Abubakar Usman Jikamshi is the Deputy National Chairman (North) of the National Rescue Movement (NRM). He was also a governorship candidate of the party in Katsina State during the 2019 general elections. In this exclusive interview, he spoke on how the party is bracing up to rescue Nigeria come 2023; necessity of parties’ supremacy in engendering good governance and the country’s insecurity challenge, among others.
You held your convention recently, what far reaching decisions did you take during the convention?
It was a good outing and we elected the national officers who will run the affairs of the party. Before now, I was the caretaker committee chairman of the party for about four months or thereabout. When I came on board actually, the party was not in proper shape. Along this line, we decided to look at things critically and how we can get National Rescue Movement on the ground. One of the things we looked at is to restructure the party and bring in new officers who will enable us to reach everywhere in the country; from national, state, local government, wards and polling units. The new structure will help the national chairman; we have two deputy national chairmen; one in the South and one in the North and I happen to be the one in the North. And we also have six vice chairmen for the six zonal offices who will be in contact with our chairmen in the respective states, so the hierarchy goes down and with that, we can put the machinery that will help membership drive down the ladder. And here at the top, the national level, we are having some programmes to broadcast ourselves to Nigerians about our party. Now, Nigeria has two parties muddling up things and people are not happy. It is the same people who are being recycled within the two major parties because when you take check list of the APC and PDP, you still find they are the same people. Today, you will find somebody in PDP and tomorrow, he moves to APC. I was in ANPP before we changed it to CPC before I joined the National Rescue Movement because of the things happening there.
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What is your party – National Rescue Movement, out to offer Nigerians?
I’m one of the founding members of the party. Ab initio, we made up our minds to come together as a party that will introduce measures that will rescue Nigerians from the situation we have found ourselves. The APC has promised three major cardinal points; fighting insecurity, economy and corruption. When you check on all these promises, the APC has failed woefully to get any results out.
Do you mean all of them?
Yes, all of them. When you check the bloodletting going on now, you can compare it to the time of Civil War because, every day, every time, we kept hearing reports of killings. It has added another dimension of kidnapping, banditry, Boko Haram and those agitators because just few days ago, in the South East, they went and killed INEC officials and stopped them from conducting voters’ registration exercise. You can see the anguish in the faces of Nigerians; you cannot confidently travel from here to Kaduna. During Obasanjo’s time, he was trying to bring the exchange rate to N250 per dollar, I can remember how our people were mad at him, but now, what’s the exchange rate? It is almost N600 to a dollar. Look at the price of petrol, when Yar’adua came, he brought it back, when Jonathan came, it started going up at a minimal level but when President Buhari came, the thing went out of hand. We have to take our crude oil offshore to refine and bring it back to us to buy at exorbitant price. Now, that cripples the economy.
Our universities are closed and the youths are not in school. We don’t have an effective ministry of labour that can settle industrial dispute. Our children are on the streets and these children can easily be influenced to do some evil things. That is why the crime rate is high.
If I remember correctly, your party was registered around 2018, where are the Dansadaus because I remember interviewing him then and some other party leaders; where are they? Secondly, what difference have you made between 2018 and now?
In 2018 when we formed the party, the party was robust, there were people who wanted to do politics; some of us joined and went for elections but because we did not have the finances, we didn’t make much impact. What I saw in Katsina was madness. The governor was using all the resources of government to organise campaign.
Did you vie for any position then?
Yes, I vied for the governorship in Katsina under NRM but the madness I saw scared me away. I was on the ground but I didn’t bother myself much because I didn’t have the resources to match them. Even the PDP at that time could not make much impact. Dansadau is still there, he is our national leader now. He was chairman from that time until December last year when the exco was dissolved and I was made the caretaker committee chairman. Luckily, INEC did not register new parties and there some of the registered group that joined us and we are making impact; we are spreading across the country.
Does that mean there is a kind of merger ahead of the 2023?
There’s fusion.
The 2023 electioneering is picking up already, what is it like in your party right now? Have you commenced sales of forms and fielding candidates?
We have the hope of fielding candidates. We have about three people who have indicated interests in running for the presidency and there are some other offices in which people from the South South and South East are indicating interests. We know we will get people to field. We are not there yet. We are going to look for credible people to field, not any how people to come and pick ticket. The following are the amount for our forms as approved by NEC; councillor – for the expression of interest form, N5,000 and nomination, N50,000; chairman of local government – expression of interest form is N50,000 and nomination is N500,000; state house of Assembly – for the expression of interest form, N50,000 and nomination, N500,000; House of Representatives – for the expression of interest form, N100,000 and nomination, N1m; Senate -for the expression of interest form, N200, 000 and nomination, N2m; governorship – for the expression of interest form, N750,000 and nomination, N7.5m; president – for the expression of interest form, N1.5m and nomination, N17.5m.
Is like your presidential form is also on the high side like the other parties, meaning that you will be like the other parties?
Yes, I agree with you because, this was the decision taken at the NEC meeting. We held our NWC meeting and everybody made similar observation just like you have observed but we cannot as the NWC slash it down; we will leave it like that. In fact, the reality of life, if you are going for the president, you should be prepared because you are going to rub shoulders with people with capacity; if you don’t have the capacity (though we are saying not-too-poor-to-run), there will be an issue. You must be able to push up something. May be at the end of the day, we can communicate to NEC members.
My question now is around ideology; you condemned APC, you condemned PDP; how sure are we that you will be different from them if given opportunity because you were member of this political parties at one point or the other.
It’s only one; I started with ANPP and then CPC. Right from CPC, what I saw was that people from PDP were joining anyhow and because they came and joined, all the existing members of the party became inconsequential. Even now, we are making it one of our cardinal points to give Nigerians credible leadership not what we are having now.
How are you going to do it?
We don’t want to tell you now because we are going to introduce some changes. If you could remember, during Shagari’s regime, that time parties had supremacy so, unless we bring that system back, we will not have much changes because the president feels he is the chief executive officer, he controls the party, he controls the resources and a few of his lieutenants, his core kitchen cabinet don’t want him change of what they are getting. But if Nigerians really want to progress, we introduce this type of system and we have to reduce cost of governance.
There is this belief that young political parties are not making impact because they tend to be extremely ambitious. Even if you are a national party you can cut your ambition, for instance, you can decide to go for the House of assembly, governorship and House of Representatives without thinking of going for the presidency and that was why in the late 1970s, you see PRP, GNPP, NPP and others making impact. Have you ever thought of doing this type of politics of starting small?
Well we have put that in our mind, but now, we want to take all but definitely fighting those gladiators is not a small task unless with God’s providence; he can change anything. But if you can make impact and get national assembly members, you can get some governors, then that will allow us to build the party strongly and for the national position, the presidency, none of these smaller parties can make it except they get other parties to form a common front and present one candidate.
What are your talking points or development agenda for Nigeria?
Our overall objective is to rescue Nigeria from the current situation in the country and to instil some discipline in the polity. If you can instil some discipline into the system, definitely you will achieve some results. If you make the highest bidder takes it all, we can’t achieve much and we are trying to see that those that have credibility within the society are brought on board.
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