Nigeria Election: President Jonathan Analyzes APC's Chances of Winning

 

In an interview with The Cable's editor-at-large, the president of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan explained why the APC will lose despite the fervor they have managed to whip on on social media.

"The result [of the Ekiti election] shocked everybody, apart from us at the PDP. I am not underrating APC, but I think they are grossly overrated," he said.

"Let us work with the facts on the ground," he continued. "PDP currently controls 21 states of the federation. APC has only 14. Of APC’s 14, you and I know that Imo and Rivers are only APC in the sense that their governors defected. The people know where their interests are better served. Also, when it comes to presidential election, Edo is PDP. So essentially, of the 14 APC-controlled states, only 11 can be described as APC. Of course, I know that not all the PDP-controlled states usually vote PDP in presidential elections, so you have to concede that one or two PDP states will vote APC in the presidential election. At the end of the day, you are still looking at 23 or 24 pro-PDP states, including Anambra which is controlled by APGA…"


"In 2011, taking that as a baseline for comparison, I scored 22.4 million votes. Buhari had 12.2 million votes. That is a difference in excess of 10 million. I do not suppose that you believe I have lost 6 million votes to Gen. Buhari already, or that Gen. Buhari has gained 11 million more supporters. Suggesting I will lose a whole 6 or 7 million votes to Gen. Buhari would be an exaggeration. Let us even add the votes of ACN which scored 2 million in 2011. Since CPC, ANPP and ACN have merged into APC, let us say APC had 14 million votes in 2011. I still defeated all of them with over 8 million votes. Don’t forget that Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, the ANPP candidate then, and Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the ACN candidate in 2011, are now in the PDP."

TheCable: Are you in good shape for the presidential poll given the fact that APC has gathered momentum in the last two months? Jonathan: You should remember the Ekiti governorship election last year. Before the election, many people were saying APC would win by a landslide. But we in the PDP were busy mobilising the grassroots, going from village to village, from town to town. The result shocked everybody, apart from us at the PDP. I am not underrating APC, but I think they are grossly overrated. We shall meet on the field. That is where we will test our true strengths. We are fully ready. You will soon see. TheCable: General Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity is growing, especially in the south. Isn’t this a big threat? Jonathan: Let us work with the facts on the ground. PDP currently controls 21 states of the federation. APC has only 14. Of APC’s 14, you and I know that Imo and Rivers are only APC in the sense that their governors defected. The people know where their interests are better served. Also, when it comes to presidential election, Edo is PDP. So essentially, of the 14 APC-controlled states, only 11 can be described as APC. Of course, I know that not all the PDP-controlled states usually vote PDP in presidential elections, so you have to concede that one or two PDP states will vote APC in the presidential election. At the end of the day, you are still looking at 23 or 24 pro-PDP states, including Anambra which is controlled by APGA… TheCable: Sorry to cut in, Mr. President, but we are also talking about figures, not just number of states. APC states like Kano and Lagos have voters in excess of 9 million. Jonathan: I’m still coming to that. In 2011, taking that as a baseline for comparison, I scored 22.4 million votes. Buhari had 12.2 million votes. That is a difference in excess of 10 million. I do not suppose that you believe I have lost 6 million votes to Gen. Buhari already, or that Gen. Buhari has gained 11 million more supporters. Suggesting I will lose a whole 6 or 7 million votes to Gen. Buhari would be an exaggeration. Let us even add the votes of ACN which scored 2 million in 2011. Since CPC, ANPP and ACN have merged into APC, let us say APC had 14 million votes in 2011. I still defeated all of them with over 8 million votes. Don’t forget that Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, the ANPP candidate then, and Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the ACN candidate in 2011, are now in the PDP. TheCable: We at TheCable are projecting a larger voter turnout this time around… Jonathan: And you think only one party will benefit from a larger turnout? I will disagree with you on that. TheCable: We agree that both of you will benefit, but we project that south-west will decide who the president will be. And APC is the dominant party in the south-west. Jonathan: Again, I will not say so. Ekiti and Ondo are already controlled by PDP. I don’t see APC winning Oyo and Ogun. And from the last governorship election in Osun, you could see that the gap between PDP and APC was very narrow, judging from the figures. Other factors will still be at play and the best you can say for now is that Osun is a tossed-up state, as Americans call it. The real battleground is Lagos, and if you have been following events closely, the PDP is reborn in Lagos. Wait and see how Lagosians will vote. ogunbunmi and jonathan 4 Ogunbunmi and President Jonathan TheCable: The choice of Professor Yemi Osinbajo as the running mate to Buhari is seen as a masterstroke. Analysts foresee him delivering the south-west votes. And as a pastor in the Redeemed Christian Church of God, this may neutralise the extremist tag on Buhari and bring in the votes of members of the church. Do you agree? Jonathan: There is no doubting the fact that Osinbajo has good qualifications. But, like Gen. Buhari, he has never won an election before. He has never even been a candidate. So APC has a pairing that cannot be described as a winning team. That said, you cannot call Osinbajo a political heavyweight in the south-west. The Yoruba are more sophisticated than that. In 2011, two of my opponents fielded their running mates from the south-west. Still, the south-west decided to vote for me. That tells you a lot about the voters in the south-west. They cannot be hoodwinked. TheCable: But Osinbajo is a pastor in the Redeemed Church… Jonathan: Yes. But the presidential candidate of APC is Gen. Buhari not Osinbajo. And I think we should leave church out of this before it becomes another talking point again. TheCable: Buhari’s supporters are very confident that he will win. Are you not really worried about this? Jonathan: I don’t think Nigerians will make the mistake of voting for Buhari. Gen. Buhari, with due respect, is not the right option for Nigeria at this time. It is a gamble that is not worth taking. I may not be perfect as nobody is perfect. But I believe that come Saturday, the majority of Nigerian voters will choose me as the best candidate to lead the nation forward. TheCable: For many Nigerians, Boko Haram is an election issue. Don’t you see this impacting on support for your re-election? Jonathan: We are not sleeping when it comes to Boko Haram. But we must be fair and accept that we are dealing with problems we never encountered before, problems that we were not prepared for as a nation. Nobody would have predicted this carnage five years ago. We can all be wise after the event, we can say whatever we like now, but who can sincerely say they projected that Boko Haram would become like the Taliban in 2009 when the uprising started in Maiduguri? I hear people say we did not give Boko Haram the attention they deserved, that we left things too late. That is not correct. To combat terror, you have to be systematic with your approach. It is not a conventional warfare. New laws are required to cover your operations because we never had to deal with terror before. There is also a different kind of training and personnel required. Operations have to change from conventional to non-conventional. You cannot use the equipment of 1984. Even when you buy new equipment, you need to train your soldiers on how to use it. You can’t do that in one day. Intelligence gathering has to be firmed up using the latest technology. This will not happen in one day. Your security architecture has to be completely different. This is what we have been working on and we are making good progress. We are getting better every day. We need to encourage our soldiers who are risking their lives every day. They are human beings like us. They have parents, wives, sisters, children, brothers. It is not fair at all to disparage them. It is also not fair to encourage mutiny. You don’t encourage more soldiers to run away from the warfront. It is not helpful. We are confronting Boko Haram with all the resources available to us. We need the cooperation of all Nigerians. When people begin to politicise the war against terror because they want to win elections, it undermines our efforts. TheCable: You used to dominate the social media. What went wrong? Jonathan: I think we are doing very well on the social media, but we are focusing our energy more on grassroots mobilisation. Most Nigerian voters do not participate in social media discussions. The majority of Nigerian voters are not even on Twitter or Facebook. So we have to get our priorities right. I have about 1.7m Facebook followers but there are over 68 million registered voters in Nigeria. I am not even sure most of my social media followers are registered to vote. We are doing door-to-door mobilisation around the towns and villages. Experience has shown that the bulk of voting comes from those areas. For every voter on Twitter, you probably have 100 voters who are not on Twitter. But when you read tweets and re-tweets, you may get a very wrong view of the reality on the ground. We have a very good strategy to woo voters. Our opponents have a good strategy to abuse us on Twitter. Let’s see how far that will take them on March 28. Obviously, it is not those who make the loudest noise that win the votes. Sometimes, making so much noise is a strategy to divert attention from your impending failure. When you lose, you now attribute it to rigging. APC is very good in that area. It is a strategy they have used in the past. ogunbunmi and jonathan 3 “I think we are doing very well on the social media, but we are focusing our energy more on grassroots mobilisation” TheCable: What’s your reaction to those who say they will not vote for you because they believe you have not done well so far? Jonathan: On the issue of performance, I only wish to be judged on where Nigeria was when I took over and where we are now. Those who are fair-minded will agree that we have made tremendous progress in so many areas. For instance, the over 6 million farmers who are now getting fertilizers and seeds directly and enjoying improved livelihoods won’t tell you I have not done well. They are saying they have never had it this good. Fertilizer corruption is gone forever. We’ve introduced dry season farming. Their harvests have increased exponentially. We’ve improved water resources across the country, north and south. These are the things that affect ordinary lives. The transporters who are now plying good interstate roads will tell you they are happy. For example, the Benin-Ore road that used to be front page story in newspapers for almost a decade because of its poor state is now brand new. We have built or rehabilitated over 25,000 kilometres of roads since we came in. The federal government has 35,000 kilometres of roads and only 4,500 were motorable when I came in. That is a fact. Judge me on that. Millions of passengers who are now using the revived rail transport system will tell you they are happy. Five million passengers now use the train every year, compared to less than one million a few years back. I would like to be judged on that. Foreign investors have made Nigeria their preferred destination as attested to by local and international agencies. In the oil and gas sector, our local content policy has produced a new generation of Nigerian entrepreneurs who are proudly flying our flag all over the world. That is a fact. That is progress. Judge me on that basis. We’ve built schools for Almajiris and the girl-child. These are the vulnerable in the society who were neglected but are now receiving good education suited to their needs. We’ve established and equipped more universities to provide for the future of our youths whose population continues to expand but there is insufficient capacity to give them university education. We’ve upgraded equipment at tertiary institutions and continue to retrain lecturers and teachers. No government has funded education better than us. Our hospitals are better equipped as we continue to upgrade them and improve the service conditions of doctors and nurses. They are performing surgeries they never did before. Our immunisation coverage is unprecedented. Guinea worm infections are nil today. We are gradually getting over the polio epidemic. Go to the airports across the country and see the changes that are taking place in terms of safety and physical development. I can go on. The real voters, the real Nigerians who will go to the polling units, are happy with what we have achieved in our first term in office. Millions of ordinary Nigerians are not deceived by the propaganda of partisan critics. I do not say that we have solved all the problems. That would be a lie. But the Nigeria of today is better than the Nigeria that I inherited in 2011. The facts are there. Our critics should judge us on the basis on what we met on ground in 2011 and how far we have moved on from there. Is the agricultural sector worse? No, it is better than we met it. Is the education sector worse? It is better than we met it. The aviation sector is better than we met it. The oil and gas sector is better than we met it. The industrial sector is better than we met it. We’re now exporters of cement and we will soon start to export cars. The rail sector is much better. The road network is bigger and better. Inland waterways are expanded. In fact, our economy is now the biggest in Africa. Therefore, let our critics judge us on the basis of facts not lies. TheCable: But the power sector remains a big challenge. Why are we still unable to attain uninterrupted power supply? Jonathan: I like to ask people: was it that there was 24-hour electricity and Jonathan came and switched it off and damaged the equipment? The answer is no. Power is an age-old problem in Nigeria and we have to understand that. When I became president, we started the power sector reform all over again. If you remember, one of the first duties I performed as president was to launch the Power Roadmap. It was like starting all over again because of various legal, structural and administrative issues. Power projects had stalled. The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) was in a legal tango as a result of the removal of its management. We had issues with gas supply as gas pipelines to power plants were yet to be laid. We also had issues with gas pricing because gas producers would rather export and make more money than sell locally at a regulated price. There were so many serious issues to resolve. You cannot decree power into being. You have to take it step by step with commitment. If anybody tells Nigerians otherwise, they are lying. The approach we have taken now is the best available to us. We have gone private. The process has reached a stage that can only go forward. The power situation is tricky in that until the last dot is connected, we will not see results. There is generation, then transmission and distribution. Until everything is sorted out, we will not see the kind of results we desire. If you build a house and you are yet to paint it or fix the doors and windows, you can move in and start to live there and complete the work gradually. But at least you have a roof over your head. However, for electricity, until you connect all the dots, you can’t get results. Until the power generated is transmitted and distributed to the final consumer, you cannot have steady electricity. That is a fact. But we are moving in the right direction today. I am confident that this will be one of the biggest achievements of this administration. Ads by Browser_Apps_ProAd Options Ogunbunmi and Jonathan (2) “I only wish to be judged on where Nigeria was when I took over and where we are now” TheCable: The issue of $20 billion NNPC affair is still hanging though, and your handling of corruption cases. What do you have to say on that? Jonathan: I would have been surprised if you didn’t ask that question. Have you picked a figure now? The accuser said $49.8 billion was missing. He then reduced the figure to $12 billion. Now people are talking about $20 billion missing. Is that the final figure they have arrived at? Why are people not saying $49 billion again? Ordinarily, the inconsistency in the figures should have put a big question mark on the entire allegation itself and questioned its reliability, but because some people have decided to crucify me, they will hang on to any lie. If the former CBN governor himself comes out today and apologises that he got his facts wrong, that no money is missing, these same people will dismiss him. They will say he has been bribed or he was cajoled to retract his statement. That is the way some Nigerians have decided to live their lives and there is nothing I can do about it. I have said it before:

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