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Professor Jibril Aminu is aging and it shows in his physical appearance. But when it comes to Adamawa State politics, the gubernatorial bye-election now postponed, indefinitely, his agility and the adrenalin in him pumps at full speed. According to him, winning the election and returning Murtala Nyako as governor means everything to him.

He told Saturday Sun in Yola during the week that the people of the state as represented by the leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) under his firm leadership, cannot afford to lose the government House to the opposition led by the former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, “because the alternative is not something we want to contemplate. Atiku and his friends who ruled Adamawa over nine years had been an unmitigated disaster to the state, and by extension the people of the country. Our people will do anything they can to stop them coming back to power”

To get this done, Aminu has led campaigns to very remote village in the state, even at the risk of his health. He says he is ready to sacrifice more to ensure that PDP wins the rescheduled governorship election in the state.

“The kind of enthusiasm and the kind of sacrifice I have seen being made by everybody to ensure that PDP reclaims power in the state is so massive and overwhelming, I would not be expected to do anything less”
Aminu’s confidence
“We have been campaigning in the last two weeks in all the small and big towns in the state, we have taken our message to the people and the kind of reception we have received can only be described as a revolution, the truth again is that our people dislike them so much that we are seen as an alternative. So we must have our feet really on the ground,” he said

“The people simply hate them and everything they stand for so much, including the one who wants to contest the election. The sign of what will happen was what happened during the canceled election, we were not in power, Atiku was in government, all the local government chairmen were appointed by them but still we won the election, so if we could do that last time, with all the disadvantages, I think we will do it even it better this time around.”

Origin of problem with Atiku
To be honest with you, I have had problem with Atiku from when he was Vice President, that was when he tried to remove me from the Senate and we had a dog fight with him and he could not remove me. That was the end of the news. Then came the assignment given to me by the party and we clashed and people said we clashed because of our former quarrel, that was not true. I had a responsibility to re-establish offices for the party throughout the entire Adamawa, and to be careful about who I allowed back into the party (laughter), by this time anyway, Atiku had left the party and founded his own party, ACD as it was then called. To us then, we used to call the party ACID.

This is why I do not see any need for people to talk about his returning to the PDP. Let me tell you AC is not in Adamawa, if they say I am lying let them try and let’s see, for people in Sokoto, Rivers, Enugu and the other states of the federation can think otherwise but you need to come to Adamawa to see what people who represent AC did to our state for eight years. Everywhere we have gone to campaign ahead of the elections in the state the people have told Nyako that the developments they have seen in the short period he has been governor have given them more than they ever got in the eight years of the AC people put together.

They did nothing, even from the federal we did not also get anything because he was quarreling with his boss , no minister was coming here because they did not want to be accused of colluding with Atiku, he himself could not get anything from the ministers, so how on earth could things get done here? We were only getting our state allocation, but life for a state was more than just statutory allocation. So that is why some of these had to be done. I had to work for PDP to defeat the AC because what Atiku was doing was to antagonize Obasanjo, PDP and the federal government.

Nigeria since after the 2007 elections
One, it does not look like it is a settled thing, at least not until the court delivers its final judgment on the petitions before them. Until the court’s verdict in favour of the President, many people thought it would be a temporary thing. Umaru (Yar’adua) would be asked to go, that the whole thing would soon be over. The same thing is happening at the state levels, so many senators and members are in court to reclaim their mandates.

This was not the case in the last dispensation in which everybody knew we had won, taken over and was going ahead with our work. So we have not seen that kind of momentum expected to begin and run a government and this is because of that feeling in people that this is exactly not the right atmosphere yet, arising from the impression or feeling of some people that everything is still temporary. Two, the political behavior of politicians is very poor, they don’t respect rules, common standards of decency and the attitude of accepting the outcome of elections only if they are the winners. We must move ourselves away from this tendency to build our democracy.

If only our people can modify their political behavior then we should be ok. It may not be a total success but it was completely an improvement on what we have had in the past. I do not agree that the election was as bad as people are making it seem.

Do you discountenance the fact of connivance with INEC by PDP to rig the April 2007 polls?
That is completely untrue. Our politicians have unnecessarily, an apocalyptic attitude. They are in every election to win, they will do anything to win, they are plagued by the attitude of ‘you must win’ and if they don’t win, the election could not have been free and fair, the chairman must have connived with the other side, then it could not have been free and fair, but this can’t be true.

First, people must accept that we have a very wrong attitude to elections in this country. For people with this kind of negative attitude, you can’t get them to see things otherwise because they can’t lose, they can’t afford to lose; if they do, it will be the end of the world. Even more importantly in my view is the fact that we haven’t got the sophistication for that kind of high standards that we talk about so glibly from the other parts of the world. I am convinced that with our kind of sophistication, we can achieve that level of standards in elections. Going back in history, all crises in this country have been precipitated by elections, and that is because of the attitude of our people.

So why all the criticism?
Nigerians are very assertive, even the poor man is very assertive. So everybody has an opinion on everything. Police has a position on INEC, INEC also has a position on the police and so on. For anything to work everybody must have the attitude of cooperation to work. This attitude of assertiveness by individuals and organizations is counterproductive. In any country other than Nigeria, INEC would have been praised for its conduct of the 2007 elections, especially the presidential elections.

Where else in the world would you hold an election without printing the ballot papers, would a judgment be given five days to the election and that candidate would be put on the ballot paper for an election holding five or six days away? In any other part of the world they would have praised Iwu and his people for a job well done, but not in Nigeria. Look, on the day the presidential election was being held, a charley plane landed in Yola at 6.30 am with the ballot papers, from there Taraba was to be serviced.

For you to get to Gembu or Mambila plateau or even places like Madagali in Adamawa or even to my local government in Song, you require several long hours because all the roads are bad and the distances are far apart. For us in Adamawa, sincerely we don’t have any complaints with the conduct of the elections. We had a very good elections, our candidate was asked to repeat because of what they said is a constitutional issue that somebody was barred from contesting the exercise, other than that, the exercise was fantastic here. Apart from late arrival of materials we don’t have information on the exercise and people don’t have the right sense of counting. They hear 60 million registered voters and they think that if you go round the states you will see the 60 million people sitting and waiting somewhere for you to see.

What about the nullification associated with poor conduct of the polls?
That is not true, most of the nullifications are on technical grounds, and not actual findings of misconduct during the elections. Omehia and Ameachi in Rivers, in Adamawa the same happened. The nullifications did not question the technical capabilities of INEC they merely disagreed with the way some candidates were disqualified from the exercise. The judgment of the courts is not challenging the competence of INEC

So why the siege mentality against INEC?
That is predictable. As Executive Secretary of NUC, I was controlling the policies of the universities, I became Vice Chancelor I was controlling admissions to the university and again as minister of education I was controlling education in the country and education was one of the most required thing in this country, and from those experiences, I got to know that once you are controlling something a lot of people want, then you are in big trouble, you can never be popular. In fact these days, the more a public officer is being abused in Nigeria, the better he is assessed as doing his job. How can you expect them to be happy with INEC when it is stopping them from getting power? INEC is the gate to accessing power, and that is what many people want. So they must be ready to face insults and to be abused. Iwu or no Iwu, electoral law or no electoral law, INEC will always be unpopular, because they are holding something everybody wants, and people who do not get it will have to find somebody to blame

But INEC could still do better particularly in the area of corruption. I remember Iwu coming to the Senate to tell us that you can trust the state governors to corrupt the resident electoral commissioners. That is one area I will request him to do some work on. I remember in 1997 I went to the UK to monitor elections, and it was raining and the women in charge of the polling booth took the booth into her living room and people were going in there to vote and were thanking her for allowing them to come into her house.

In Adamawa we had a slightly similar situation during the National Assembly election. My friend, ABG built a school in the town and it was raining and he advised that the polling booth be moved inside the school to avoid the papers getting wet, do you know that the parties could not agree to move the booth inside the school? Instead, they said let the papers get wet, let it get wet, you can imagine that, they were alleging he was going to cheat, for God’s sake how can he cheat? That happened maybe because people did not have confidence in the system.

Iwu and criticisms
As a university man, you will expect me to be kind with Iwu. However, whenever a university man comes into government, I feel worried, because they don’t know the system, which is full of experienced and vicious civil servants. I know every university man who comes on board is at risk because we have ways of doing things that are different from what you will find in government. But the truth is that when you talk to him, you do not get the feeling of a man who has come to dupe you.

He comes out spontaneously. With my experience, I can tell when you are not telling the truth or trying to hold something back. Iwu never tried to hold something back. His explanations were so simple that adversaries find it difficult to believe him. They said he had extra ballot papers in South Africa, he may or he may not. To me it is stupid to say that because he had 60 million voters he had to print 60 million voters card and not 70 or 65 million cards. Ok, suppose a bomb blew off INEC office in Abuja and the voters card, what would have happened with the elections?. Would it not have been easier to handle if you had extra voters card somewhere? Rather, people wanted him to flood everywhere with the card during the elections.

Let me tell you that there is no way you can convince people who already are convinced you are out to stop them from getting what they want. Iwu may not be a perfect man, but I think he tried to do his job. In trying to do his job, people identified him with some friends and political ideas, but it is easy for people who lose to find somebody to blame for their failure and this is what is happening with Iwu. Knowing the operations and law setting up INEC, I can tell you that Iwu isn’t as powerful as people are ascribing to him. INEC as an organization is very democratic with a board of commissioners with equal powers. Iwu on his own can’t take decisions on elections, such decision are taken democratically between him and the commissioners.

Atiku and criticisms against Iwu
When people make comments, they sometimes forget that they are inadvertently saying some things about themselves and their views about life and their basic attitude to the situation. Atiku’s basic attitude to life is that anything can be done and everything goes. He thinks that there is always a Mr. Fix it to always turn things around in his favour using whatever means of lubrication to do it. That is the kind of thing because I don’t see why they should target poor Professor Iwu. What they are doing is just a cheap shot, how can they say the man was the person doing and determining everything that happened during the elections. Because Iwu is chairman of INEC, he is only a cheap target that every person can attack. I know that there are a lot of ways Iwu can improve the performance of INEC, his staff and the level of corruption in the commission, but sincerely speaking, I am convinced that the man has done a good job and he should be commended for doing that.