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Olisa Metu, new national publicity secretary of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, speaks to Tobs Agbaegbu, senior associate editor, and Haruna Salami, senior staff writer, on the allegations of imposition of candidates against his party and the insinuation that President Goodluck Jonathan’s choice of Bamanga Tukur as national chairman was his own way of preparing the ground for the politics of succession in 2015. Excerpts:

Newswatch: A new executive has emerged, but there are some aggrieved members like Ebenezer Babatope who said he was forced to step down. How do you want to move ahead now?

Metu: Well, I am sure you are confusing being aggrieved and being sentimental or being emotional. People were emotional because they had run a good election, because they tried to convince delegates, because their campaign didn’t work out the way they thought it was going to. That is different from being aggrieved.  Babatope is a seasoned politician, a highly respected member of the party and a major stakeholder in PDP and he ran a very good campaign. It will not be very dignifying to say he is aggrieved. Babatope is not aggrieved. May be he was a bit disappointed that his campaign didn’t work out but not aggrieved. We don’t have aggrieved members of the party. There is no way a responsible or respectable members of the party will be aggrieved; they can be disappointed, but not aggrieved. 

Let me explain our convention to you. All over the world, in all democracies, including the United States you have super delegates. When you look at where the super delegates are going, you will understand whether you will win that state or not. That is what happens in their primaries and even their congresses. So, in Nigeria you have super delegates as well. The president is a super delegate, the governors are super delegates. There are super delegates in the states they control and zones too. It is completely democratic. When you see, they are not backing you, of course, you will be disappointed and emotional about it, but that doesn’t qualify you to be aggrieved. Things were done in the open and there were trade offs and people negotiated.

Newswatch: What did the trade off that resulted in the election of the national chairman because a few days to the convention it was widely reported that he lost at the zonal congress of the party and suddenly there was a turn around. What went into it?

Metu: In states you have where local government chairmen or some people will sit down and say they want somebody to be the state chairman and the state governor will say look at these other people, look at their qualities. I am looking for somebody with this kind of experience to help me. Don’t you think this person can work better as state chairman and this person can work better as deputy state chairman? He will convince the people and they will back him. There is nothing different or undemocratic about what happened.

If the leaders of the party decided that the experience, the exposure, the transparency of the national chairman Bamanga Tukur is what they need, they can discuss with leaders of the North-East to say, yes we understand you had an election that produced Dr. Musa Babayo. Why don’t you allow this man (Tukur) to represent us because we are not looking for the national chairman of North-East? We are looking for the national chairman of the entire PDP in Nigeria and these are the qualities that we need. Please try to support him. If you support him, we will try and ensure that your zone is in peace.

Newswatch: Who handled the negotiation?

Metu: It’s not called negotiation. In politics, it’s called lobby, campaign, dialogue. If you want to know who handled it, you have to ask Ibrahim Mantu, the director-general of his campaign. He is a seasoned politician, former deputy senate president. He knows how to lobby, how to talk to super delegates.

I can roll out the super delegates for you. Mr. President is one of the super delegates, and he is a very important super delegate. He is the president of the country. He is a major factor and you can’t discountenance that. So also is the Senate president, deputy Senate president, Speaker of the House of Representatives, deputy speaker, governors, the leadership of the party, and the board of trustees, BOT. We have super delegates everywhere and there is nothing undemocratic about it.

Newswatch: The national convention has come and gone. But Nigerians want to know what really happened. All fingers pointed at Mr. President as the person who insisted that the national chairman must be Bamanga Tukur and he compelled all the other 10 contestants to withdraw. Was it what happened or not?

Metu: While I cannot pretend to elevate myself to speak on behalf of Mr. President, I can as well say here categorically that I do not think there is anything wrong, unlawful, immoral, and illegal for Mr. President to support a candidate of his choice. Nothing. He is a PDP member like others and he has every right under the constitution of the party to support somebody of his choice and if he decides to campaign and discuss with others for them to support his candidate, there is nothing undemocratic about it. It’s completely constitutional. The way it’s written in the newspapers, it’s as if there is something wrong about it. What we should look at rather is the person being supported, is he qualified? Does he have the prerequisite experience? Can he bring progress to the party? Can he add any value to the party? That is more important than the issue of either an individual or a group of people campaigning for him.  

Newswatch: But the undercurrent behind the insistence that he should be the chairman is that the party is thinking of 2015 and that Tukur is the one from that area that could help them … (cuts in).

Metu: Which party is thinking of 2015? In the South-East, the entire zone backed my humble self as national publicity secretary. Are they thinking of 2015? It has to do with qualities. When a group of party members decide that this is the kind of qualities that they have, they will now back the person. By the way, I never visited Bamanga Tukur throughout the campaign. I felt he was doing his campaign, I was doing mine.

But at the campaign ground, immediately after our inauguration, he made a speech. I now understood why the super delegates were backing him. He was very focused on four points: reorientation on the corruption drive, the party should be involved; the party should be involved in governance; he talked about party discipline based on clearly defined principles. You can see why it was not difficult to convince delegates. I don’t think it has anything to do with 2015; it’s still a long way off.

Let me tell you, the president completely in history has never been known to plan anything years in advance. The president wanted to be commissioner he ended up becoming a deputy governor. He was very happy with deputy governorship and God made him governor. He was very happy with governor and God made him vice-president. He was very relaxed and God made him president.

Now, the president is more focused on issue of delivering infrastructure and a lot of promises that he made to Nigerians between now and 2015 or 2014. If at the end of the day, when we get to 2014, then the people will be able to assess the president whether he has done well or not, the president has never made any pronouncement whether he will run for a second tenure or not, but the constitution guarantees him a second tenure. You can’t deny him that. You cannot. So, the issue does not arise absolutely right now. It’s a distraction and a disservice to the president for any member of the party to be discussing 2015 right now.