The Kwara State Governor, AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, has said the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has no political value.
Governor AbdulRazaq said this in an interview he granted THISDAY newspaper, which was published on Monday.
According to the governor, who is in the same party, All Progressives Congress, with Mohammed, the Minister only thrives on the social media.
When asked why it appeared he had no political structure despite the fact that the 2019 election was not his first, he replied: “I have never granted an interview before. Never. You cannot say you’ve seen me on TV. But what the media people say is that if you don’t tell your story, somebody else will tell it and you may not even like it. I’m reserved. I keep to myself. People blabber what they want. When this Republic started, everybody was with (late Dr. Abubakar Olusola) Saraki in the ANPP (All Nigeria Peoples Party). Just a few of us were in PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) then. We launched the party, very few of us. We knew our goal, to remain in opposition and remove these people from power. That’s our goal from then up till now. If you stick to something you are deliberate, and God knows your conscience, you will succeed.
“I’m not saying we got here because we were tough, or more intelligent than others. There’s something divine about getting here, because all their institutions; traditional, religious were all stacked against us. Along the way, they started pulling out, because most of them saw that they had a glass ceiling on the Saraki side. They started pulling out. We started in 1998. Where was Lai Mohammed in 1998? He was in Lagos. He came in 2003 to contest and went back. The other guy that was shouting was with Saraki. We remained here deliberately. We did not ask for anybody’s structure.
“We had people like Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, as well. He was with us. He was the first Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the PDP. He has never been with Saraki. There were less than 10 of us. We deliberately continued to build our structure. In 2015, when Saraki moved to PDP, we left, because we will not be part of it. We left the party for them. I moved out. I never contested for office, I was sponsoring candidates and building a party. I was even offered the position of Board of Trustee of the party. I refused. I said I have my business.
“Our goal was to change the system in the state. It was not until 2011, that we found ourselves in the ACN (Action Congress of Nigeria), but then ACN belonged to Asiwaju (Bola Ahmed Tinubu) and Lai Mohammed was his front man here so since they had their candidate. We said let’s do free and fair primaries, but they refused. Eventually, they threw us out and picked their own candidate. We moved to CPC (Congress for Progressive Change).
“In CPC, we built the party up. We did our best. Those were the days INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission) was just nothing. Today, INEC has been cleaned up, it’s difficult to just write results anymore. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but very difficult. But in those days, they just wrote results and that is it, it stands. They shout the results and everybody goes home.
“People didn’t understand the appeal process of the INEC; you’ve lost, go home. From CPC, it was still deliberate and we hung in there. We were there for 2015. Saraki left PDP and we moved to PDP. In 2015, I contested for Senate; in 2011 I’ve considered governorship because not that I wanted to contest, the person, Senator Lola Ashiru, the senator now for Kwara South, we moved together from ACN to CPC. And I said he should contest and he agreed to contest but when he looked at it, I believe he saw that it was just impossible for the party to achieve anything, there was no funding from Abuja. We had to fund it.
“So Bukola’s father wanted the daughter to be governor. So they found ACPN. Senator Ashiru went to join them and left me alone in the CPC. He joined them because he was promised some funds. I was left to fund the entire CPC, but it was a good experience. It made me understand a lot of things. In 2015 when we now found ourselves in PDP with Jonathan, Saraki had left. I wanted to run for governorship but I looked at it, the number of people contesting, the odds were difficult. Nobody wanted to step down. In Kwara South, they had seven local governments, and two candidates. Kwara central had about eight candidates in four local governments. So how can we defeat? I did the calculation.
“And in politics, people are not realistic. I even went to one professor’s house, just to say hello, and when I was leaving, I saw some people running behind the mosque. I asked the driver if he noticed some people running and he said, ‘yes.’ He said those were the people with us in the afternoon; the delegates that were with me in the afternoon, they were the ones hiding from me.
“The delegates were playing games so I stepped down to contest for Senate. I contested against Saraki. I believe they rigged the election. Even at the tribunal, they went to do nonsense in the tribunal but we left it and walked away. I was convinced that our day would come. When I look at it, since I’ve been contesting or donating money to people for election, I’ve never lost money. Within three months of every election, I get my money back in business.
“Yes, I spent time, but financially I have not lost. So coming to 2019, we found Saraki going into PDP again. And they told us in Abuja that it is Saraki that they recognise, so they are handing the party to him. They don’t know us. How can you not know us? It’s okay, if that’s the case, we’ll go back to CPC. We had merged to form APC and then Lai came and said that we have a new leader from Abuja and they had handed over the party to Saraki. That’s the APC.
“I said that it was the end of the road. We left, but some of our CPC guys stayed in. So we moved out. In 2018, when we moved back to PDP, and they had problems in Abuja, naturally we moved to APC. In moving to APC, they invited all of us because Saraki had vacuumed everybody out. It was us from PDP that came and took over the party.
“Lai Mohammed that is out there shouting didn’t have anybody. So we came and took over the party and we were in two factions, but we overwhelmed them. From the first meeting, I just knew the direction we were going. They called us for a meeting in Abuja and after the meeting, they set up a committee for Kwara. Oshiomhole was there, a working committee member, the deputy chairman of north and south were both there. They announced that the chairman for the committee for Kwara would be Niyi Adebayo. The deputy chairman south. It looked odd because Kwara was considered part of the North. When you give me Adebayo then there is a southern game being played. We understood that and then we now saw Lai being the minister, the highest person in political office, he too taking charge.
“It is a game of numbers, these primaries. It’s about working. I’ve had the experience for almost 20 years. I’ve people in every ward. Because of my nature, I don’t talk. I can sit with you for 10 days, I won’t say a word to you. Because of that they underestimate you and your capacity to do anything. But when you are deliberate and calculating and you know where you’re going, then you laugh at them, and just keep quiet. We built our own structure around the state.
“For example, a few months ago we had some peace meeting with Lai Mohammed at the Governor of Niger State House. It was the first time Lai Mohammed would meet the Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly. Is that the kind of person who is making noise about politics and governance in Kwara and you want me to waste my time responding? The Speaker was with me when I was running in 2011 for CPC, so you can see it’s deliberate. Lai Mohammed knows only one member of the Kwara State House of Assembly. How did these state legislators emerge? They say we don’t have people. All the members apart from one is with us. All our National Assembly members apart from one is with us.
“We are in the same group. And then they say you don’t have people. I don’t understand. Because we were deliberate and calculating, we knew where they were going, we knew. Even the National Assembly member we don’t have, Lai Mohammed came to beg me to accommodate his own candidate because he lost the primaries. He lost to our own candidate. It took a lot of pleading and we allowed him and that’s the only one member in the National Assembly from Kwara who is not with us. The only one in the state assembly did not even contest.
“I allowed him, Popoola. He did not contest for the state assembly. He contested for the House of Reps. But after the primaries, the Senator, the person that won the Senate and the House of Reps were from the same town; Offa. It won’t work. We asked the community to decide. Obviously they will take the Senate. So, what do we do with the guy that won in the House of Representatives? We had to send him to the State House of Assembly, which he did not contest. He did not buy a form from the assembly. Those are the only two people, but they will say we don’t have people. They’re noisy in the media, not on ground.
“Lai cannot win an election in his ward. They’re good with social media noise. That’s all they do. But nobody’s asking how each member of the state assembly emerged. How did they manipulate their way to win their seats? There was no godfather, putting people in place, everybody struggled to emerge. We would network and work with each other. No godfather. Everybody struggled in their own way. Yes, I gave money, and they also sourced money for themselves.
“So everybody struggled to win this thing. But some people will sit down and say that it is their party. It is this or that, that I don’t have anybody. If I don’t have anybody, I have all the legislators with me. Is that not something? Let them tell me, they have people. How many legislators do they have both in the state and National Assembly on their side? It’s just a whole lot of media hype. Lai came a few months ago to make noise that he sponsored the campaign, did this and that. He made a lot of noise and pushed it to NTA….”
Mohammed was yet to respond to the allegations by AbdulRazaq as at press time.
