 Welcome once again to the Breakfast and Plus TV Africa. Our first major conversation this morning is discussing Nigeria's very near future 2023 and what rather the kind of president Nigeria needs in 2023. Like I mentioned earlier, there's been a lot of postulations. There have been names called, there have been people who have presented themselves also, including governors and former governors to take over that position in 2023. But what's most important is what happens beyond 2023. And, you know, a few times, you know, I think it's always important that we mention that it's really not about who you take out of government. It's more important who you put in government because Nigerians get to deal with the consequences of that decision for four or eight years. And that is no joke. We'll say good morning, first of all, to Nick Agoule, who's joining us as a public affairs analyst. Thanks for joining us, sir. Good morning. Thank you very much for having me. Great to have you on the program. Before we get into what Nigeria needs in a person, let's first of all start with what's important that Nigeria needs to do system-wise, electoral act-wise, you know, constitution-wise in order for us to have more faith in, you know, the build-up to 2023. Thank you very much. Certainly, like you have said, Nigerians have lost faith in electoral protest. I do a lot of advocacy, trying to bring Nigerians to the ballot box, telling them that the ballot box prevents the best possible opportunity for us to get the leadership that this country needs. And I have met with previous residents, especially from the educated class, you know, the way to do people, the people that most likely will not say their vote. They don't want to come to the ballot because they say that their votes will not count. They have both no matter that the politicians, you know, have already set in place machinery to rig the elections. Some are fearful for their own security. So the electoral process needs to be set in, especially in the light of the debacle in the National Assembly regarding the electronic transmission of votes. These things have doubts in the minds of Nigerians that the electoral process is going to be free, fair and credible. So what needs to happen is that the president needs to ascend to the electoral bill that is on his table. There were two bills, two important bills that the National Assembly signed shortly before they went on reset. They passed the PIB, the Petroleum Industry Bill, and the electoral bill. The president, on his return from the UK, keeping why he was in isolation, he ascended to the PIB and ignored the electoral bill. So these things send the wrong messages to the minds of Nigerians that the government is ready to conduct a free and fair and credible election. So the parents of democracy, one of which is the sanctity of the electoral process, has to be defended. Without this, Nigerians are not going to come to the ballot. In 2019, only 30 million people came forward to vote. And I believe that there are more than 100 million Nigerians who have booked a TDA as you come to the ballot. So I agree with you that the electoral process is also an issue. Alright, hopefully we will get to speak more on that and see if there's any changes that can be made in the build-up to the elections in about two years. Now let's talk about the person. There have been postulations. I'm sure you've also seen some names mentioned. There are people who have also brought themselves forward. They've also been, if you watch closely on social media, some parents that have been made to say, do you think these two would make a good pair for 2023? Do you think this person from the south and this one from the north would make a great pair? But from what you've seen and what Nigeria currently is dealing with, what kind of person would you think or would you suggest that Nigeria must do all it takes to put into that position in 2023? Thank you very much for that question. To me as a person, I believe that there is one key criteria, one key quality that a man or woman aspiring to leadership at any level, president, local government chairman must have. And this quality is professional. We need a man or woman that has a professionality. A man or woman whose heart breaks down if they see the suffering of the people and they are determined to do something about it. When they see that there are children out of school that are used without jobs, we don't have electricity, we don't have security, the roads are bad, there's no water, no gas, nothing. And this person says, look, they are determined regardless of the opposition that participates. Whether it's for my party people, those who sponsor my campaign, my family members, my associates, I don't want to solve this problem. I want people to be happy. Until we have that man or woman, every of that criteria is not going to work. Education will not work. And social will not work. Whether they are from the North, they are from the South, if they are from any of the ethnic groups, Christian or Muslim, it's not going to work. So we just have to have this person who has a reasonable determination that they want to push my on the basis of Nigeria. Someone that wants to leave Nigeria for where it is bound and place Nigeria where it is supposed to be in the Committee of Nations. A country blessed with every available natural and human resources that will take its capital place in the Committee of Nations. Think about Yukwai Yu of Singapore. Mandela, these are the kind of people that I'm talking about. They have the quality of looking at the suffering of their people and being determined. Mandela was in prison for 27 years to make sure his people are liberated until we have someone with big quality. It's not going to happen for us. Compassion is not necessarily something that can be spotted just by senior persons or candidates face. Neither can it be spotted from his CV IDR. So there has to be other things that Nigerians may want to also point out that you may not be as compassionate as Nika Gulli has described but you still have certain qualities, either educational qualities or you just really are someone who has shown capacity for development in the past. So are these other details here and there also important? Thank you very much. I completely agree with you that, like they say, the mines construction will not be figured out on the face. So it is impossible to know what is happening within the temple of any human. But what we electorate in Nuku is pedigree, track record what these people have done in the past. Nigerians do not listen to promises of if you let me, we do it be or see. Nigerians must look at what these people have done in the past. Some of the people to be president now, they've been doing us. What did they do? Why they were governor? My man was a governor and did not get enough of his credit. But he, as a person, you can see that his personal wealth was rising. You see the money in the United States, they might not have the ideas to take his credit from position A to the next level. The man cannot also perform as president. That's the truth. If the man was a minister or the man was in the corporate world, managed the company to death and you want to hand over Nigeria to him. Stop don't know what. Nigerians must look at the track record of the people coming forward to determine those who have that compassion over the suffering of people. But I also agree with you that in addition to compassion, the person must have other qualities. The first of which is this person must have a united mind. This person must be. You see, our country as of today is polarized, is divided along ethnic, religious and political lines. We need someone who will come and unite this country. You know when you have a president that publishes on the fourth rank of the nation, someone like Donald Trump, he flourished on the visitus in the American society. Such a person is not going to unite the country and bring the nation together to begin to journey towards a common destination. Of course we need a person to have the right level of education. We need a person to be a visionary. A person that looks and says, look, this is where I want to take Nigeria to. We need an economic manager. Nigeria has probably what we call the best economy in the world. I mean what I'm saying. In my line of work, working for international oil and gas companies, I've come to nearly 40 countries in the world. I've been in a position to say that I have never seen a country as endowed as Nigeria. Yesterday, for the first time, despite the over 20 years that have been in the oil industry, I read this story in one of the major newspapers in Nigeria. And this story was about Nigeria. It's important facts. And the FIRS decided that they would press VAT, or seven and a half people, on gas imports. And because of that, the cost of cooking gas has more than doubled. Since yesterday I read this story, it have not been all right. My mood has been terribly bad. Because Nigeria is producing this gas and setting this gas on fire in Niger Delta. And then Nigeria is going to import this gas or other countries are bringing it in. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's a problem. We need a president that will look at something like that and say it can never happen. Why are we going to be training our guards? Are they going to other countries to import guards? If a farmer has left yams, after suffering this yams, left the yams on fire, and then goes to nowhere else, will go and buy yams with high cost for the family. I think in Nigeria, that father is a color mentor. We say he has a spiritual problem. So we need a president that will pay no to speak like that. Hold on, Mr. Agulay, I need to bring in Ezekiel, who's also joined us this morning. From what Nika Agulay has mentioned, there's a lot of things that would be expected for whoever wants to take that office. But the fears that I believe Nigerians have is the frailty and the weakness with campaign speeches. We've had a lot of people who have said so much. They've spoken about anti-corruption, spoken about security, spoken about all sorts that they would love to do when they get into office. That eventually didn't happen. We, of course, have people who can make the best campaign speeches that eventually are all useless once they get into that office. Mr. Agulay, I want you to share with us what you think should be the strongest campaign point for any person who's getting into position in Nigeria in 2023. And the reason I'm asking this is because we can complain about our economy. We can complain about security. We can complain about corruption. There's so much. We can complain about infrastructure. But there are certain things that I believe Nigeria is currently dealing with that if they aren't fixed, it may be impossible to achieve any other thing in the future. So what would you suggest should be Nigeria's or whoever it is, the strongest campaign point for a person who's looking at 2023? Okay, thanks for having me. And sorry, Network, try to make me not to be here, but I think we won at the end. Before you recruit anybody for any office, the very first thing you do is to define that office. What is the office of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria? It's not general now because what applies in Ghana might not be applicable in Nigeria because of who we are, the systems we are. The office of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria does it have any peculiar matching order? It is when you have defined that office, it's when you have looked at the fundamentals that you can now have a benchmark for you to profile the different people. If you look at the matching order, the matching order is in chapter 2, section 14, subsection 2b of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. And it states, the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government, that matching order. Second, you look at the environment. Nigeria is a country. Is it a monolithic country? Is it a multi-religious country? What sort of country is it? Nigeria is an amalgamation of the North and the South. Nigeria has very many nations within the country. Nigeria has very many tribes, so many towns, they have two dominant religions. These are the dynamics of the constituent part of this country. Now, what makes a nation? It is that the different constituent parts have agreed to come together on the understanding in the case of Nigeria of equality. What that means is that the man in Sokoto has the same right as the man in Bayelsa, has the same right as the man in Ikatekwene in Akwaibong state, has the same right as the man in Burma in Bono state. Those fundamentals are irrevocable. They are fundamentals that you cannot play with. To that extent, therefore, the man that must come to be the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and again, I bring the last paradigm, which is the work or the essence. Government is the aggregation of the resources of the people and a recruitment of managers to manage these resources in the larger interest of the people, in which case Mr. President is not a lord, he's not a monarch, he's not a king, he is a chief executive who is accountable to these stakeholders where we are Nigerians. So if you're coming to be the chief executive of Nigeria, you must see yourself as the chief servant of Nigeria and not the lord of Nigeria. All this put together defines the background, the matching order and of course the job description. When you have put all that together and you now come to the contemporary situation we are in today, we are faced with a situation where we are the poverty capital of the world. Number one, we are faced with a situation where we are one of the top three most terrorized nations in the world. Number two, we are faced with a nation where our infrastructure has deteriorated and decayed and above all, we are faced with a nation where people have lost confidence in the system and as a result are resorting to self-help. So that man that will be the president has to be a man that has the capacity, the competence, the character. Capacity means that he can sit down, understand the problems and the challenges. He is also in tune with the times in which case he has the capacity to have an understanding of the economic dynamics to look at every aspect of the challenges that we have and then he has a character where he understands that every Nigerian has as much rights as the other. That character means he is somebody that is honest, trustworthy and of course when you talk in terms of the competence or the capability, it means that he is somebody, you can just, because John says he should have basic school set or in fact primary school first and in the Nigeria of today that no longer applies. You've got to be a man who can sit on the board, analyze issues and take informed decisions. So you've got to be well-exposed, you've got to be good at fit for purpose, you've got to be detribalized, you've got to have a character that people can look back on you and say that I like that man, he is trustworthy, he is a man of integrity. Yeah, Miss Ayantok, some of the qualities and the things that you've mentioned, if we're being honest and you look across all Nigerian politicians that come to mind, not very many of them can paint this picture or represent this personality that you've mentioned. Maybe one, maybe none. There's also a lot of challenges and I hope that we'll be able to bring in Nika Gulay with this also before we go. There's also a lot of challenges with the leadership recruitment process. One thing that Nigerians have always complained about is it's not because they don't want to vote, it's because they get there and they look at the options and there's really no urge to actually even bother themselves. So there is that also. But there's something else that I think is important that we should talk about and how we can find a person who can do this. The United States, during Donald Trump's presidency from reports, saw some of the widest divisions in the country. It created some divide in the United States that a lot of people hadn't experienced before. I didn't notice before. And people might also argue that in Nigeria today it's pretty much the same thing. That there is some level of division that we've never seen before. We've never even imagined was this bad how do we find a person who can unite Nigeria again? Who understands the importance of uniting Nigerians in the journey forward while other things are going on? Beautiful. I think even if this is my last contribution I'll be very happy to just give this a last shot. The time has come and I want to specifically thank the National Consultative Front. What they've decided to do is I'll run through this as fast as I can to say Nigerians. Let me give you a little background. Angela Merkel is living Germany and then there's a debate on the two people that are supposed to on the people that are supposed to succeed her and the Germans are not interested because they really don't like the people that are there that have come as option. The same thing as being the case in Nigeria we're just presented with one, two, three people that is like between six and a half dozen and we're not really interested in them. So what we decided to do is that let Nigerians for one take the destiny in their hands by doing what we are embarking on the largest ever recruitment process. We are coming up with this project in National Consultative Front where we're asking every Nigerian tell us who you think can be a good president. Don't, it's not whether the person wants whether it's this party, we don't care. Who do you think that can be a good president? And then we're expecting about 5,000 entries. So we have a panel of eminent Nigerians that are going to profile 60 from each of the geopolitical zones. This 60 that is going to come up to about 360 are going to be put across to Nigerians. They are profiles, they're everything. Unless Nigerians, everybody looking, we don't care whether it's in this party or in that party who do you think is non-partisan, it's general. So Nigerians are going to vote and bring it from 60 to 30. From 30 geopolitical zones to 20 to 10 to a point where we now have made over five geopolitical zones, we bring it to about 30 Nigerians. Where Nigerians have been the one profiling and bringing. When this 30 eventually emerge, they are going to be brought into what looks like a reality show of some sort. Where for about a month, these people are subjected to addressing issues, various issues of the national import, so that we can really see their competence, their capacity, their capability. We can really explore their character and capacity. We look everything and keep eliminating till we come to probably one geopolitical zone. By the time we arrive at that, Nigerians would have been the people that evolve the people that we think can be our president. It's at this point that they are now emptied into a political vehicle going to 2023. So you can no longer say, I don't have an option. This is where we want every Nigerian getting involved. It's going to be the most ambitious leadership recruitment exercise probably in the world. And if we need to do that, let us do it so that we can now say we have a choice. And we can no longer say, oh, PDP will no longer throw anybody they want at us. APC will no longer throw anyone at us. And because they are the two big parties, then we are compelled to pick between the devil and the red blue sea. It's no longer going to happen. Nigerians have stepped up and we are ready to get this going. In the next few days or weeks, you will get the details. Alright, we'll see how that turns out. Nika Gulli, confirm you can still hear us. Yeah, thank you very much. Oh, sorry, I apologize for that. If you heard my last question, would you like to also chip in on that? And the question is, how do you find a candidate that you are sure can unite Nigerians again or understand what it takes and how important it is that Nigerians are united again as we also build the nation? How do you find a candidate like that? Yeah, thank you very much. Before I answer your question, let me agree and lead way to my co-pilot list, what he's saying. He says, you know, there are a lot of things that are needed in the man or woman that will be our president in 2023. We mentioned competence, capability, capacity, character, and I will add to that compassion which I talked about and courage. Courage is very important. We need a courageous man or woman. You know there are things of Nigeria who are the worst men or women. There are the ones that go behind the scenes to the man in the scene and try to divert his attention but come onto it to take him away from the direction that he's headed. We need a courageous man or woman who can look this people in the face and tell them to get out of the way. So I will say that in answer to your question I will say that the leadership recruitment for 2023 and in agreement with my co-pilot list is the most ambitious leadership recruitment that we are going to have. And it's like a penalty kick. We either get it or Nigeria may pop in or survive another 48. So it belongs to everyone of us to get involved in this process. Now the issues here are that the major parties, APC and PBC they are all independent democracies are not working. So at the end of the day they present to us the electorate and the days that look like a choice between the deep blue sea and what everybody say again. There are choices or not two choices. But the constitution has been provided for the existence of a multi-party democracy. So we have other parties. Now if we publicize our third war and we ignore the fact that we are from the north or south Muslim or Christian because poverty does not know a Muslim or a Christian or someone from the north or south. We can align ourselves behind the workforce a candidate that we know must be united qualities people that can lift the leader up that carries on a party that is not either of the two major parties. So we put our vote behind us. There were 30 million votes in the 2019 presidential election which will mobilize enough and bring people out and give these candidates 50 million votes. They will win the election. But the problem is that those who are to vote are those that are most likely to say their vote. Those who will not say their votes they mean I hope that the educated class living in trying to some of them will try to talk to them about the electoral process and you will meet immediate parties. I don't do politics I don't believe in the process of not coming out. These are the people that we must mobilize to bring to the ballot because if we don't get leadership in 2022 I think it's going to be very bad for us. Alright we're going to schedule another day when we can talk about mobilization concerning 2023 because it's never too early to start and earlier we earlier Nigerians start the better to at least shape the narrative and shape the direction with which Nigerians will go with the next general elections. Thank you both for sharing your thoughts with me this morning and we wish you a great Wednesday ahead. Thank you very much. Absolutely. We're going to be moving now to talk about the Nigerian Bar Association and its chairman Ullumi Diakbata calling out lawyers who apparently buy judgment across the country for politicians. We'll get into that conversation after the short break. Good morning.