By Kemi Yesufu
Honourable Yusuf Tugga is a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress(APC) in Bauchi. A close ally of President Muhammadu Buhari, he contested for the office of governor in 2010 under the defunct Congress for Progressives Change (CPC).
He was one of the leaders of APC in Bauchi state that dragged the state governor before the President and the party over allegations of impropriety.
In this interview, he speaks on the crisis in the Bauchi APC which has pitched the Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu against Governor Mohammed Abubakar and his supporters .
You were one of the Bauchi APC leaders who recently visited the president and the leaders of the party. What are real issues causing disaffection among the party leaders in your state?
First of all, I will like to say it is really unfortunate, that we share the same political party with Governor Abubakar. That is, myself, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Yakubu Dogara, the three senators representing the state, the 12 members of the House of Representatives, the Minister for Education, all found ourselves in this situation. We had to speak up against the policies, or lack of it by Governor Abubakar, the divisive politics that he has been practicing and the threat posed by his style of governance to our home state of Bauchi.
This is why we feel that we cannot just look the other way. We cannot, as leaders and as stakeholders, as people and as indigenes, look the other way while our state is being destroyed by one individual and his praise singers.
Did you and others who aren’t comfortable with his style of administration make your complaints known to him before coming to Abuja?
That is why we decided to come together and take these steps. It is not personal, it is based on issues, it is based on several attempts that failed to make him see the light, to make him change his ways.
If that fails, the next thing you need to do is take the necessary steps to prevent further danger to the state, and this is what we are doing.
Like in earlier cases in other states, the governor described your group as Abuja politicians who are not in touch with the people at the grassroots.
It’s not enough to just try to label people Abuja politicians because that is the song that the governor and his aides and praise singers have been singing. But what defines an Abuja politician? Because if you are elected as the Speaker of the House of Representatives or as senator or member of the House of Representatives, where are you supposed to reside? Are you not supposed to be serving in Abuja? So, is it not laughable for you to be labeled an Abuja politician? And if you take somebody like me, I am not holding any public office. Yes, I used to be a legislator, but at the moment, I am not holding any public office.
When Bauchi has been ruined, there are no opportunities; I am a businessman, do you expect me to go and just sit in Bauchi and simply watch the state unravel right before my eyes? So there are no opportunities that have been created. If they want us to become Bauchi based politicians, then the governor should make sure he puts Bauchi in order. Should anyone begin to say most educated people that are either in business or actually working in the federal civil service are not indigenes of the state?
There is this issue of bailout funds which is the main basis of your allegations against the governor. But he said, after seeing the president to explain his position, that only a hundred million Naira or less was not used to pay workers salary in Bauchi but that a sizeable chunk of the money, about N8 billion, was used to pay salaries?
I am very sure of my facts. We know how much Bauchi is earning. We know how much Bauchi was also getting from the bailout. Like I said, when the premise itself is wrong, when you are not able to tell us how much exactly the state is owing, you don’t even know, then it gives you room to play with figures. If you have some clever accountants that can juggle figures, you can print anything and present it and that’s what he has done.
But the cold war, to outsiders is like a gang up by the elite against the governor. Is that the true picture?
What will be the reason for the gang up? Why would we gang up against him? Why did we not gang up before and reject him? This is the question you should be asking and he should be asking himself. It is easy enough to just play the victim and say ‘there is a gang up against me’. He has to examine himself to see what he is doing that is wrong and he has to also bear in mind that 12 members of the House of Representatives, three senators, minister and some of us that are stakeholders that actually help build this party in Bauchi State and Nigeria as a whole, are coming from different works of life and different constituencies. It is not likely that all of us will simply wake up one day and decide that we want to gang up against the governor. And even before this visit we made to the national secretariat of the party, some of us, I wasn’t present, had actually invited him for a private meeting and had tried to appeal to him to change his ways, to be more conciliatory towards people in the state and to address certain issues.
There were certain actions he was taking that were alienating him from not just us that you referred to as elite, but also civil servants in the state that were not being paid their salaries, teachers, traditional rulers from ward level up. Mind you, it is not a good excuse to just say you are going to scrap some schools because the state can no longer afford them because when you were campaigning and making promises, you should have known that you are not going to be able to do that. You should have done your home work.
The governor said he met with your group and the meeting was supposed to continue on another date but you weren’t patient enough. How true is that?
Put yourself in our shoes. You approach someone and tell him please, there is a problem with the way you are conducting yourself. We want to work with you and there is something you are doing right now that is going to have terrible repercussions on the people of the state.
Please, don’t do it. And then you turn to the person and say I give my word, I am not going to do it, and the next day, you do what you promised you were not going to do. You tell me, what would you think of that person and do you continue to hope against hope?