 Violent shootings, parallel congresses and loads of drama characterize the APC Congress held over the weekend. And don't vote for the PDP and APC again because they have bad antecedents, former Aina commissioner Atahiru Jega wants Nigerians. This is Plus Politics and I am Mary Anacorn. Mild drama played out in the country over the weekend as the ruling party, the APC, had its party congress. Some of the intrigues that hallmarked the congresses are violent shootings, which claimed one life and injured many in a kitty. Parallel exercises in Lagos Anogun, bickering in Aqaibom, Oshun and Delta, among other states. In Rivers, in Rivers State previously, Senator Magmus Abbey had urged supporters to boycott Saturday's nationwide ward congresses of the party, citing indiscriminate issuance of nomination forms. He also accused Amina Gamawa, head of the team, selling the nomination forms in Rivers State of dumping fairness and equity to share the forms to predetermined party leaders to the exclusion of others, especially his supporters. Well, joining us to discuss this is Senator Magmus Abbey. Thank you very much, Senator Abbey, for joining us. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure. Great. Just as I started and I stated that there has been, I mean the weekend was a very intriguing one, with the APC going ahead with its congresses and we can see all of the pockets of violence that was a resultant effect of that congress. We've seen parallel congresses and of course in your state you have also spoken about the fact that there was no equity and there was no fair play. But before we get to Rivers State, let's talk about the APC in general. I'd like to start by asking, and you can choose how to answer this question. Is the APC in trouble? No, I don't think so. If you have been a close watch of Nigerian politics, partisan politics over the years, you will discover that there's really nothing different about what is happening in the APC when you compare it to what has always happened in political parties in this country. The truth of the matter is that Nigerian politicians are not Democrats. Nobody, most of the people who are in politics in this country, they don't like the idea of submitting themselves, their aspirations and whatever to the dictate of the majority. So before any contest is held in this country, the average politician will do whatever they can to achieve a predetermined end. And I think that is at the bottom of all the crisis we have whenever we are to do anything that is electoral in nature. So it's not something that is limited to the APC. It doesn't matter anywhere you bring Nigerians to vote. You will always have violence, you have drama, you have all these efforts and attempts to cheat one another and achieve a predetermined end. It's just the way we still are and it's a culture that we need to do a lot more to change. Why do we call ourselves a democratic state if you're saying that most of our politicians and most I'm guessing is at least 70% of them are undemocratic and you're saying that even the way that you conduct your internal politics and you're speaking for your party, you're saying that there's nothing democratic about it. Why are we saying that we're running a democracy? I mean, are we deceiving ourselves? No, I think that like every human process, there's every need for us to benchmark our activities and our progress against a predetermined goal. I think the goal for democracy in this country will be for us to have hitch-free elections where anybody can by whatever means check the process to see that the process is not only fair but whatever counts there are accurate and verifiable. But the processes that we have in place presently will not lead us to that expected end. So I think what we need to do instead of us to wring our hands and say, oh, are we joking? I think the thing to do is for us to, as a country, as a people, you know, try to actualize and imbibe the virtues of democracy and then do what we can to improve our processes. We can't keep using the same style of voting and counting that we have been using that clearly produces a lot of contradictions and confusion. So I think it's a question of improving our processes. But in terms of what we do now in the country, I think by and large what you have seen in the APC congresses is what you see in Nigeria and democracy, the Nigerian democratic space. So we need to improve on that. I did have a conversation with someone from the APC and the PDP on the issue where the speaker of the House of Representatives mentioned that they would want to include in the Electoral Act bill direct primaries as opposed to any other form of primaries, and this would suffice for different political parties which the PDP kicked against because they're saying that the constitution of the country should not dictate to political parties what they should do. I'm saying this to say, the APC has also spoken about consensus candidates across board and looking at the congress that they went ahead to do over the weekend, we can see that most of the people who are having parallel congresses or had parallel congresses and the bickering that we've seen over the weekend which has led the vice president to call for a meeting of sorts shows that maybe the consensus candidate issue is not really realistic, but I'll ask you, what realistic is it if the APC is deciding that they will go with consensus candidates? Does this reflect the real of every person? Does this reflect the nods of everybody in the party or this is what the National Walking Committee is prescribing? Well, the consensus option is part of the constitution of the party. So it's one of the means by which the party can arrive at a decision in an election of this nature. But like I said, it's all about process. Whether you're going to use consensus or you're going to vote or whatever, if the rights and the privileges of individual members are respected and everybody knows that at the end of the day if there is a vote, the result of that vote will be what will be accepted by everybody. Then the incentive for the leaders to reach a consensus will exist because nobody would actually be able to 100% predict the outcome of a vote. But where people already have the processes under control and they know that if they proceed to an election, this is the result I have in my letter. In such a situation, there's really no incentive for consensus, for anybody to give up anything when you can take everything. At that point, depending on the good will of individuals to accommodate one another and help one another. And sadly enough, that is not the spirit of politics in this country. So for the consensus option to work, the same kind of attention to detail, to process that we need to make the electoral option to work well is the same kind of attention to detail that we need that will make the consensus option to work. So if we don't, with all due respect, improve the quality and content of our democracy and have a situation where people can actually vote, vote accounted peacefully, and the respect of the peaceful vote, respected by all actors, no matter their position of power in this society or in the party. Then I'm afraid that this kind of thing that we have seen, we didn't just see it in the APC, we saw it in the PDP, they ended up in court in Anambra, and the general confusion that we see anytime we're doing something that involves voting in this country will continue to be part of our challenges moving into the future. But I believe that if we work hard and we are determined to actually bring about the expansion and purity of the democratic space in this country, it is something that is achievable if we work at it and it can be achieved. I spoke with the senior advocate of Nigeria on Friday before the congresses and I asked him what he thought about the position of the APC going into the congress, knowing the internal crisis that the party is already facing. I'm sure that you know about the tribunal that dismissed the joint petition, you know, of Jagade, which was of the PDP, and of course the ondo state governor, you know the results of that judgment and of course what the tribunal said. But Bani Red did say that if the issue was not settled and the APC went into the congress, he somewhat predicted what happened over the weekend. Let's take a listen to what he said and then when we come back, I'll have you speak on it. Of course right now as we are talking, APC is supposed to start its congresses tomorrow. I can take care of your contradiction. They have no register to do any congress. So they are saying they want to do consensus. But what consensus is that all parties must agree, must consent to their arrangement. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I need to take you back. Did you say that the APC does not have a register? The APC has been conducting, as we all know, it's been in the news, that they have been re-registering members. Where are they registering them? Where's the register? No, registering is different from a register. You think a register can go away? Have you compiled it? Is it credible? The people who have access to it will file for the integrity of it. Before you can have a transparent process, there must be a credible register and done by all the stakeholders. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that there is nothing like that on ground as I'm talking to you. It's even so bad that they do not even have congresses at the local government at what level. They will conduct anything tomorrow. Most of the people that they even appointed or nominated as prime state congress committee team, most of them just arrived a day before today and they are the stakeholders that are admitting to that. I'm talking to you, people have not even gotten in front of you. Nominations for not letting you screening, not letting you knowing those who will conduct the respective elections in that world. You know, the whole thing is just a sham. So you can hear him. He's saying that the whole thing is a sham. Now there are a few things that he said that we can tie to what you had said earlier on, that the fact that people were not being consulted properly, there's no fairness, there's no justice, there's no equity. If the APC had done its due diligence within its members across the country, and don't forget there are calls for Boonee to be sacked by the way because of the outcome of this judgment and the Ondo State Governor. I mean, even Fester Skyamel had asked that he be sacked because he might pose problems. And for the APC not to have continuous court cases dragging in the future, he should step aside. And that's another case in itself. But with all of these things that are happening, I'm wondering to myself, why did the APC go ahead with this Congress? What was the urgency, the need for the urgency to have these Congresses even with the issues that, you know, the party has been facing? Well, first of all, I think that the two issues that you're alluding to are totally separate from each other. They're not the same. If you're talking about the legal drama over the outcome of the Supreme Court judgment in JGD against that period of look, that is a different issue. What people are saying in respect of that is that the party going ahead with its Congresses in the light of the minority opinion in that judgment will impair the outcome. That's the different thing. If you're talking about the preparedness of the party for this exercise and the steps that Bannery was talking about that he said needed to have been done before the Congresses would vote, those are two separate issues. On the question of preparedness and all that, let me say this. We have taken about a year to get to this point where we are today trying to conduct these Congresses since after the dissolution of the last National Working Committee of the party. Now, no matter what you do and you try to go and conduct any exercise in which Nigerian politicians are supposed to assemble and vote and produce a result, except the politicians themselves agree to respect the processes you have set in place. It will be impossible for you to conduct an exercise that will be history. What is the essence of an exercise if they're not going to respect it? It's an exercise in fertility. So why do it if there is no agreement? Why? I mean, look at what we're having to face. We have been doing this since 1999. There is not much difference between what is happening now and what happened when the last executive was set up. It was the same thing. At the end of the day, you had an executive. If you're having general elections now in this country, it's going to be pretty much the same thing. At the end of the day, you have a result. So as long as we... What is the change that the APC promised? What change are you bringing if you're doing the same thing that you accused the People's Democratic Party of doing and we're seeing you do the exact same thing? What is the difference? And I keep asking, what's the difference between the APC and the PDP? Was it just to unseat President Goodlock Jonathan and now it's the same potato-potato? Really, what was the change that was promised? I mean, we don't see it, do we? You see, let me say this to all Nigerians. You keep talking about APC and PDP, but this is your country as well. And these people who are doing this thing are your children, they are your brothers, they are your sisters. These are the same children that were... Some of the people that are taking part in politics today, 20 years ago when we started politics in this country, they were in the secondary school. And this is a culture that they're great up with. What I'm talking about is that as a nation, we ought to work on our entire... The fabric of what we do. Change is not just about the words, it's about what we do. And change is always a painful process. Even within the all-progressive Congress, we have to battle and struggle for change. We cannot just say that because we're a party committed to change, therefore everything will change automatically. No. Change is always a painful process. Why promise something that you do not have? You obviously cannot give what you do not have. You're battling for change, but then you promise to give change. So why promise what you do not have? Again, when you keep talking... I mean, I totally agree with the fact that yes, we as a society need to work to change the course of things, but whatever happened to leading by examples, we're the ones who are following, we're the lead. If the people who are leading us are making promises, they should be at least able to keep some of those promises so that we can at least have some level of trust. But there seems to be none of that in play. No, you're not being factual and you're also not being fair. First of all, the all-progressive Congress has done a lot as a government to try to bring change to the political process in this country. There's no denying that. The whole issue of introducing direct primaries as an option to ensure fairness and all that is something that this party has championed. But what I'm saying is that the all-progressive Congress is a political party. Magnus Abbey is an individual. So if the party says something and Magnus Abbey gets up to go and sabotage what the party has set out to do or do something different, these are individual actors across the country and these actors are Nigerians. So it doesn't matter where you take them to. If this is what they believe and this is how they behave, that is how they're going to behave. The only way we are going to curb this kind of excesses on the part of our political actors and leaders is for us to deliberately work hard to clean up the processes and make it impossible for people to predetermine or try to predetermine the outcome of an election. If you find out, for example, bringing talks to the venue of an election and beating up people will not give you the desired result. Politicians are not going to waste their time bringing talks to the venue. They are going to concentrate on convincing the voters to follow what they want. But if you have a system where you bring talks and you can get a result, you write a result and it to be sustained and all that, then people will go and pursue those shortcuts to give them the desired advantage. I think that what we need to concentrate on now within the party is to learn from some of the mistakes that we are making, improve our processes and try to digitalize some of the processes that we use in our elections. If we do that, I am sure that as the system continues to improve substantially over time, the behavior of our key actors will also improve. That's where I think we need to go. I think that capitalizing on the blame game, talking about politicizing the challenges within our poverty, which spreads across everywhere, it's not going to get us to where we need to go. Where we need to go is to get to a place where our processes will be stronger than those who want to undermine it. For example, in the bank, it's improving its anti-forgery and fraud technologies to try to deter those who would like to take money that does not belong to them. And nine times out of there, they succeed. So I think that if the political parties will also concentrate on improving the political process and every time we do it, we do something that shows that we have learned something from what we did before, and therefore this particular one will no longer be done this way. I believe that over time the electoral system and the political system itself will improve without internal democracy in the party, without the respect for the rights of members, without the respect for the outcome of democratic elections imbibing to anybody, the whole exercise of democracy in this country will continue to be in trouble. I really like your optimism, Senator. It's refreshing. But you said I wasn't being factual. Let's talk about facts. Recently we talked about electronically transmitting our election results, and you saw the position of the Senate, and you're talking about the fact that we were not being fair to the fact that the APC is bringing change or that they have brought some change about. This is the most change that Nigerians have been hopeful for. We've been hoping that some part of our elections will be free, fair and credible. But we saw majority of our Senators, your former colleagues, who said no to electronically transmitting the results. We're still waiting on the House of Representatives on that note hoping that they would be able to change things. There's so many things. And you just started the conversation by saying that this is how we've done electioneering, or this is how internal party politics has been since 1999, and you're telling me that I'm not being fair as to judgments of what is happening within the political party. So please, what is the thing that you can point to to make me hopeful that change has even occurred if we're doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a change? Let me be very, very clear about something. No matter what anybody would say, we have come a long way in the course of trying to improve our electoral processes and our internal party democracy. If you go back to before now, parties didn't even bother with, why are these Congresses important? These Congresses are important because they're the foundation by which the party is going to choose its candidates. But if you remember before now, the leaders of the party simply sat down. If you remember what happened in the MPN and PDP days, the leaders of the party simply sat down and picked up whoever they wanted and submitted the name to INEC, and that was the end of it. But today, because of the various rules and laws that have been put in place over time, people know that that is no longer possible. And now, even when you submit the name of the candidate, you have all the old issues of cogent and verifiable reasons. You can't change them and all that. There is a lot that has happened in the system that has brought us to where we are today. And those are part of the improvements that are taking place. You see, improvement in the system is not... It's like a child that is growing up. If you want the child every day, you will not notice that something is changing. But if you travel, after five years, you come back and see a child, you see that the child is taller, the child is bigger, the child has grown. So that is what is happening to our democracy. Today, we are having a debate about electronic transmission of resource. We didn't have this debate 10 years ago. We didn't have it 20 years ago, but we have it today. So that's where we are now. The desire to improve, the knowledge that we must improve, everybody knows that what we're doing needs to be done better. And even the senators that you're saying disagreed, they did not disagree over the fact that this was not necessary or this was not desirable or this will not help the elections to get better. I think the fulcrum of what they were disagreeing over was to see whether the technological environment in the country is sufficient to support the electronic transmission of results. Which INEC has clearly come out to say it is something that they have done and something that they can do. So I believe that at the end of the day, that issue will be resolved in favor of a better process and not against. Finally, let's go to river state. I want to close on that note. Now, the APC in river state has had its fair share of troubles, like I've said. Different state experiencing problems here and there. Now, you have asked your followers not to participate in that congress, what is the fate of those people who have not participated because it looks like they're going to lose out. I'm going to take you back to 2019 where the APC lost out on all of its tickets during the elections, making the opposition to have the upper hand. What is the fate of the APC in river state with all of this that's happening within the party? How does the party hope to consolidate and be on its feet to be able to take on the PDP come 2023? Well, first of all, it's a misrepresentation of facts to say that I asked my supporters to boycott the congress. That is not correct. They were not allowed to participate because they could not get access to forms. They were not registered and revalidated. Like Muse said, we had no knowledge of where the register was and which register was going to be used. We simply were shot out of the process. Now, across this country, let me give you the example of river state. In river state, you have over 8,000 and something word positions in the party at the word level, which is the elections that were going to be held. Now, if each of these positions are being contested by, say, a minimum of two persons, you have over 16,000 potential nominees to take part in the election. Now, the committee that came to the states to sell forms to members directed that each of these persons who intend to take part in that congress should come physically to the party office and identify themselves before they are given one form. That means that a minimum of 16,000 people would have been expected. Now, when they got to the secretary, no supporter of the minister came to the secretariat to get the form. All the people who came from all across the states were those who are put an unquote seen as not being part of the minister's faction. And so they spent the night there. They had paid people to give them forms. They went to the banks. They paid. The party had said that those who went to the supreme court the last time who were not given forms should be given forms based on their old receipts. When they brought the receipts, the people given the forms said the receipts were faded. They have to go back to the bank to revalidate it. The roads were blocked. It was just one frustration after another and it was totally impossible for them to get the forms because the intention was that they should not be given the forms to participate in the process. That is one. Two. I'm coming, Maria. Now, even before that, the party at the national level had directed based on the report of its own registration and revalidation appeal committee that came to River State had directed that the registration and revalidation exercise in rivers and five other states should resume the committee that was directed to come and oversee the registration of members refused to show up. The party now directed another committee to go back to River State and carry out that exercise. That committee was never publicly authorized by the party to do so. And so while members of the party were in the state mobilizing for registration and revalidation, people arrived to begin to sell forms for congresses. So the entire process from the beginning was designed to shut out people. My asking my supporters not to go there is because if they had gone there, the outcome of it would have been violence. So do you think that you're being targeted? They have both forms. They have no means of participating in the process. What do they be doing there? So do you think that your people, your followers and the people who are opposed to the minister's faction, do you think that you're being targeted? Do you think that it's a deliberate thing from the national to shut those members of your party out? Well, it is clear that there are some godfathers and some supermembers who are stronger than the party because how else do you explain the situation where on the 14th of July, the caretaker committee, the extraordinary convention committee of the party issued a public directive that was contained in the public statement. And this was casually and deliberately discarded by the powers that be. And then again, when you get up to the point of registration, despite all that was happening, the caretaker committee was unable to tell the lady to give these people time and at least give them forms. But later that night, they sent a hundred forms to me. How do you send a hundred forms to me when you are insisted that everybody who is contesting must come to the secret by themselves? And then 12 hours before the beginning of the election, you send me a hundred forms. How did they get those hundred forms? Where else in this country did you see thousands of people through to any party secret anywhere in Nigeria to go and collect forms one by one to take part in a congress that was mainly two days away? Where did that happen in Nigeria? The only place that happened was in River State. So when people do things that are wrong, you do things to oppress other people. You do things without any recourse to any sense of justice or history. This was the same thing that was done that resulted in the case that went up to the Supreme Court. It is the same style. Nothing has changed that is being brought back in 2021. So some of these questions, you need to ask the leader of the party in the state and that's the Minister of Transportation. I was going to close on that note. I was going to ask, so why are you still in the APC if you feel this oppressed, if you feel like an outsider, if you feel that someone is deliberately trying to push you out? Again, do you think that the Minister of Transportation is targeting you as a person in closing? We need to go. First of all, I joined the APC Voluntary. I have a copy of the party constitution. I was a member of the Nigerian Senate when I came from the PDP on the floor of the Senate. That was not a little sacrifice. I almost lost my life to establish the APC in River State. And so nobody, let me repeat for emphasis, nobody has the right or the power to push me out of the party and I'm not going anywhere. I will stay in the party, we will fight for our rights and we will ensure that the right thing is done in the All Progressive Congress in River State. And anybody who is sensible should realize that by now it will be impossible to overcome the determination of members of this party to see that the right thing is done. Nobody can drive over the rights of others and believe that it will be business as should be. It is not going to be. Well, Senator Magnus Abbey, thank you very much for speaking with us. We appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you all for staying with us and being part of the conversation. We'll take a short break and when we return, former chairman of INEC at Tahiru Jega is in the news again and this time is advising Nigerians not to vote for the PDP and the APC. Stay tuned.