Obasanjo is not the Nigerian voting public. He only got one vote. If a sample of the Nigerian voting public supports Atiku, then it makes him a good candidate. Because, at the end of the day, it is the voting public that you need… Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but she lost to Donald Trump who is the president. So, no matter what you say the national trend about how elections are conducted is what matters. Trump understood what the white voting American public wants and he played to it. So, in politics, you must amplify the voice of the voter, not your own voice. I might not like Atiku as a person but if the voting public wants him to be give a chance, then it is something we can look at but we have not reached that stage.Has Atiku reached out to NIM?
“No, he has not”.
Given the role of money in elections, how do you intend to prevail over moneybags at the polls and where would you pull the resources needed to prosecute an election in Nigeria?
I’m not sure that money is all that it takes to win a presidential election. If money was to be what it takes, Jonathan would have defeated Buhari in 2015. Yes, money plays a very strong role. Buhari won the election largely on account of the disenchantment of the voting public against Jonathan. Yea, money is very very useful but I don’t think money is something that cannot be located at the appropriate time. But, I’d rather have credibility than money. Particularly now that President Muhammadu Buhari and the APC has become one of the worst governments in Nigeria is the main reason to expect the over 30 million registered voters to vote the way they want money or no money. There is a radical departure from money politics. Today, we have social media politics. There is something close to about two million registered members of NIM.
Does this membership reflect national spread or from a particular section of the country?
The calculations we’ve been working on the past two weeks say we have about two million members. We are national, we are at the six zones; we are at 34 states and about 350 local government areas. That’s the spread of NIM. We are in the Diaspora: Canada, India, New York etc. In fact, we have a very wide spread whenever I look at the statistics I get shocked on how NIM has blossomed across the world.
Is NIM going to register itself as a political party?
NIM is simply a movement. Now what does a movement do? If you followed the Italian election on Sunday, some political parties created the Five Star movement, this movement did not field candidates but they campaigned on anti-European issues. And as a result of their campaigns, there is no winner in the Italian election. So, the work of NIM is to energise 2019. Though we have two million people today by the next four or five months we may have five million members. These five million people can do a lot of electoral work.
“There are two levels of work. NIM as a movement is mainly about conscientizing, advocacy, talking, pushing the agenda. It had no electoral objective. Then the second objective is that we endorse a person to be president and we turn our energy and support the person. So, we don’t need to have a political party to achieve any of this. All we need to do is to have an alliance. We can find a good guy in APC and support him; we can also find a very good guy in PDP and support him because he meets our standard. But we have set a standard of what we want in 2019… extremely credible, fresh, innovative, technology driven type of candidate who works hard. And you won’t find that in only one party. At the end of the day, NIM can support candidates from across the parties. And I think, this is why NIM has been successful because if we had become partisan, we would have all kinds of squabbles. In fact, we have about thirty political parties within NIM but we don’t support any of them. It is for them to show us they deserve our votes not because they are carrying money. That is why I said money politics may not be as important as it used to be. Every election presents its own trend. I feel that the social media has broken down the barriers of money. So money becomes only important for administrative and logistics purposes. We are talking about highly undermined, unemployed, angry, discontented youths who have been pushed to the streets. If you have about 30,000 unemployed graduates in Lagos, you think they would go to the ward to collect money? They will go to vote based on what they are seeing on the social media and other advocacy issues. So the money would not be as important.
Do you have confidence that INEC will deliver a free, fair and credible election in 2019?
I don’t know but I just pray they do. I just pray that they understand that Nigeria expects them to deliver a reliable, credible and fair election but I can’t speculate as to how they would do it.
What sort of Nigeria do you expect your movement to bring about?
We want a Nigeria that is a prosperous, industrialized, innovative, technologically-driven country that has social security system for the vulnerable, the aged; A country full of ideas in the ministries, government is working, infrastructure is available, you can go from here to Benin at 8pm because it is safe. That’s the Nigeria of our dream; crime and poverty is at its lowest level, inflation rates are low, the interest rate is at a single digit, banks are lending money, small business are thriving. Nigeria is currently the laughing stock of Africa, a sleeping giant. So, we need to wake from our slumber and occupy our pride of place. Nigeria should one of the first ten of industrialists nations of the world because we have the population. Look at the kind of money MTN is making here. MTN is making more money than the banks and Dangote put together. Why because we are a hundred and fifty million people so how come we can’t take advantage of our huge population. We want the nation’s school system to work so the potentials of young Nigerians can be tapped.
So how would you rate the efforts of the Buhari administration in building a better Nigeria?
The Buhari administration is the worst government in Nigeria’s history. It has delivered absolutely nothing. All the economic indices are high. The interest rate is high, the unemployment rate is high, infrastructure is broken. The economy is dead. This is not the kind of country I dream of.
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