PDP will drive public life from the back bench —Engr Babalola

By OLUSESAN LAOYE

Engineer Femi Babalola, the owner of the famous Jogor Centre in Ibadan is one of the last seven PDP governorship aspirants in the 2015 elections in Oyo State. Though he expressed his reservations over the process that produced Senator Teslim Folarin, he refused to quit the party like others. In this interview with OLUSESAN LAOYE in Ibadan, Babalola says that they will restore PDP to its boisterous health. He added that the PDP will drive public life from the back bench. Excerpts:

With the defeat of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the last general election and what is happening in the party now do you still believe the PDP can bounce back to reckoning?

The PDP by its intrinsic characteristics will remain a viable political party in the country. In fact it has greater capacity for viability than the APC notwithstanding the outcome of the last general election. You have to understand the makeup of the party to appreciate its strength. Components that constituted the PDP dated back before the present fourth republic. These components were generic and quite tangent to the nation. The PDP is built on very strong foundation and it will be very difficult to break the sinew. It will be simplistic to doubt the party’s resilience or write it off. But this is not so with the APC. We cannot forget the fact that the APC is a marriage of convenience. Throughout our political history, we have seen that mergers of political parties have never really worked. Though we have seen the APC apparently breaking that jinx by winning the federal election, it is not certain how long that amalgam would work.

That fabric is not neatly knitted and anything can happen anytime. The PDP will be more capable of intrinsic rejuvenation than any other political party in the country and it will definitely bounce back. The party’s loss generates interest because nobody expected it to lose because of its size as the second largest party in whole of Africa, but loss of elections by a big party is not new to history. India’s biggest political party the Congress Party has severally lost election and it is presently out of power. In US, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have variously lost election at times least expected. At a time, serial victories of the Republicans almost pushed the Democrats to the background. But that had not undermined the viability of these political parties. In spite of panic exit, the PDP will remain the largest party in Nigeria. It will take years of exit of members for the party to plummet, but we will not allow that. Recently, those in APC admitted that there are still many good people in the PDP. That is very true. Efforts of these good people will save the party

You happen to be someone very close to the former Governor of Oyo State, Otunba Adebayo Alao Akala, you also contested the PDP governorship primaries with him and others, why did you decide to remain in PDP when your colleagues left long ago?

I do not need to leave the PDP to offer selfless service to Nigeria. Those leaving the PDP have not considered the dialectical implication. A politician would have been most insulted if he is considered to be unprincipled. Politics is principle driven and I remember Senator Bola Tinubu mentioned that recently. So I don’t envy those going to the APC. Besides, political parties should not be reduced to shifting coalitions. But then, the Nigerian polity is ripe for bipartisanship and the polity will benefit immensely from across party collaboration. As Nigerian political parties embrace détente and intensify bipartisanship, the political environment will become less acrimonious and defection will be discouraged because you are able to contribute to national development in whatever political party.

A clear proof of my point was the President Buhari’s endorsement and push of Dr. Adewumi Adesina for the presidency of the African Development Bank, AfDB when Adesina was essentially in PDP as incumbent minister in the former President Goodluck Jonathan administration. This should be the new attitude among politicians in the interest of the country. If you recall stalemate in the US that led to the shutdown, matters were resolved through resort to bipartisanship. If party rigidity had been sustained; the shutdown would have lingered with adverse effect on that country. In Oyo State here, I have advocated all-party support for Governor Ajimobi in order to move the state forward and allow it attain its full potential. Politicians across political parties in the state must be willing to collaborate with the incumbent notwithstanding how they feel about the governor or the ruling APC. It is high time politicians synergize in the interest of the masses that look up to the political class for gains of democracy.

You said you will still remain in PDP but you are calling for support for both Buhari and Ajimobi. What are your expectations from Ajimobi?

The governor should champion bipartisanship and interact with politicians across party lines. Ordinarily, there should be no problem with Ajimobi’s triumph. The governor only needs to put up the best civil behavior and encourage politicians in other parties to work with him. He should know God put him there and should conduct himself as governor of all. I will implore him this time to look inward in selecting his aides. He can no longer expect that problems of the state can be solved by outsiders. He should work with aides who are familiar with the state and understand the cultural context they operate. A second term governor who has no eye on the next election should function as a statesman whose gaze is on the next generation.

He simply has to devote himself to policies and programmes that will position the state for the future. He has to deliver more on welfare and improve quality of life. In this respect, he needs a sense of empathy and his aides must also be empathy sufficient. They must think that children in public schools are like their children, patients in public hospitals are like their family members and the people struggling on the streets are like themselves. He must seek to expand opportunities. It is not time to bruise the feelings of the people. If the government fails to help in this respect, it diminishes itself. Besides that, the governor must devote himself to creating jobs. This he can do through deliberate engagement of the Lebanese business community in the state. The Lebanese are the largest employer of labour in the state. He can engage them in fashioning strategies to widen the scope of job opportunities they offer.

The governor should also consider infrastructural expansion in agriculture. Enhanced mechanization of agriculture and deliberate deployment of industries to harness value chain in the sector will lead to expansion of job opportunities on farms. That will engage all categories of workers from mechanics to doctors, accountants, engineers among others. Education in the state must move from the hyped free education to that which instills in students the tools to adapt and innovate in a climate of constant technological change.

But some politicians have held that the PDP is in a free fall the end of which is not yet in sight. Don’t you believe this?

That is the wishful thinking in certain quarters. For us who feel the pains, we know we need a quick intervention to arrest the present trend and restore members’ confidence in the party. If a trailer breaks down and it is repaired, it will come back to action as an intimidating long articulated vehicle and not as keke NAPEP. That is the worry of opponents who don’t wish the PDP quick return to its old self.

The National Assembly election which produced Senator Bukola Saraki as the Senate President and Yakubu Dagora as the Speaker House of Representatives is sending a signal that the former PDP in APC may be planning their way back to the PDP?

You should remember that Baraje is one time national secretary and acting national chairman of the party. The five governors and others who left with him were also core members of the party. In APC where they are, they have maintained a close tie and a sense of commonality. And this played out in the recent National Assembly elections. In politics, all sort of things happen. That is why the conditioning factor in politics is the dictum no permanent friends, no permanent enemies but permanent interest. This is very true of Nigerian politics. So you cannot foreclose any development.

For a party that has called the shots for 16 years, how will the next four years look like for the PDP?

The irony is that the PDP will more or less still rule the country from outside office. It will still be the party to look up to. Nigerians may pretty turn to the party for hope that would see the nation through the next four years. The country will witness for the first time brilliant alternatives and options a very vibrant opposition could offer in a democracy. We will deepen competitive political system the way opposition has never done before. Options the PDP comes up with may be the mainstay of our democracy in the next four years. For instance, as the nation’s economy limps due to poor performance of oil in the international market, the PDP may lead in profiling policies for post petroleum economy in the country, while the ruling party grapples with the daunting task of socio-political delivery. You can see that the PDP will be able to drive public life from the back bench so to say.

Immediately after the election there were agitations for the removal of the members of the National Working Committee (NWC) of the PDP, what is your take on this?

It is important as a party that we avoid hasty generalization and value judgment. I do not think the party so far has investigated how it lost the general election, so how come we apportion blame? I think it was defeat trauma and from the look of things, it is subsiding now as we come to terms with the reality. Even if we had won, the party would still have investigated the victory vis a vis electioneering and expenditure among others.

As a politician, what is your take for 2019?

It will be too early for anyone to be talking of 2019 now. We have just had a general election with severe aftermath for the PDP. A reasonable preoccupation now is how to rebuild the party and fix its features. I am going to be part of the national contrivance to reposition the party. The problem appears rather simple in Oyo State, but it is not so in other parts of the country. And since the party is one strong national body, we in Oyo State are concerned with the right therapy to restore the party to its boisterous health.

Why do you say that the problem in the Oyo PDP is not as serious as it is elsewhere?

I am not denying the fact that the party in Oyo State has its share of the overall crisis in the PDP. Without mincing words, that played out here during the last general election. But right from the time the Baraje splinter group emerged, we knew the party had a big problem to grapple with but the party here maintained neutrality. The Oyo PDP was not part of that problem at all. What we sought to do then was to make all sides to the crisis see reasons and we appealed for calm. You can see that the Oyo PDP has always been matured in the way it handles issues. When I positioned that the PDP has no serious problems here, I am saying it is not something outside our capacity to resolve. We have what it takes to resolve crisis and not allow it to snowball.

I am aware that the party in the state will come up with a machinery to reconcile all members, seek return of those who left and forge a common course for the future. By the pattern of the last governorship election in the state, it became clear that the PDP is still the preferred party except that we splintered our votes. All the votes that went to the Accord Party, Labour Party and the SDP were all PDP votes. You can see that what the APC scored, in spite of the expected bandwagon effect of the Buhari’s victory, was a minority vote. So you can see what I mean that the PDP does not have serious problems here. All we have to do is to reach out to all aggrieved individuals and fashion a truce.