 The presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Dume B. Kachikou has described the victory of the all-progressive Congress APC Bola Tinubu in last Saturday's election as well-deserved. Mr. Kachikou also alleged that all the four major parties, namely the APC, PDP, LP and NLPP, committed fraud during the election. Bola Tinubu won the poll with 8,794,726 votes while Atikua Buwaka of the People's Democratic Party, PDP, came second with 6,984,520 votes. Peter Obey of the Labour Party, third with 6,101,533 votes. The three candidates won 12 states each. Mr. Kachikou polled 81,919 votes in the election. Well, joining us to discuss the ADC stand on the just concluded elections and plans for the coming governorship elections is the vice presidential candidate of the ADC, Ahmed Buhari. Welcome to the program. Good to be here. I was more comfortable trying to call you Ahmed B. Is that all right? Yeah, for many people who are not comfortable with President Muhammad Buhari, we're just shortening my name to Ahmed B. We don't want to call Buhari at all. I say that it's a name the way you have, although no, but many people don't have Nyambo. That's why I find very interested and it also makes a lot of sense above the rest. It's fine to call me Ahmed Buhari. Many people nickname me as Ahmed B for the purpose of comfort. No, the reason to calling you Ahmed B was not because it sounded Buhari. Buhari is a good name, isn't it? So Ahmed B has a ring to it like you're more friendly, you're very close to the people. You have a nickname I can call. I don't know the nickname of President Buhari for instance. Baba. Well, congratulations on your bold outing in the last election. Yes, thank you very much. It was really good. Well, you were inspired by political happenings around the world from what I saw about you, what is happening in France and other countries where young people are thrown up. They are now on the throne as it were and you came back to Nigeria here. How would you see the political landscape in Nigeria? You think we have reached that point where people who aspire like you, young people who are coming to the helm of affairs can have that kind of chance that we are seeing in other countries? I think it's a process. I think compared to 30 years ago I can still remember exactly what the political terrain seemed like. You only need to make a declaration and get killed the next day maybe. Your family could be kidnapped. You could just hear people say they are pulling out of the race because certain threats have been sent to themselves and their families. And so if we are in 2023 now and a lot of people are just all in the race regardless of all of those kinds of fears and I think we are actually progressing. With regards to my ambition, I remember it all started in 2016 when I came out of the most younger slimmer. My beards were still softer and then I said to the whole world that I was going to run for the office of the president. To be honest with you, it was born out of a lot of things that happened differently and I was really upset with the way our so called leaders were running the affairs of the country and then I had a business going on and most of the things that we felt the right policies would help us achieve were not being talked about at the helm of affairs. And I said if the only thing that I would achieve would be having healthy conversations that can sort of redirect the narratives around the political elites, then we will do it. We ran for that election, we ran to the end, we did well, I'm happy we did well. And then in 2019, in the middle of 2023, I got calls from different presidential candidates inviting me to be a running mate and I said, oh wow, so we did something in the last election. Eventually I decided to settle with Dubebe Kachiku and it's interesting that we came fifth after the big four. Okay, that's very interesting. But did you settle with Dubebe Kachiku because of his person or what the party had to offer? So I listened to all of the candidates that invited me for this conversation to be a running mate and I sort of warmed up to maybe more. I think there was this lot of passion and desire to see something happen differently. From the beginning of the collaboration, all of that was vibing. Unfortunately, we were dealing with a party that also had a different agenda. And so while we were thinking of getting to the polls, the party was thinking of who we were going to eventually deal with when it comes to negotiating with a mix of money. This is what the party has always done. And that really gave us a huge setback. That's very interesting. So what are we expecting from you as a person? My principal and I did make very, very clear comments about our future. And it's going to be service to humanity, service to the nation, having conversations that would help direct a generation of people who I believe without trying to believe to anybody. We have a problem with processing information. And so it depends on who is saying it. We just take it to town without necessarily breaking it down to understand it and know how well to use it, if we should, why we should and how we should use such information. And I think we are committed to working with the rest of the country to ensure that these things have been addressed. Necessarily as political office holders or as individuals? Like I said to everybody, I didn't plan to be in the race in 2020-2030. In my bed while I slept, I got this course. And so we will see how it goes. Okay, so what's your general assessment of the just concluded elections? We just talked about your principal saying that every party rigged it, but maybe we'll just hear your own side of the story. He also said that this is a lesson to religious leaders who use the pulpit as a space for political discussions. And I think he is important on all of those things. I think Nigerians have never been divided like we are right now on political matters because we allowed religion and ethnicity play a major role in the decisions that we made through the process. And I think it's extremely wrong. I think, like I said, the generation must be focused on the kind of information that we receive, decipher it properly so that we know the kind of, so that we know the next moves to make. Which regards to the rigging. I just sort of randomly stumbled upon in 1979 video, when NPN won the election in 1979. It was a show Shagari, the image of the president. And there were three other parties who lost, and they came together to announce that they were not going to accept the result and that they were going to go to court and it was rigged, it was massive rigging. But I'll tell you something. Every single space you find, where people control, they always rig. The results that came out from the southeast is something you don't want to look at twice. It's like 97% in a space where you have other parties. People say people were chased out of the queues, people were driven away except they were going to vote for certain parties. The same thing happened in Lagos because the legations fell, this was their space. The area boys came in and tried to, you know, bombard everybody. And if you say these things happen in Kano, I'm not going to argue. We saw young children voting in Kano. Similarly, we saw young children voting in the southeast. So, generally, our election pattern has always been heavily misguided and controlled by, you know, whoever takes hold of the space. I think that what Kachiku was just trying to say was the election was between a formidable APC and a divided PDP. Everybody on the other side used to be part of the PDP. Kuang Kuo Su was part of the PDP. Atchuka O'Berker was part of the PDP. Pito was part of the PDP. When they pulled out, divided themselves, there was no way they could actually have beaten Tunibu. Tunibu might not be liked by certain people in certain age categories and social status, but you go to other places, he's been celebrated. He's loved by a lot of people in the north. And it is campaigned by, first of all, you know, clearing out the whole Muslim-Muslim ticket with Khan and some other top Christian bodies that were against the Muslim-Muslim ticket, and they never said anything about Muslim-Muslim ticket again. And then the next stage was, let me campaign from where I'm the weakest. And he started campaigning from Northern Nigeria, introduced himself to them, picked some of their strong stakeholders, and before he knew it, he was an accepted figure. Before he knew it, they not gave him the vote. Look at the vote pattern. In 2019, APC made 15.7 million votes. In 2023, they're making 8.7 million. They lost 7 million votes. That means a lot of people were not happy with the APC. However, because the divided PDP had gone in separate ways, they were unable to put those numbers. They would have given them about 14-15 million votes to defeat the APC. Okay. Well, you did well in the last election. You became fifth, like you said. What are we looking at for governorship? What prospects do you think the APC has in governorship? We have a fantastic candidate in Lagos, Fonsha Doherty, well-spoken, highly educated, an excellent gentleman. But, you know, I mean, Lagos to support the process, but I haven't quite seen the euphoria around his person. You know, the euphoria is largely around the existing APC governor, the Labour Party, Gobernatorial candidates, and obviously the PDP Gobernatorial candidates. They seem to be the top three that everybody seems to be talking about. And when I look at all of them here, I'm thinking in my head, what makes them, what makes one of them different from the rest? You know, try to understand where we're headed. Are they all the same? Are they different? And if you look at it critically, Sean Waldo, I've always said it, is a product of the Lagos Godfather system. Except you are anointed, you cannot become. And so, I mean, that for me is something I want to stop. I love and respect mentorship. When you bring Godfatherism into it, do I have to call you to tell before I make a decision after you have actually taught me what to do in the years past? So I don't want that to continue in Lagos. The next candidate, who is the Labor Party candidate, who used to be in PDP, lost the primaries in PDP, and he was asked to move to the Labor Party by Bode George, and then he went to the Labor Party at the time when I think they had this chaos between another candidate who said he won the primaries, who was the bona fide guy, and I think the case is still in court, the Supreme Court or so. That's a different matter. But I think what is most important here is now that he's in the Labor Party, I am seeing a Bode George who is a chieftain in the PDP saying, yeah, that's my boy. That's the one I support. And I'm saying to myself, somebody calls the Lagosians, or why would we move from one Godfather to another Godfather? Everybody knows in Lagos, Tindall is the Godfather of the APC, or the Godfather of Lagos, and for the best times I've known, Bode George always wanted to become the new Godfather of Lagos. So it's a tussle, and all of them have got a puppet there. And then I looked at the third guy, the PDP guy, and Jando, I remember his biggest scene in the PDP was because he didn't listen to Bode George, who wanted him to make Rhodes Vivo, who lost in the primaries to become his running mate. And he said, no, I'm not going to choose that as my running mate. I'm going to decide by myself who my running mate is going to be, and that was where they fell out with Bode George. And so Bode George asked the guy to move to Labo while Jando had to pick Funke Kendele as his running mate. For me, that was brave, that was strong, and I respect that. It means that we probably might, if we're thinking very deeply, get a governor for Lagos State that is not controlled by any bloc, or Godfather, or persons. So you think someone can stay in the PDP and not be controlled by... Well, we've seen it, we've seen it, because in the PDP, the PDP, original PDP structure, wanted other people, like the other Dohati in PDP to become the Gobernatorial candidate. And I remember when he was able to, you know, manoeuvre his way into the PDP and actually to clean the ticket. It made a lot of PDP members really upset that this guy that we do not know, this guy that doesn't seem like a guy we can control, would not be able to allow us, you know, get the way we want to get it. So things like that I respect as a young person, and I'm hoping that Lagosians, beyond the euphoria of maybe Peter or B, which obviously is what I think Reservoir is hiding under, the same way Shawolu is... the euphoria around Shawolu is that Tindubu pick team and everybody has to follow. I think these things are very pertinent and I think Lagosians should think deeper. I am from Punta Uwara, a very small town in Niger State. I lived there for 16 years, yeah? I don't live here anymore, but anything that concerns Lagos concerns me, because this is the first town that made me the man I became. And it's important for me to pay close attention to the happiness here and render my advice where I think it's necessary. And I think very important to note is that we are running mates as well. I remember when Jadok picked Funkie again, I felt that was also very brave. Number one, this woman in my opinion who naturally exists in a space where women have to walk 10 times harder than men to succeed. And then we're hearing today that she has the highest grossing movie in Nigeria. I mean, that's somebody I respect. That's somebody that's hard-working and when you look at her antecedents coming from, based on family background, you cannot say she's from a wealthy family. She's not from a blue blood. She's from the ground. And then that pushed me to find out more about the Abdulaziz Jando guy. And clearly, this guy used to cook food for his mom, you know? And then recently I saw his wife, resultant neighbor, I didn't even do well at all in this result. He made some Fs. And then I called him. I called somebody who is in the PDP, and I said, I'm just hearing that your guy did so badly. I spoke to him. He said some of those days he was actually walking. And sometimes he doesn't even come back home until in the night. There was no electricity for him to even study. But look, most importantly for us to notice, despite all of those challenges, he could rise. He could rise. He could rise in the private sector. He's been in the public sector. And I think based on his, an employer of labor, I just think there are deeper things to be really watching out for. There are some things that you've just said that I never knew existed. But let's leave that now. This is Lagos. Like you said, you have an interest in Lagos. Lagos made you who you are. But whether you have come to Lagos or not, like they always say, is the commercial capital of Nigeria. When Lagos sneezes, the nation catches a cold. That's what they say. So we need to get it right in Lagos. What are some of the things that you identify in Lagos that need to be addressed? We don't know who is going to be governor, no matter what we say. But there are things that the next governor needs to look at. We have to decentralize the center. You know, every single activity comes down to Victoria Island, Ikoi, Lake Hea. And that is because once you go past Ikeja, so I came into town on Monday and I've been privileged to move into places like Agege, further into Agege, like places like Gatankoa, into Mushi, down deep into Mushi, mile 12, and what exists behind my 12th, Apapa and what exists behind Apapa, everything you see is just color. Once you go past the first two streets inward, you will be shocked at the living condition of the so-called legulations that we think are doing all right, in comparison with those that live in this other half of the city. And my biggest fear and worry is that as much as they keep coming every day into the city to fend for their selves and get their daily bread, the worrier some thing is that a day will come when they will explode. Nothing exists there. There are no roads. There are no tap water. I'm talking of a Lagos that is saying it's making about over 70 billion naira in revenue every month. You need to see a commensurate level of development on ground. It is not happening. It makes me wonder if indeed part of the resources being generated has been diverted somewhere else. But in all honesty, I think those people living in those areas are the real concern that whoever becomes the next governor should really address. And that is the only way you can get the real progress that you want with regards to the traffic, with regards to proper taxation, to avoid multiple taxation, which regards to so many other things. I think we should decentralize the center. I think we should be more focused in those suburbs and make sure that they have the basic amenities so they don't influx the city all the time. They don't need to be here. They only come here because they want to survive. Yeah, with Lagos, Lagos capital is in Ikeja. Yes. Go past Ikeja and see. I told you Ikeja stops at Ikeja. Go past Ikeja. I know you don't know the place. Go to Gatangpoa and see. Well, I've seen all those areas. I understand what you're talking about. Some grows and glows of Lagos is what we are looking at. Some things that we can give them a pattern in the back and say, OK, you have done well, but you can do better. But the things that they really need to do, let's say security, let's say education, let's say traffic, let's say health and all that. How would you rate them in various sectors? So again, with regards to education, during the last debates in Lagos, I listened to the three main guys that presented themselves, Fushun, Fushun Shadohati of the ADC, the Labour Party candidate Rose Vivo and Abdulaziz Adidiran Jandoh of the PDP. And one thing that was very clear in that debate was when the question of out-of-school children was asked, everybody said some things like, we're going to get them out of the street. We're going to get them jobs. And then when the PDP candidate responded, he responded in a way that I didn't expect. He said, I would have conversations with churches and mosques to see how they can use their free hours to accommodate children in those facilities where we start making plans for the long term. So in the short term, we would have children that use the church's premises for education. I would get teachers employed to teach them while I get the same children in some mosque areas so that they can teach them. And then as that is all going on, we're now building up. And I felt that was really commendable to involve those sort of bodies to be part of this growth for these people. And I think it's a process. And I think it must be progressive. And I think the other thing I said from the beginning with regard to young people's inability to process information has to do with the fact that when I hear something, I want to ask how and they now have to put aside by itself where the reality is on the ground. Is it possible? I live in the city. Can it be done? How do you get a virus off the road? Is it by giving them money or taking them where? You can't just get them off. It's a process. These guys have a lot to do. The same way when the Al-Majiri system was about to be eradicated in Northern Nigeria by former president Gulak Jonathan, I felt it was a great idea. But these guys were taking off the streets and pushed into some dormitories who talked even in syllables. How do you want to run the space? Fantastic idea, but the how was missing. And so after the government went out, nothing could happen in the space. The boys went back to the streets. Unfortunately, a government came in place that didn't even make it an agenda. Sad. It's sad. Really, really sad. But you just struck something about continuity. Yes. Because if there had been continuity from that, the next government would have provided at least syllables to the people that were dumped somewhere. To be fair to the EPC government, there's been a lot of continuity, especially on the federal level, a lot of continuity from the previous administration. We've seen rail lines completed. We've seen BVN coming to fruition. We've seen certain policies and programs that were started by the Jonathan administration and completed by the Boharis administration. We can see implementation and see it working, which means we have to give that to them. However, for the ones that might not have been able to be controlled, probably they didn't have the framework that anybody could use to help continue them. I think all of those things are also things that are needed. Do you think that's a good enough excuse? It is good enough excuse, because for example, if I come in and I see that you've started a project and I'm asking for the manual, where's the manual? Where's the program design that you use? I don't have it. How do I sweep it? Because I cannot understand it. I don't know where it started from. I don't know where it is now and things like that. People, politicians can easily give excuses like that. And that is why it is important for us to put everything in proper perspective. I think people keep seeing a lot of things with regards to why the country is not working. Is it the right president? Does this one say sensational things and all of that? What I think is very important here is the civil service structure. Everything that the executives and the legislative and the judiciary bring on board, the civil service structure is unable to implement, simply because the corruption starts and ends there in reality. Which is why I keep saying we have to move from a salary incentive system to a welfare incentive system so that as a civil servant, I know that if they are getting into the civil service, I can start paying for my rent to own house. My children can go to school and I'm going to be charged that through my 35 years of service or 60 years, whichever comes first. Of course, health care, full health cover, go to the ministries today. You see posters of people, John, Shuaibu, Abraham, Lincoln, they're all looking for $200,000, $300,000 for medical care. Go back after one month obituary, obituary, they're gone. Well, okay. Well, now let's go back to politics and youths we're wrapping up now. So let's just take this, maybe a one-off now and finish. You've become a model to youths who want to go into politics. You've learned some lessons and a lot of people after the last election may be discouraged, whether we like it or not, they'll be discouraged. But from what you've seen and we're hoping you're going to continue being in a political space, no matter how. We're hoping that. So let's just hear you talk to the youths. What do you think they must do to continue to function in that space, in that political space? Yeah, I think more than anything, I'm really proud of young people. I've seen them find a voice. They've found a voice as a collective. I call us or call them older now. I call them their youth. You're a politician. You're not even up to the age of a youth leader. I call them the new tribe. I call them the new tribe. I call them the guys that we really need to look out for, especially with how we can free ourselves from these shackles. But I want us to really stop the hate when somebody tells you something. Don't just discard it. Listen to it. Hear their points out. They might be right. You might have an information that you already have stuck in your brain and then a new information comes. What you're supposed to do is not to discard the older but to marry them together and see which is superior. I want us to be a generation of very smart people, not just full of fellow people. Otherwise, we'll get it wrong. What a way to wrap. We've been talking with the vice-presidential candidate of ADC, Ahmed Buhari, and it's been very enlightening and very, very interesting talking with him. We would like to say thank you for coming on the program today. It's good to be in your studio for the first time after about five years. It's a nice place. It's a beautiful place, bigger than I thought. I thought you were in the corner but you were in the space. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Thank you. Well, we are going to go on a short break and when we return, we'll be discussing the politics in Ogun State, Nigeria. Stay with us.