 First on PLOS TV Africa. We're looking at politics right now. The National Executive Committee neck of the ruling all-progressive Congress APC has fixed the cost of its presidential expression of interest and nomination forms at 100 million Naira. The spokesperson of the party, Felix Morca, disclosed this at the end of the emergency meeting of the neck on Wednesday in Abuja. He said the expression of interest form is 30 million Naira, while the nomination form will cost 70 million Naira. So far, about 10 aspirants have declared interest to be the flag bearer of the party for the 2023 general elections. Those who have declared interest include ex-legal state governor Borla Tinibu, vice-president Yamio Shibajo, the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Aimechi, and the Minister of Labor and Productivity, Chris Ngige. Others, Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State, his counterpart in the Buenos Aires State, David Umayi, former EIMO State Governor Rocha Okoroccha, former Senate President Kent Nnamani, among others. These has generated mixed reactions from Nigerians, from the high costs to corruption and all of that. But joining us now on this conversation is the publisher of Metro Star, Emeka Madunago. He's been with us since off the press, but let's talk about all of that. Now, thanks for staying with us, Emeka. Thank you very much. All right. How do we even start this particular discussion? Lots of reactions have trailed this 100 million Naira nomination expression of interest of the APC for the presidential ticket. Even the PDP has its own reaction. And Nigerians are saying the political party is now more like a business, a concern, and they are more interested about what they can make from the party, as against giving enough people the threshold and the opportunity to exercise the franchise of being able to contest. What are your thoughts, Emeka? Well, it's interesting because politics is one major business we do in Nigeria. It's a big business. So it's the big players that are going to politics. So even you have 18 political parties. I don't know why people are so focused on one political party, what they are doing with themselves. It's a family affair, like the PDP. It's even surprising the PDP is even responding because they are just a little away from APC. Then after the PDP, you have SDP. After the SDP, you have APGAP. You have ADC. Just removing fractions, just removing some figures away. So what's the difference? I mean, the point is they are trying to just tell us how creative politics has become in this country. We need to really have a conversation about extracting productivity from this. I told you government officials are usually very busy but not productive, largely non-productive. So ensuring that the resources available to them for different kinds of things turn out it can be accounted for in the kinds of policies and outcomes we see from the activities. And it's also interesting because these elections will bring out a lot of new things. Remember President Muhammad Wari said he would ask the youth to hold on for him to finish before the SAPU is not too young to run. So you now see young people, I saw one on your screen, one 38-year-old, what you call somebody. Then you have different people coming out, women also coming out. You also have the governor of Kogi State, I will be telling you that. He's the voice of the youth, he's experienced, he's been in government, he's been a governor for eight years. So he knows the problems of the youth, he knows the agenda of the youth, he can push it. You have Ashwajib Bola-Tinibu telling you that he's been a lifelong ambition. He wants to serve Nigeria. You have Vice President Jamiro Shimbaju telling you that he will continue from when President Wari stops. And Nigerians are saying we don't understand this kind of, some people say it's a threat. Well, these are interesting times. And you have other, you have ministers, you have other kinds of, even Senators or Judo-Kalu. Then in the PDP you have Anim saying he will continue from where Jonathan stopped in 2015, that's seven years ago. So all kinds of, you have different ideas coming up. So if the APC decides to say 100 million, what it means if you permit me to play the devil's advocate is that this is serious business. We want serious contenders to come forward, not jokers, not people who will come and say, okay, I want to run for president. And then along the line they say, okay, my family and community have prevailed on me to step down for this person. And it becomes a joke, even though that's what politicians do, but for you to put down 100 million is a big business. Then to the other side, Nigerians should also get ready to ask questions, where is all this money coming from? So again, it's one political party out of 18. So like I've said, if you know your interests cannot be factored into what this political party is doing, you have 17 others. If you can't afford the fees of the PDP, which is half of that of the APC, all right, try the SDP, which is a bit away from PDP, or next door is ABGA, next door ADC, just little sums. Some parties are saying, come and take forms free, but I wonder how that will work out because you have to process the forms. You have to pay certain fees to process these forms. So it's beyond looking at the forms, at the cost of the forms, I'm sorry. We should look at what each of these candidates is bringing up. What are the current issues? Because if we get lost in the debate about the cost of forms and all of that, we allow the real issues to slip by. So what are the real issues? You have security. I talked about youths before, youths and women. Inclusiveness, youths and women. You have food, hunger. Hunger is a major problem. Then none of our refineries is working. In fact, produce a drop of oil. Maybe in the past, I don't know how many years, has produced a drop of oil. Then you have infrastructure. Even though President Buahari is telling you that infrastructure is the strongest point. But a lot of Nigerians will still tell you that the roads are largely not what they expect them to be. So we will put up all these issues. Then we need to also look at the track record of these, the contestants, of each of them. Nigerians are telling you that, for instance, Vice President Yemio Shinbaji has been a part of the Buahari administration. So they don't even want to hear anything about Buahari once he's gone. Let him just go with everybody around him. But you also have ministers who have been a part of this administration. They're coming out to say, well, all right, we'll make things better. Then you have Tinubu, who is coming to say, I will restructure things, I will change things, I will make things better. Fine. Then you have, I'm still talking about the APC. Then you have somebody, you have Ojika coming out to tell you that, okay, I will make sure that Nigerians have a better deal. I'm talking too much about continuing with the legacies like some other candidates. Then you have Yaya Bello, who is trying to keep a distance from all the, I will continue with Buahari's policies and all that. Coming out to say, okay, as governor, I have put in youth, women, even people with special needs. I have been able to secure my state, keep my state secure. In a state that has borders with 10 other states, I've kept my state secure. I've been able to serve my people, even though people say, well, we still have areas to cover up. Yes, there's no perfect system. So when you look at all these issues, look at the profiles of the candidates. Nigerians should focus on what the issues are. Let the parties sort out their party issues. But if you even look at it, because we've also had some Nigerians who are concerned about the issues that you have raised. And if you look at it, nobody seemed to be saying anything about the blueprint. When we're talking about the blueprint, it's not just a statement that's been made. You hear some presidential aspirants saying, we're going to turn the country around, make it to compete with the likes of Japan and what have you. These are just statements. There's no, you know, how you want to address all of these issues and how do the people even get to that point? But that's on the one hand. But let's also look at the issue of, because it is at the party level that we get to, you know, the larger level. And this is very fundamental to our democratic process. And so if they don't get it right, then it means the entire process might just be, you know, truncated. So with the pattern now, right now, INEC also stipulated a time where this party should be able to say this is the pattern. This is the mode we're going to adopt. For instance, the presidential, you know, primary is going to be here for some of these political parties. And the APC is still not decided. We hear they are, you know, going off the issue of consensus. It might just be derv. The electoral act doesn't. Yes. And so the issue of indirect primaries and direct primaries. So what do you make of this? And what do you think it will play out, you know, for the APC? Do you see crisis? Do you see people decamping shortly after all of this? Or even in the midst of all of this? No, people have even already started defecting. So it's not politicians. Politics is a game of interest. So positions are always on the move to places where they feel their interests will be better taken care of. But I respectfully disagree with you that they have been just statements. Because some of these experience have come out to draw up care. I mean, for instance, Pete Obie has told us that if he becomes president, he will have a special vote for hunger, to take care of hunger. And he has stated how he intends to do it. Tinubu has said in terms of security, we need to boost the numbers of people in the, of those in the armed forces. We need to boost their numbers. We need to employ, get more Nigerians into the security services so that they can effectively police and secure the nation and its borders. Then you go on to somebody like, again, you go on to the other aspirants here and there. You go on to Yahya Bello. He tells you that, okay, fine. That the problem here is that one, Nigeria has no need to borrow in. That if we manage our resources very well, we don't need to borrow. So for me, the reason I'm saying this is okay, because this is a statement. Have we, you know, have they been able to, we know that the time for campaign has not started. But have we seen this aspirant putting out this document, the how, answering the how. So if you say the... Of course, they made that. Then you begin to put, okay, this is how we intend to recruit. This is what we need to do. This is how, because it's not just a statement. Then make this statement. Oh, we're going to do this. We understand the problem is because we don't have personnel. But at the end of the day, you see what happens. We have, you know, president who came in in 2015. It worries everybody. It bothers not just, you know, the rude, but the ruling class. Everyone is part of all of the issues that we're faced with at the time. Security, economy and corruption. How far have we fed? These things were actually saved. It felt like it was written down. But we haven't seen the how, you know, that was put to answer them. You see the problem is this. Part of why we're here today. Is that president Muhammad Wari came in on an adversarial note. Okay, 16 years of PDP have been a waste. All right, I won't do what PDP has been doing. Instead of looking at government as a continuum and following up on policy. If there were policies that were not well thought out or well executed, you could have tweaked them and made them better. You had a policy like you win, for instance, which was meant to produce young entrepreneurs. Women, you know, youths. But what happened? It was just a thing. It was just a thing. Empower. Empower. Where have we gone with? Where have we gone with empower? When Jonathan was here, we had Shopee. He got mad in controversy. And that was the end of it. We didn't know where the font went to. So part of the problem is the adversarial nature of politics we play in Nigeria. My predecessors were all useless. My predecessors destroyed the country. My predecessors destroyed the state. My predecessors did nothing. But you ride on the roads the third. You have an office you report to as a president or the governor, which was maintained by a predecessor. If there was nothing, if they did nothing. So how come you have an office you go to every day? You have a government house. You sleep in every night. You see, the point is we must make our system a policy-driven system. There must be clear court policies. And the Nigerians must ask the right kinds of questions from these people. But you see, that's what I'm talking about. Right now we are mad in the debate over the cost of forms. Instead of asking like my colleague has said, give us your blueprints. They've declared. They've brought out all these statements like she said. But you can see if you go through the declarations, they contain action plans about what they intend to do. But you see, we also as citizens, it's our civic duty to make sure that we look at the declarations and say, okay, give us more clarity on how you intend to do this and do this and do this. But don't you think that the sum itself, because I understand the fact that you're saying, let's not be carried away by the forms. The cost of the forms, yes. But let's also pay attention to these individuals, their capacity to perform and their policies on ground. But don't you think that this also would influence their behaviour? For instance, we'll remember a time, I would make reference to 2014, the president had complained about 27.5 million error from not mistaking and that it was so much and that he had to take bank loans. So imagine someone who does not have, I don't know if all of them have the capacity to cough out and trunk out 100 million, it might not be so much. But don't you think there's already a mindset that might just think that if you have people coming together to support you to get this, then the policies at the end of the day will be reflecting the interest of this sector peasants. You might just be doing the bidding, or you might more be concerned about how to recoup your forms because it's a business transaction. So don't you think that these... Like I said earlier, politics in Nigeria has come to be seen as a lucrative investment, that's one side. But the other side is that the conversation, Nigerians must get to the conversation where we have to decide what's best for us, what's most workable for us. We started out this country in 1960 with a parliamentary system of government where you elect MPs, the MPs now choose the prime minister. But by 1979, we opted for the presidential system of government which is the most expensive, it's a very expensive system of government, it's not cheap anywhere to operate it. So let's even talk about that because you mentioned that when we were having a preacher just before we got on air. So the system of government that we are running, is it actually a bane to us right now as it is? Because you were saying that the parliamentary system was way more cheaper compared to the presidential system that we are in right now. Are we supposed to be going back to the parliamentary system? Or just what exactly? Well, it's for all Nigerians to decide, 215 million people, it's for us to decide. We are having a constitutional amendment exercise right now. If we can accommodate it, fine. If not, we should prepare for future constitutional amendments so that we make sure that we get on board those platforms that will advance the collective interest. Not just saying, oh, cost of forms is expensive, but you want a system whereby, you know, that promotes winner takes all. Oh, it's my brother, it's our town, it's the town of our area. Because we talk about forms, but the same people talking about forms, we tell you, no, no, no, it's the town of our area, it's the town of our son, of our daughter to get into office. What do we really want? But you see, if we also look at it recently, you remember the statement from Affe Baba Lola who talked about the fact that we should suspend, you know, the 23 elections and get an interim government. Now, one of the concerns he raised was transactional because we cannot afford to continue in this recycling of people and then get into the transactional government that we're going through. As much as a lot of people have, my concern here is this, because the money back politics as we have described it over time, don't you think it has affected how politics, the policies, if you see the policies, at the end of the day, they really don't reflect the interest of the people and don't you think that it's this kind of transactional you have mentioned that it's business? And so if people see it as business, then what policies do you come through with that would reflect the interest of the people that would serve the interests of Nigeria? Let me correct something. I'm not saying I said politicians, not all of them see it as a lucrative venture, not all of them. But you see, even if the forms are expected, it doesn't stop you from performing, it doesn't stop you from bringing up policies. It doesn't give you the chance of even getting there to even talk of performing as well. Why won't you then? Then it's up to the people. You have 18 political parties. If you feel that, okay, fine, APC, they're charging 100 million Naira for forms. We won't vote for their candidates because their forms are too high. You have other parties vote for their candidates so that the conversation is not just about just talking points, okay, your forms are too high, it's about money back politics, it's about this, that, and the other. You have a wide choice. Nigerians should exercise their rights to elect their leaders. It is a given, it's a given for people in a constitutional democracy. Exercise your rights. On election day, you see people playing football. People sit at home. They want to watch what's going on on TV. Instead of going out to go and cast their votes and at the end of the day they say, the government is not working. We are also a part of the democratic process. We must come out and say, okay, these are the things we want. And you mentioned something about old people. Yes, Nigerians are expressed concern about old people. Then you see young people coming up and saying, okay, look at me. This is one. One is the governor. He says, look at me. I've done something in my state. Then you have some other young people here and there. Why are people not looking at them? Already you have support groups. One of the aspirants. It was actually some support groups led by youths that bought his form for him. That was youths. Those are the youths you're talking about that are being shot out. Okay, fine. You have youths coming in, in APC, in other parties. Why are we not looking at those youths? Because we need to move away. We need the next president, somebody who has capacity to perform, who is healthy, strong, and who is competent. We must move away from all these issues. Yes. Thank you so much. We are going to just press pause on this particular topic for sake of time. Emeka Madinago is a journalist. He is also the publisher of a Metro Star newspaper. He is a political affairs analyst as well. He joined us not to look at all of the issues, the fallout from the APC National Executive Committee and the nomination forms and the way forward for the youth and of course, politics and elections in Nigeria. Thank you once again. Thank you very much. All right. It's still the breakfast that will take a quick break and then when we come back, we'll be focusing on anti-curity in the moment. Stay with us.