are allan musuru [a magician], I don’t believe you can go to Musawa and defeat Abu Ibrahim. You cannot go to Dutsi and defeat Hadi Sirika. Or you go to Kafur and defeat Aminu Bello Masari. Wallahi [I swear to God]. It is not possible! If you think it is possible, bisimillah [proceed in the name of Allah]. Election day will soon come. We will amass money and we will amass essential commodities. We have them already! You mean money? Wallahi we have it! Wallahil azim [Allah is the witness to what I am saying] we have money! We have working tools, i.e. money. Wallahi we have them! I repeat, wallahi we have them!” Sirika spoke in Hausa, so the English speaking audience missed the import of his remarks.
The first question to ask Minister Sirika is, you said “we” have money. Please, who is the “we”? Is it national APC, is it Katsina State APC, is it the governorship candidate of APC in Katsina who until recently was heading a federal agency, or is it you, Hadi Sirika, who in the last seven and a half years headed the Aviation sector, first as Minister of State and later as a full-fledged Minister of Aviation? Pray, is it your political godfather President Buhari, who was widely thought to be “clean as a hound’s tooth,” to use a phrase that US President Dwight Eisenhower used in 1952?
The second question to ask is, if you have so much money, where did you get it? For seven and a half years now Sirika has been a public officer, a Minister, who is prohibited by law from doing any business other than subsistence farming. The same thing applies to his other Katsina APC top gun colleagues, who are also Federal or state public officers. Only seven short years ago, the new Buhari Administration chased officers of the former PDP Administration up and down the country because they shared billions of Dasukigate funds to fund the 2015 election. To their credit they never boasted publicly about it. If President Jonathan had not lost the 2015 election, we probably would never have known about it. Even Madam Patience Jonathan never did a video boasting that PDP had money. She only said in 2015, “We must do our second term.” But here is an APC top shot publicly boasting that he will deploy money to win an election.
The most visible thing Hadi Sirika did as Aviation Minister in the last seven years was trying to refloat the grounded Nigeria Airways, which he rechristened Air Nigeria. Nearly everybody was skeptical. Old timers remember the logo of Nigeria Airways, the Flying Elephant. It was probably the most illogical logo in the world because nobody ever saw an elephant flying. Now that Nigeria Airways is properly grounded, why should anybody try to resuscitate it? Anytime we heard in the news that Federal Executive Council had approved huge sums of money for the Air Nigeria bottomless pit, there was grimace all around. Some people will now say they know where the money went.
Since 1978 when I became old enough to follow the antics of politicians on the soapbox, I heard many politicians accuse their rivals of using money to win elections, but I never heard any politician ever boast that he had enough money to win elections, until Sirika came along. Since the Second Republic we have had politicians who were reputed to be millionaires and billionaires. In the 1970s, GNPP leader Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim was thought to be the richest person in Nigeria. I saw him speak at several rallies but he never boasted that he had “working tools.” National Party of Nigeria [NPN] was said by its opponents to be a party of millionaires, but it never boasted that it had enough money to win elections, or call the Almighty as its witness that it had money.
When he contested elections in 1993, Chief M.K.O. Abiola was widely thought to be the richest person in Nigeria. MKO flaunted his credentials as international businessman, telephone mogul, newspaper publisher, Baba Addini, holder of over 100 traditional titles, Pillar of Sports in Africa, philanthropist extraordinary and repository of local adages and parables, but he never boasted that he had “working tools” of politics. How much money has Hadi Sirika got, compared to Uncle Waziri or MKO? International business journals say Aliko Dangote is the richest man in Africa. Kano State is a tiny dot in Africa; did you ever hear Aliko boast that he has enough dollars and euros to buy it up?
The next logical question is, what do Sirika and his candidates intend to do with this money in the upcoming elections? He should be made to say how much money they are holding. The Electoral Act has pegged spending by a governorship candidate at N1 billion and N5 billion for a presidential candidate. I thought that was mean of the Electoral Act, because election logistics are costly. I am referring here to the legitimate costs such as moving around, opening and maintaining offices, printing posters and souvenirs, advertising, hotel accommodation, hiring halls, legal and security costs. But these are not the costs that Sirika was talking about when he boasted that they have enough money.
No wonder that criticism of Hadi Sirika’s gaffe came in thick and fast on the airwaves. One senator said he poked directly into poor voters’ eyes, told them that they are hungry and that they are chicken, who will go after any grain of millet that is thrown at them. Another Katsina politician said if Sirika has so much money, why is it that he did nothing when people in his ward are dying of hunger? Yet another, this time Katsina academic said Sirika made this boast because they used money to bribe delegates during the party primaries, and they believe they can do the same in the general election. He also asked, where is EFCC? Its agents have been looking for stashed money all over the place. Someone has just made it easy for them by boasting that he has loads of it, and for that matter he is a public officer.
If the purpose of Sirika’s boast was to intimidate election opponents, it is likely to backfire. National Bureau of Statistics recently revealed that 133 million Nigerians are in the firm grip of poverty, millions of them in Katsina State alone. There will now be a stampede to Sirika’s house to get the money, with no guarantee that the people who collect it will do his bidding in politics. You see, the poor Hausa man is very arrogant in his own way. He wants rich people to give him money but he wants them to give it to him in a dignified way. A Northern talakka does not want to be called matsiyaci, another name for a koboless bloke, and he hates it when rich people boast that they assisted him.
President Buhari said in London when he met King Charles last month, and reiterated when he met West African Elders Forum Pre-Election Mediation Mission led by former Sierra Leonean President Ernest Bai Koroma last Tuesday, that the 2023 elections will be clean and that no one will be allowed to use money or thugs in the elections. This reminds me of an incident during the Obama presidency, when Vice President Joe Biden accidentally revealed a social plan that Obama was billed to announce the next day. The White House Chief of Staff was outraged. He said, “No one upstages POTUS [President of the United States]!” Sirika more than upstaged Buhari. He contradicted him in every material particular, to use the notorious phrase in Decree 4 of 1984. When will Chief of Staff Prof Ibrahim Gambari be outraged and declare that no minister contradicts POFREN [President of Federal Republic of Nigeria]?
