By Desmond Mgbo
The governorship candidate of the Labour Party in Kano State, Ishaq Bashir recently defected from the APC alongside Senator Ibrahim Shekarau to the New Nigeria Peoples Party(NNPP). He later joined the Labour Party. In this interview, he spoke on the chances of Peter Obi /Datti Ahmed winning votes in the North among other issues.
You are the gubernatorial candidate of the Labour Party in the state and there is the widely held belief that your party is not much on the ground in the state. May we have your assessment of how far you have gone in the state?
For every big thing you see in this life, it started small. Anything you see that starts as a boom usually ends like a meteorite. If you have something that grows organically, it would last and endure. It is just like the emergence of Peter Obi as the presidential candidate of the party. It came from nowhere but the people that are following Peter and Datti, they are organic lovers. They are people who believe in their capacity and ability to drive this nation to greater heights. They are people who believe in their ability to unite Nigeria and give good leadership to Nigerians. Now when you come to Kano, let me say that the Labour Party is entrenched in Kano and in Nigeria. All over the world anyway, there is no place that you go that you will not find Labour Party. It is in Europe, it is in America, it is everywhere. The good news that I want to give you is that before I came to the Labour Party, I sat with the state chairman of Labour Party numerous times and he has been working, day and night, and I can tell you that we have done a lot in terms of charting a course for the party as a credible alternative to what we have today in the state. I am so sure that we are going to do much more in the days ahead. I don’t know Peter Obi, our presidential candidate before now. I also don’t know Datti before now, although I had lived in Kaduna all my life. But as it is, providence has brought us all together and I am sure that our combination would offer Nigerians a breath of change they badly desire. I am happy that the first time I was able to meet these two gentlemen, the presidential candidate, his representatives and the vice presidential candidate, I was able to believe that what they stood for tallied exactly with what I have been fighting for. It has been a long struggle to free my people, our people. Like I said before, I was in the PDM in 2015 and I came third after APC and PDP. I think this should tell you a story. For a fresh candidate to come and contest and come third at a time when Buhari was contesting and Goodluck Jonathan was the President in the government, that tells you that we have a structure that can be relied upon. We have people all over the state.
People that can come alive………?
No! It is not just our people coming alive. We have been together with these people all these while and we are moving together. We moved from PDM to PDP at that time. I was together with Shekarau at that time. And when we had issues with the leadership of the party, when Kwankwaso joined the party, we moved out of PDP because of irreconcilable differences. And we all moved to APC at the height of the 2019 general elections. We thought APC was what they professed to be. We were there for the number of years and we got the biggest disappointment of our lives, which everybody in this country is a testimony to. APC is a colossal disappointment. It was then agreed unanimously that Mallam Shekarau and Kwankwaso must unite to fight this corrupt government at all levels. We came together with the belief that we can work in unison. But unfortunately, Kwankwaso being who he is- he is dictatorial, wants to chum out orders and he determines who does what and defines how far you can go in politics, what you can contest for and what you cannot contest for. I am not cut out for that. I am educated, I am knowledgeable and I am exposed enough and I am grounded politically and I am guaranteed by the constitution of Nigeria to exercise my freedom of political association and movement. So I left the NNPP.
With your current political strength and structure, do you think, in all honesty, that you can beat APC and their gubernatorial candidate in the state?
APC and their candidate is already beaten………
How?
Nigerians are living witnesses to what APC stands for. Deceit. This is what APC stands for. I don’t want to be quoted but you and I know that we cannot trust APC anymore at any level of governance.
What about your chances against Abba Gida Gida , the candidate of the NNPP, given his superlative performance in the last general election?
As his name “ Abba Gida Gida “ denotes, Abba is closed up in small, small houses. That is what the name denotes in Hausa. He is not a big time issue. Now I want to give you this challenge. The norm is that for every election period, there is a challenge for contestants. I want to ask you guys at the NUJ to organize a challenge for us all to debate among ourselves. I am eager and my body is itching for us to all come out and tell Kano people who we are and what we have to offer. I want you to organize a debate for all gubernatorial candidates to come out.
But in the 2019 elections in the state, Abba Gida Gida performed very well and almost won the 2019 gubernatorial contest in the state…
No! You are getting it all wrong. Abba did not do well. Ganduje helped Abba to do well. Kano people voted for Abba because they don’t have an option. So what you are talking about was actually protest votes against Ganduje that made Abba to get the size of the votes he got then. Let him come out and try to repeat the same feat now.
The thinking is that with Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau and his group in the NNPP in the state, the chance of Abba clinching the ticket is brighter than ever before?
Tell me who is Shekarau’s group who made the group thick? Can you mention two persons that made the group thick without mentioning myself? I was the only gubernatorial aspirant in his group in the present dispensation. You were there in house when I declared my aspiration. You saw the mammoth crowd that witnessed the occasion. You see, it is about the person; it is about the candidate and what he has to offer. I challenge Abba, I challenge Sadiq Wali, I challenge the candidate of the APC, Gawuna. Let them come and let us talk to the people of Kano and let us present what we have to offer different from what it is at the moment.
In brief, what is your vision for Kano State if eventually you are elected come 2023?
We want to put Kano on the road to sustainable development and this encapsulates everything. Economy, heath, education, good wellbeing, road, environmental degradation and what have you. And you cannot give what you don’t have. Like I told you, none of these gubernatorial candidates has worked beyond Kano or truly lived outside Kano. They all studied and lived in Kano, and possibly some had gone to Sokoto and studied. And that is all. I schooled and worked with virtually every tribe in Nigeria. I studied abroad and I had extensive training and working relationships with multinational organizations and I know what it takes to work in an effective environment and that is focus. I am taking up Kano as a project. I am not coming in here to dole out money or to bring people and share money to them or to build bridges of N16 billion when you have people dying of hunger and poverty.
You will agree with me that Kano politics is certainly more complex in nature than just having the kind of your credentials, winning the endorsement of Kano people is also more complex than……..
Yes, I quite agree with you that Kano politics is complex in nature and that is exactly what gives me an edge. I know how to unveil and unravel complexities. Let me give you an example. When Gawuna of the APC was unveiled, who was responsible for his coming out as gubernatorial candidate? It was only Ganduje. He woke up one morning and said this is my candidate and there was no consensus in his a party or among stakeholders. When Sadiq Wali came out, his father happened to be in the Board of Trustees of the PDP. There are better aspirants in the PDP than Sadiq Wali and I can mention at least three of such aspirants within the party who are competent and better equipped to be the gubernatorial standard bearer of the party. Now, let us turn to the NNPP. Look at Abba Yusuf. He is the sole gubernatorial candidate of the NNPP and an in law to Kwankwaso. Now if you vote for Abba Gida Gida in 2023, what you are doing, technically and invariably, is giving Kwankwaso a third term in office. It is giving him a bed space in the Government House for the third time. Abba is certainly going to take all his instructions from Kwankwaso and nobody else. Gawuna publicly said that he was here to please Ganduje. Kano people should take note of all these. When you look at the political space in the state, we are the only people who are talking issues. The rest of my gubernatorial candidates are in the race to implement the agenda of their respective political godfathers and their interests.
How would this governance by proxy, as you have just outlined, tell on the state?
I don’t want you to use the word proxy. If you use the word proxy, you are being too generous and charitable. The right word is “crony”. Cronyism is in Kano. That is, I endorse somebody who would go out there and do my biddings, somebody whom when he has the opportunity, he would go there and do exactly as I want him to do and not what the people of Kano State want. But I, Ishaq, I am an independent candidate and the only persons I am answerable to are the people of Kano State. I have my own mindset and I have the vision of where I want to take Kano State to, if elected.
There is this suggestion that Hausa/Fulani I mean core- Northerners may not vote for Peter Obi because he is Igbo. What are you doing to reset the mindset of your people who are thinking in this line?
When people say things like this, I just laugh. Peter Obi does not own Labour Party. Labour Party belongs to the working class of Nigeria. Peter Obi joined Labour Party, probably a month or two before I joined. When you say Igbo, are you talking of Igbo, who are also Nigerians like all of us? Are you talking about them? If you are talking about people who are Nigerians, is Peter Obi not a Nigerian? Is he not guaranteed to contest? Is he not eligible? Is he not capable? So, it is the Northern elite who bring in this division of ethnicity or religion when it suits them. Let me ask you a question. Of all these parties, which party truly belongs to an Igbo man? I am asking you? It is NNPP. The owner of NNPP is an Igbo man from Anambra State. Yes. It is NNPP Limited which has now been commercialized to include Kwankwaso and sons. Kwankwaso went to an Igbo man to get a party and this Igbo man told him that he saw in his dream that an Hausa man would come one day and pick this party and he would become President. When people are talking of the political party of the Igbo man, it is NNPP because it belongs to an Igbo man.
But the same Kwankwaso only recently attacked the Igbo people as a whole?
Well, that is the contradiction of the elite that I was talking about a while ago. They say things when it suits them and when it does not suit them, they keep quiet.