How APC benefited from PDP’s mismanaged success – Eyiboh

Mr. Eseme Eyiboh, is one time chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Information. While in the House between 2007 and 2012, he was a sounding board for many policies that flowed from the legislature. He eventually became the Dean of The Initiatives, an intellectual resource base for the House.
In this interview, Mr. Eyiboh, scholar, farmer, policy wonk and politician speaks on issues flowing from the recent elections and how the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, prepared itself for defeat.
Excerpts:
You have been out of the House for about three years now. What have you been doing?

My going to the House of Representatives was out of the desire to represent my people and representation in this case is protecting the interest of the people regardless of the constitutional responsibilities of the legislator which of course is appropriation, oversight and legislation. You also have to make sure that you buy your people in, into the national programmes and policies of government and also bring them closer and understand their felt needs and then integrate them into the National Development Plans. The National Development Plan in this case is captured in the national budget. Since my eclipse in the House of Representatives, I have had nothing to do with the decision of my people. But I have been trying to network and open up the contacts and doing what I can to still make sure that I sustain the connectivity of my people with what is going on at the centre.
I felt that I shouldn’t play the typical Nigerian politician who after every election if he is not successful goes back home sulking as a monument of self pity, so I decided to take a step forward by making sure that in the course of it, that I now have to appraise myself, go through the process of self appraisal so that in the days ahead I will find myself comfortable enough in future competitive models because I have no doubt in my mind that there will be a change in this country.

What is your perspective of the recently concluded elections and the outcome?

You know President Goodluck Jonathan came in with the greatest goodwill any Nigerian leader ever had. That same wind that brought him in is the wind that took him out because he lost the opportunity to manage that goodwill and as he was losing that goodwill his men were not able to do the integrity audit of that goodwill until they lost it. There is this theory in security called theory of “sweet descent.” You never know you are falling when you are falling because it is sweet when you are falling from the apex, no obstruction, the breeze is touching you and you are falling freely until when you are on the ground that is what our president went through in 2015 election.
The Nigerian people have handed over a handbook which is presently with the APC and that handbook is saying that time has changed. The greatest mistake of the president was that he never recruited the right people in the right places. He performed very well but he never informed and when he attempted to inform, he now took a wrong direction in managing his public communication. So, the election was PDP vs PDP, APC only benefited from the mismanaged opportunities. A situation where you had the president’s wife going in one direction for campaign and the Presidential Campaign Council was going another direction, the party was going in another direction and you now had the Governors’ Forum also going another direction. So, it was a time that the country was undergoing a great depression. A situation like this arose in America some years ago under Franklin Roosevelt when there was a great depression, and he took stock and went through a leadership recruitment process and came out with what is today popularly known as the New Deal and he took America out of that bad situation.

But here, the PDP conducted itself as a band of people who are insensitive, a political organisation that for 16 years could not even review its own manifesto. A political party for 16 years was busy building empires for people who wanted to use Nigeria as a franchise to be able to rehabilitate their age long failed ambitions. It was very unfortunate, so, there was no way that they could have succeeded. Most of the steps that they took were steps in the wrong direction.

How do you mean?

Children who were born from 1970 till date, constitute the greater population of our people and these people were born when corruption was most manifest in this country. These people have never seen heroes, they have never seen role models and they keep reading about role models and heroes and they are desirous to see in our own clime, their own role models and heroes. You see little children wearing T-shirts with Michael Jordan, carrying names like Mandela.
Some of them heard what Buhari did with War Against Indiscipline, but they didn’t know what happened. So, today they are desirous of seeing such a change. In that time that we are talking about when you graduated from the university, you know you are a graduate. But today, everybody is talking about unemployment and 80% of the unemployed are unemployable because the system is emphasising on manpower and not mind power. Global competitiveness today is knowledge driven. If you go to the Silicon Valley in the United States, 80% of the engineers there are Indian Americans. Now, if you buy a machine in China you need a Chinese to be in that factory. So, what used to be a burden because of population has now become a catalyst for them. But instead of the managers of our own democracy to now look at our democracy as a vehicle to drive development, they are busy talking about GDP. But one is now talking about development as a process of which GDP is just a single component.
So, PDP for 16 years were breeding champions and Goliaths, but neglected the fact that there is a stone for every Goliath.

So, was Buhari the stone that fell PDP?

Buhari didn’t do anything to PDP. It is the people who gave them the handbook that things have changed, that the behavioural pattern of the average Nigerian voter has changed and that you can no longer take us for a ride and as we speak, PDP is yet to recover and I don’t see PDP reinventing itself with the quality and calibre of leaders that they have today.

What is your reaction to the crisis in the party today?

It is a function of poor leadership recruitment process. A political party which has ruled for 16 years ought to own a think tank, a nursery cluster across the country whereby at any given time if you want to pick a national chairman you would go and pick a round peg in a round hole. We are not in a wartime, but these gentlemen were just misfits put together to manage success. A party in power is expected to rejuvenate itself in every election and is supposed to come out with innovations, it is supposed to come out with models, with strategies for productivity but unfortunately, if you observe the trend and the threats, the threat analysis of PDP was that in every election, PDP was losing ground but they were not taking note of it because of the quality of leadership mandated to manage the party. So, how would you be able to manage the party? Because they are seeing the party as a buffet table.

What are the prospects for the party?

PDP will first have to culture itself on leadership.

Do you see Buhari being able to steer the nation in the right direction?

My concern about Buhari is that he has the perceived personal integrity, he has an austere lifestyle and those things go well for him but how can those be translated into national leadership? What is the mentality within APC? Who would be able to complement this his mentality? Buhari and Osinbajo are fantastic men in their own right? They have the sense of personal organisation, but this change is a process and people will have to buy into it. What process is he going to use to persuade and invite people to buy in? Remember election has ended it is no longer APC/PDP, it is now Nigerian people and the president. So, he has an onerous task to perform because we are in a situation of great depression and we need a leader in the mould of Roosevelt to be able to create a new deal model for us.

So, could Buhari do that?

It depends on leadership recruitment. If he subjects himself to the clannish interests of his political party and the influence of godfathers, I would rather say that this success may become a potential for implosion. But if he is firm and puts to test his sense of personal organisation and acts to type as a general we have always known, I think it would be an issue of time.

You were the Dean of the Initiatives. Did you not have a successor?

I had a deputy dean and The Initiatives was formally registered with the Corporate Affairs and recognised by a number of international development partners. But this thing is all about perspectives. I was looking at it as a vehicle to share policy directions and perceptions of government and drive the process. But today because there has been an eclipse of visions and in the country we are no longer talking about visions, we are now talking about perks, so some people are discouraged from investing in those things which are intellectual which are research based and some of them also are afraid too that leading The Initiatives would also make them vulnerable to the governors who are also powerful, because that it seemed, was one of my undoing.