Nobody Can Stop Northerners From Contesting Presidency In 2023 – Tony Momoh

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By Temidayo Akinsuyi

Prince Tony Momoh, a former Minister of
Information and one of the national leaders of the ruling All
Progressives Congress (APC) in this interview with TEMIDAYO AKINSUYI ,
speaks on the controversy surrounding power shift, former CJN Walter
Onnoghen’s resignation and other issues. Excerpts:

The general
impression that the presidency will come to the South after the
completion of President Muhammadu Buhari’s tenure in 2023, but right now
some Northern political leaders are threatening to field candidates,
saying the South should forget . What is your take on this?

Politics
is a talkshop. The armoury in the dictionary of politics is word. The
only thing is that communication has rules. For instance, communication
in a love letter should be different from communication that is
published in national newspapers. I believe that there should be time
for everything. We just finished a general election about a month ago
and people are already talking about irrelevant things when we ought to
be dealing with more pressing issues that will grow the country. Having
said that, power is not served a la carte; you struggle to acquire
power. There is no way anybody can beg anybody or any region to come and
take power. So, it is a struggle and any part of the country can
struggle to occupy any position in the country. Wining election is
decided by votes, so if some people sit down and think people will say
‘come and take these positions in 2023, then they don’t know what
democracy is all about. Politics is like a game of chess and those who
are good players win. When PDP zoned positions, a lot of people from the
North and South contested. I remembered when the PDP presidency ticket
was zoned to the South, some people in the North contested.

Even
look at the APC now which has zoned the position of Senate President to
the North- East but some people from other regions are protesting,
saying that they have a right to occupy the position. So, if anybody
thinks that the Presidency will be zoned to the South in 2023 and then
the North will just sit down and watch, then they have a lot of shocks
coming for them. We can still find another person from another zone who
may contest under another political party and win. So, nobody should
think that they can just sit down at home, not work hard and then power
will just be handed over to them like that.

But don’t you think
the rotational policy between the North and South should be strictly
adhered to so that there won’t be any political crisis?

Although
that is what people think, it will not be that smooth. It has never been
that smooth. When they said the PDP presidential ticket should come to
the South- West to pacify the people in the region, did other people
from other regions not contest? We had people like the late Alex Ekwueme
from the South- East and the late Abubakar Rimi from the North who
contested against Olusegun Obasanjo. I believe in 2023, a lot of people
will come out to contest for Presidency and nobody will stop them. So,
people must work hard to get power and the prayer for winning election
is answered by votes; the volume of votes you can produce.

Now that he has resigned, should former CJN, Walter Onnoghen be prosecuted?

Prosecution
is a political decision. I have said it before that all Onnoghen would
have done to save everybody the embarrassment of being suspended by
stepping down. Now that he has resigned, what happens next is a
political decision.

Are you saying the Federal Government can decide whether to prosecute him or not?

It
depends on what the issues are. What are the issues? Did he plead
guilty to misconduct? The Attorney-General is very powerful. He can
withdraw a case at any time, he can take over a case at any time and he
can institute a case at any time. The power to prosecute is there and
that is why I said prosecution in any matter of this nature is a
political decision.

Given the proliferation of political parties
in the country as witnessed in the just concluded elections, some
Nigerians are suggesting a return to the two-party system like we had in
the 1993 elections. Are you r perspective on this?

What happened
with the SDP and NRC during the time of IBB was an attempt to reduce
the proliferation of parties in our political life and you know that a
committee was set up and they had all the entries grouped into ‘a little
to the left’ and ‘a little to the right’. So, we had the SDP and the
NRC, and when we began preparations for a return to civil rule in 1999, a
lot of people said, no, that the SDP and NRC were government
parastatals. But the fact is, what people didn’t know is that as at the
time Abacha dissolved those parties, they had taken over the ownership
of their party because after the annulment of the June 12 elections,
meetings were being called and SDP that produced Abiola was deciding to
or not to attend meetings because they were already in charge of their
party. So, if we had allowed the NRC and SDP to grow with all the
structures already in place at the local, state and national levels,
they would have grown into institutions that would have stabilised our
democracy.

But what happened after 1999 was that we had a
situation whereby the power of INEC to register was being questioned,
and Obasanjo messed up the whole system by asking INEC to register as
many parties as possible, most of which were initiated by the PDP. So,
we had this situation where we had so many political parties, and as at
the last count, we had 91 in the system, and it is not as if they are
tired. More parties would spring up because we must look at what we have
made of politics in Nigeria and you are a political association until
you are registered as a political party. You cannot do business as a
political association.

You can only do business when you are
registered as a political party. We have made politics a business and
political parties are the vehicles for those businesses while Nigerians
are ruthless businessmen. In business, there must be a gain. We are not
going to have a reduction in parties; we are going to have more. So, we
have a challenge which is to ensure that politics becomes what it should
be. In other realms, it is service, not a business. As long as we
continue to see it as a business in Nigeria, we are going to handle
political parties as we handle selling pepper or sugar or even 419.

We
must decongest the political space. If we don’t do that, we will
continue to have the outcome of what we have now and even vote buying
will increase because again if the National Assembly is, and then you
decongest the political space, reduce the power at the centre, move them
to the States, then cancel local government elections and reduce it to
part-time if you must have them, you will see overnight how we will cure
these ills because these are businesses. Nigerians are ruthless
businessmen and women, and it will continue to be business as usual.

Source:- Independentng

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