Senator Adeyeye: Buhari Has No Choice But To Leave In 2023

Senator Sola Adeyeye, a Professor of Biology, was the Chief Whip in the 8th Senate where he represented Osun Central Senatorial District. He featured as a guest on Channels Television where he spoke on latest developments in the polity such as rumoured Third Term agenda, state police, restructuring and other issues. TEMIDAYO AKINSUYI who monitored the session brings the excerpts:

President Buhari recently said he is not contemplating going for a Third term, but the PDP said he doesn’t need to say that while Pastor Tunde Bakare said he should pick his successor. Where do you stand on this?

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First and foremost, there has been so much rumours in the press and social media about third term. If the President had kept totally quiet, the same PDP will say ‘oh, he has kept quiet because he is planning third term’. Now the man now said and I believe him that he is going to leave in 2023, and he has no choice than to leave because that’s what our constitution says. Even if we change that constitution, the beneficiary will not be the present occupier of that office. In any case by the grace of God, we will not change that constitution in that respect. Therefore, I believe the President when he said he is not considering a third term and I believe that the PDP is playing extremely poor politics that the nation does not need at this critical time.

What is the extremely poor politics?

We need to focus on the problems of the nation. We need to focus on the problem of federalism; we need to focus on the problem of resources. For a nation of about 200 million people, we just passed a budget of $29b, a bit more than the budget of Harvard University for one year. Egypt with only about a hundred million people passed a budget of about $90b. South Africa with only about 34 million people, that is about 17 percent of the population of Nigeria passed a budget of about of $130b. We are in a mess. We are pathetically poor and Nigerian politicians are acting as if things are honky-dory. They are not!

As a chieftain of the APC, you said the problem of Nigeria is the present constitution, but why has your party not done anything about this constitution?

Unfortunately, the issue of amending the constitution belongs primarily to the legislature. People can blame Buhari for all they want; People can blame Oshiomhole for all they want. As far as I am concerned, the bulk begins on the table of Dr. Ahmad Lawan , the President of the Nigerian Senate and Barrister Femi Gbajabiamila, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Let them begin the process now. That does not mean we should go through the same exercise we went through in the past. If we do, we will end up with the same result that we had in the past. What do I mean by that? If we try to revive the whole thing, you get bogged down by all kinds of issue, and at the end you achieve nothing. Let them take specific items, debate them and set for this republic a target of what we can achieve in the next three years. If we don’t achieve them in the next three years, by the time the election stream gets full blast in 2022, it will be too late to do anything.

Where do you leave the issue of the 2014 national conference?

Had anybody gone to court to challenge that conference, he would have won because even the constitution does not have room for such a body. That is why I believe we should hold to the tip of the current legislature. Let us not deceive ourselves. There is nowhere in the world where constitiutions are changed drastically overnight. Some of these things will be done piecemeal but I believe there are five or six items that we can look at critically. If we look at them, we will begin to move this nation forward. For example, I am glad that the federal government and the governors now are talking about state policing. Only this past week, we read about ‘Operation Amotekun. Whatever it means, I know that some state governors will take it. Here in Lagos, we have LASTMA. Whether we like it or not, LASTMA is a kind of police. There is a way in which this current constitution, we can push it to its limit and I believe that the state governors should be bold enough to do that.

How can they do that?

Under President Olusegun Obasanjo, the then governor of Zamfara state, Ahmed Yerima pushed this nation to its limits with his Sharia law and he got away with it. The whole thing has now created some kinds of problems that we have in some states in Nigeria, because as Obasanjo said and I believe correctly, what Yerima was doing then was political sharia. But the truth is, he pushed the system and some governors in the South needs to be courageous; some governors in the Middle-Belt need to be courageous and I dare say that some governors in the North need to be courageous to say ‘Some of these things are not working for us, what can we do to make this Republic work? Why should the import of a Republic of about 200 million people go through only one port? Ports in the United States don’t even belong to the federal government, they don’t even belong to the state, they belong to the cities and yet, in all of those ports, they are manned by federal agents. Let’s give Warri a chance to build a port, let’s give Port Harcourt a chance to build a port, give Calabar a chance to build a port . Just put checks in places that they don’t become places where the integrity of the country can be compromised. Once you do that, we will free Lagos. Apapa right now is a chaos and it is a shame to all Africans, especially Nigeria.