In this interview with PREMIUM TIMES’ Shehu Sani, the senator representing Kaduna Central, speaks about speaks about federal lawmakers’ controversial jumbo pay, his disagreement with his state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, and other issues.
Question: In your constituency and home state, you seem to have some friction with your governor and friend, El Rufai. What is really happening?
Shehu Sani responds: What is going on in Kaduna State is not personal, but more ideological, particularly the way our people are treated and governance is going on. I wanted to contest the governorship of the state in 2015. I opened offices in the three senatorial zones of the state. Later, there were pressures on me to step down by people who said there was a preferred candidate, who was Nasir El Rufai. I listened to them and stepped down. I went on to contest for the Senate. But, there was incumbent Senator, that contested the primaries, and I ejected him, by winning the ticket.
Nasir did not contest against an APC governor. He contested with others who were also not governors and won. Nasir and Isa Ashiru were the two major contenders out of the five that contested the primaries with Nasir. Nasir got about 1,600 votes in the primaries from the three senatorial zones. I got over 920 votes from one senatorial district. If I had contested the governorship, he could not have beaten me.
I contested the Senatorial election and won. And the two gubernatorial candidates all have their preferred senatorial candidates. Nasir had his own preferred senatorial candidate, who was the incumbent, General Sani, whom I removed.
The other candidate also had another preferred candidate, Sani Suleiman, the former local government chairman. One can see that the two gubernatorial candidates had their own senators they want to work with. And I combined both Nasir and his opponent and thrashed all of them in the election.
I told them that I was going to win this seat without giving anybody any kobo. I challenge any politician in Kaduna under APC to come and say that he did not give people money to win elections in the state.
Having won the primaries and general elections, we decided to say let’s work together for the success of the party. I won my senate elections before Nasir won his gubernatorial elections. After the victory, Nasir set up a transition committee and put all the other senators, and even the senatorial candidate who lost the elections, without my name there. I had to draw his attention to that omission. As a sitting senator, there is no way a transition committee would be set up without my name there.
He said it was an oversight and assured me that my name would be included. During his inauguration and swearing in, I was there. We went round during the campaigns. After he won, it came to the point of sharing positions, he asked me to send the list of my people for appointment, which I did. But he threw the list away and decided to allocate some Commissioners to the other senator representing zone 1, and from my zone, he gave it to the person I defeated in the primaries. Even my local government, no appointment, not even a councillor was considered.
Will Nasir El-Rufai be happy for the President to giving appointment to the person he defeated in primary elections without consulting him? Will he be happy for the President of our country to be asking his opponent to give the list of ministerial and Board appointments, only for it to be thrown away?
So, what he was doing was simply gathering opposition and empowering people who are determined to fight me. He never knew that I am an old fighter. He said he is stubborn, but he cannot be more stubborn than a person who spent so many years in jail. I believe Nasir’s men came to the political scene in 1999, whereas I have been in the trenches even before anybody heard of Nasir’s name. You go back to Abacha and Babangida eras and see how we stood up against military dictatorship and tyranny.
Kaduna is a place I was born, live and won my election. I never lived in Abuja. All my family are in Kaduna. There is no street in Kaduna that I don’t know people and people do not know me. Since 1998, when we came out of prison, I have never stepped out of Kaduna for more than one week. So, one can see how entrenched I am there. That is why I said I will win election without giving anybody any kobo. And people never believed. But, by God’s grace it happened. I did.
With all these appointments Nasir did, he had simply drawn a line for the first issue. The second issue is the way he is running Kaduna State since he took over. First, he appointed about seven party executives into his government, namely the state Chairman of the party, who is now the deputy governor; State secretary, who is a Commissioner; the auditor, also a Commissioner; assistant Legal Adviser, now also a Commissioner; Financial Secretary, organising Secretary, now the Chairman, Publicity Secretary, Auditor, ex-officio members are all Chairmen of local government councils.
You don’t do things like that and expect people to keep quiet. You must separate the party from the government. Effectively today, in Kaduna there is no APC executive, because all members of the executive are in Nasir’s cabinet.
Three, on the issue of demolitions, I could not have said anything if Nasir said he was recovering lands from hospitals, schools, and the affected persons have been given alternative lands or where to go. When you see a house, one is talking about the entire family, consisting husband, wife, children, grandchildren and livelihood tied to the family.
Nasir simply gave them two weeks to vacate before sending bulldozers to pull down everything. Abuja of 2007 is definitely not the same thing as Kaduna 2015. In a democracy, whatever you want to do people must be carried along.
Now, Nasir sent bulldozers to demolish houses belonging to families, rendering them homeless, particularly women and children, who were scattered everywhere. Nasir does not know Kaduna, because he has spent so much time in Abuja to the point that he does not know what Kaduna is about. He does not know the sensitivity of those places, and the problem that action is going to generate.
Most of these people were given their land papers by the previous administration. Nasir says he has brain. But, all animals that have brains have hearts. But only human beings have a human heart. You met a people that were impoverished , destroyed, exploited and demoralised by the PDP in the last 16 years, and at one go, out of all the policies and programmes in the whole world on health, education, jobs and empowerment, for Nasir, what is priority is demolition of houses belonging to the people. I told him that that is not going to work in Kaduna. You demolish in Abuja and get away with it, where you have rich and power people, who most of them must have built their houses from questionable means, but not in Kaduna, a rural state where people are struggling to survive. Here people are prepared to die for their family land.
After he did that in Zaria, he has not been able to do the same in Kaduna, because people rose up to resist it.
On the hawkers, students of political science and political economy would know that whatever policy direction is taking place, one must decide which side one belongs. Nasir belongs to the ultra-conservative rightist reactionary group. They are for privatization, elite, bourgeois and bourgeois reforms and capitalist ideas. They see people as statistics for GNP (gross national product) and GDP (gross domestic product). Nasir is a man, who, all his life, has espoused capitalist ideas and conservative rightist philosophy. I am from the political left, rooted with the masses. In all our ideas, we are concerned about how we can carry the people along.
The hawkers we see on the roads are the by-products of an exploitative and repressive socio-economic system to which the likes of Nasir El Rufai have propagated all the years. You don’t address the problem of beggars by packing them in a vehicle and sending them to their state of origin. The same people in the North who cried that Lagos, Port Harcourt and other states in South were throwing away beggars are the ones now doing same in Kaduna.
For me, before one takes an action there must be an alternative. For those he demolished their houses, he never gave them an option. For the beggars he sent out of the streets, he never gave them an alternative means of livelihood, by giving them capital to start their business. All the three attempts he has made have failed. The beggars are back in the streets. The hawkers are back to business. His demolition cannot proceed. This is to show you that if that policy was actually in the best interest of the people, they could have been effective.
You cannot have dirty underwear and lock it up in a cupboard and say you have solved the problem. You are deceiving yourself. You have to wash it.
