Before leaving the All Progressives Congress (APC) for Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Mohammed Dele Belgore used to be a leading chieftain of the opposition in Kwara State, having been the governorship candidate of the defunct ACN. He left APC alongside his associates and supporters when the former governor of the state, Bukola Saraki, and his group defected to the APC. In this interview with journalists, including Correspondent, DELE MOSES, the former governorship candidate gives details on why his group took the decision, which he described as inevitable, and why the PDP will win the 2015 election in the state. Excerpts: 

How do you feel being in the PDP after your defection from the APC?

I believe that our decision is in tune with what people wanted. We are in a party where the people feel they have a fair chance to participate in its affairs, to pursue their aspirations and where they feel that the forces that held them back in the past have departed. On a general basis, we are quite comfortable where we are now.

At what point did you arrive at the decision to leave APC and what prompted you to take the decision?

It was never easy. It was a difficult decision that took us months to arrive at, but the turning point for us was when we felt we had exhausted all remedies for equity and justice within the APC and when the clamour for us to leave had reached the peak. We can no longer continue. It is not about me, as I have always said. It is not just Dele Belgore on his own deciding that he was going to change party. It is not only Dele Belgore alone who started it, who has been in this struggle since 2010; it was a collective decision based on collective and mutual consideration, and it got to a point whereby we had to take the decision that we took.

Did you write the leadership of the APC on your position before you left the party, and what was the response?

Well, I didn’t myself write personally because, like I said, I didn’t have a personal grievance directly; but we wrote as a group. As a large part of APC, we wrote petitions, but none of the petitions was even acknowledged.

Senator Bukola Saraki recently said he came to you and appealed that you should not leave APC for the PDP. Why did you not consider his words?

Well, he gave a piece of advice, and I said “thank you very much; we will consider it”. We considered, we weighed it along other factors and we decided to take the decision we took. We took a decision that is in the best interest of our supporters.

Can you disclose those other factors you weighed the advice against?

There were factors; for instance, you mentioned one of them that we started the APC; we nurtured the party to such a position that it became very attractive, so it wasn’t easy to turn your back away from that. That was one of the factors. The other thing was that our first priority was to try and force a change within. The third factor is the overall interest of our supporters, and we found that they have switched off APC. Then we also looked at what were the rules upon which we were going to be playing, where the rules were fairer, and we concluded that the way APC structure was set up was already predetermined as to the outcome they wanted to achieve, and that was not acceptable to us. So, those among other things were the factors we took into consideration.

As you are working for a change in governance at the state level, the APC is also prosecuting that project at the national level. Why did you not remain in the party so that if the change at the national level is accomplished, you can be regarded as part of those who worked for it?

All politics is local and we start with local consideration. The local consideration is that the APC arrangement was not in our community interest and was not in the interest of our supporters and our cause. So, irrespective of what was going on at the national level, we first took consideration of our local interest and local circumstance. Having now decided that our local interest is with the PDP, we then joined forces within the PDP to support the party all the way to the centre. What APC was doing at the centre did run counter to our interest in the state and therefore it is not acceptable. You first work at your local base then you support the national. We are in the PDP now; we are now committed to the success of the PDP at all levels under the leadership of the President. We are committed to success of PDP at all levels, but we first start at our local base.

What is the local interest?

It is simple; people have advocated for a change from bad government. They have advocated for a change from a system of patronage for select few to a system of meritocracy for the wider number, for equal opportunity for government’s attention, government’s resources and for a political space to be open up to everybody whereby there are no second-class citizens in the state. As regards people’s aspiration, there should be no limit to individual aspiration. You should not have to be going to somebody’s place. We want a breakaway from a fiefdom system of government that we run under a democratic setting. It is an aberration to have a fiefdom system of government under a democratic system. That is what we constantly advocated and that is what the people have been agitating for. Go to the people and you find out that that is the cause and that cause has not changed. That cause is constant. What is happening now is that we are now teeming up with like minds who share this belief but whose voices were not heard because certain characters were in the PDP that suppressed them. Now that those characters have departed, we’ve found a common bond in that to be able to propagate that cause.

But would you have left APC if your request that the structure of the party in the state should not be handed over to Saraki is yielded to by the national leadership of the party?

Well, correction; we never personalised any of these and we never picked up Senator Saraki or anybody else. What we said was that there should be a level-playing field, such that everybody then tests the level of his popularity within the party and goodluck to whoever emerges as the winner. That’s what we’ve always said. We never singled out any one person. Let me borrow Chief Mike Ahamba’s analogy which I found extremely graphic and useful. He said that the APC arrangement is like a 100 metre race where you put your favourite runner at the 60th metre point and you ask everybody to go to the starting block. The result of the race is predetermined. It is that predetermined nature that we strongly advocated against, not about any individual.

Would you say it was wrong to make the sitting governor the leader of the party in the state as APC seems to do?

Nobody quarrels with the governor being a leader, but let him be a notional leader, okay! Even where you have full congress in a party, you don’t automatically give the governor certain positions; you don’t automatically say he nominates the chairman, you don’t say in an exco of nine the governor automatically gets five positions. What you do is that you recognise that the governor is the leader of your party, he puts up his candidate presumably because he is the governor. He may have more support, more resources, wherewithal and what have you, then his candidate emerges. So, being a governor by virtue of his position, the position already confers him with a lot of implicit advantages, but you don’t say that the governor is the one that brings the chairman. Of these nine positions, five are automatically the governor’s. You predetermine the result.

The Kwara APC seems to be claiming that majority members of the former ACN members remain in the APC and that the exit of your group from the party is not felt.

Personally, I will rather talk less about the APC because we’ve moved on. But my simple reaction to that is: why is that so much interest there in the APC in our leaving the party? Several press statements have been issued. People have been sponsored to hold press conferences. Why does it bother them so much? If our supporters did not follow us, if it is good riddance as they claimed, then they should be more than happy that we left. Why are they expending so much time and resources attacking the fact that we have left? We merely exercised our democratic and constitutional right in the same way as some of their own people did. So, I’d rather not talk of APC anymore because we have moved on.

There is this fear in some quarters that as the PDP is attracting bigwigs into its fold, the party may suffer internal crisis over leadership tussle. What is your view on this?  

The presence of strong personalities can only make a party vibrant, so that is a good thing. I can tell you confidently that we are all working towards a common cause and what is that common cause. One, moving the PDP in the state to that strong and vibrant party which will control the affairs of the state in 2015 and also building the party to win the presidential election and elections for National Assembly seats in the state. We are all working together towards that. Whatever competition that may emerge later, which is natural, would be healthy; but there is a common purpose. So, it is a good thing that we have all these important personalities and it is an indication of emergence of a vibrant party.

In case there are many of you seeking to clinch ticket of the party for governorship race and you are asked to shelve your ambition. How would you likely take it?

Well, I happen to come in for that purpose; but if it does, we would do whatever is necessary to be done in the overall interest of our common objective which is to bring about change in Kwara.

What is the prospect envisaged by the PDP in the state? 

The prospect is that we will win at all levels. That is our objective.

Part of reasons APC is citing for its confidence of winning the 2015 election is its claim that the number of people who registered as its members recently outnumbered that of the people who voted the government elected in the last election. What is your comment on this?

Even when they give you that figure, you question that kind figure. You can never get the membership registration exceeding the popular vote because people who came out to register are people who want to be member of your party. At the election, the majority of people who vote are not members of a party. So when they tell you that they register members exceeding the number of people who voted in the last election, then you must know that is phony. And then, what figure are we looking at? They have given about three different figures. The evidence on ground is that the turn-out was very poor and they then had to resort to all sorts of disinformation. Civil servants and other people were cajoled to go out and register. If they had this number, they won’t need to. If you have 384,000 or whatever figure they are saying registering for you as a party, go to sleep, you don’t have to campaign for any general election; just tell your party members to come out and vote and that is okay; you don’t need the populace anymore.

Why do you believe PDP would win at all levels considering that APC, at present, controls government both at local and state levels with legislative houses?

Go back to 2011 and election results of 2011, you will see quite clear that we challenged almost all of these positions. In our view, they didn’t win all of these. When you say part of it is that they won all the local governments. In that process, you also included Offa which is a recent memory; did they win there too?

What do you feel about the centenary year the country just celebrated? 

At a time like this, people generally lament the state of the nation; but let us give ourselves a pat on the back that we have stayed together in the multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi- ethnic amalgamation of Nigeria. Holding together and making progress is an achievement. Also, since 1999, we have a democratic government; that in itself is an achievement because more people are getting involved in governance. Of course, we could have done better; there is always room for improvement. We could have done better; Nigeria still needs to find its feet and its proper position in the comity of nations.  There are giant strides, but we do have something to celebrate in this centenary.

How do you think the country can overcome the terrorist attack which is especially being persistently experienced in the North East?

It is hard in those areas to make meaningful progress, to have a kind of social and economic development that the people deserve. So the menace of terrorism has to be tackled. We shouldn’t play politics with it. They should look at it as a cancer in our society and in the world. Let us rise above politics. Let people of all divides, religious and political persuasions put heads together and tackle the menace. It is not one man’s problem. It is not the President’s problem. It is not the government’s problem. It is not problem of any governor of the particular affected states. It is our problem.

What do you think the country should do about the alleged failure of Cameroun to cooperate with us on the fight against the terrorists?

If it is true that Cameroun is harbouring militants and not cooperating with the Federal Government of Nigeria to rout terrorists, then first of all the matter has to be taken up at the highest level, at the presidential, European level. If that does not achieve any result, we then have to show our might as a large and more powerful of the two countries. We can easily suffocate Cameroun by shutting our borders to them, by blocking trade. We can bring them to their knees if we have to, but that is the last resort and we hope they do not push us to it.

Besides, if they fail to do something, that menace of terrorist may come and affect them. It is like riding on a tiger’s back.  The day the tiger is hungry, the first person it may turn to may be the one riding on its back. You may be going around saying, you have got the tiger’s protection, but if the tiger is hungry, the first person it turns to may be you.