INTERVIEW: Hungry Nigerians will determine 2027 elections outcome — not coalition, says Dalung

Solomon Dalung, sports minister between 2015 and 2019, has never been one to hold back. A founding member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Dalung parted ways with the ruling party in 2022. Known for his outspoken views, he has consistently made scathing assessments of the policies of President Bola Tinubu’s administration

In this interview with TheCable’s SAMUEL AKPAN, the former minister claimed that a powerful cabal drives decisions under Tinubu. He also believes that the 2027 election will be determined by Nigerians, not coalitions or political parties. 

TheCable: In 2022, you left the APC for the SDP. What happened? 

Dalung: There were two major reasons why I left the All Progressives Congress (APC). The first reason was the non-compliance with the rules of internal democracy and the disregard for the rule of law. The governor of Yobe state, a sitting governor, was appointed by then-president Muhammadu Buhari as chairman of the APC for three months, and it was extended to a period of over two years. Calls for the party to respect its constitution and the rule of law fell on deaf ears. I tolerated it for those two years.

The second reason was that as a director of contact and mobilisation in Tinubu’s strategic council, of which Lawal Babachir was the chairman with Nuhu Ribadu as a member, I met with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was aspiring to be president at the time. I wanted to know his vision for the country so that I can reposition myself to work for him. We spent 30 minutes discussing, but he did not comprehend anything we were discussing.

So, at the end of the day, I made up my mind that I would not leave legacies of producing presidents that would fail Nigerians. I was a founding member of APC and worked tirelessly for Buhari to be president. The four-point agenda we gave to Nigerians as our campaign promises, none of them were realised. I warned myself that I couldn’t continue to produce either a septuagenarian or an octogenarian as presidents who would always end up selling the people. So, I resigned from the council and the APC and joined the Social Democratic Party.

TheCable: Years down the line, there has been a lot of defections to the APC. Does this mean the party has become better? 

Dalung: The politics we practise in Nigeria now is transactional, where political actors are more or less businessmen who borrow money from banks, friends, and organisations and invest it in politics. So, when they are declared winners by INEC, their primary occupation is to recoup their monies and prepare for the next elections. This explains why on the day of the inauguration of President Bola Tinubu, there were already billboards for his 2027 elections. These are characteristics of transactional politics. It is more or less the politics of businessmen. They see politics as a business. You put your money, and then you recoup your money. This is just basically what is happening.

So, these defections are just like buying shares, and when the prices of shares are going up, you sell them to buy a new one. The stakes now are higher in APC. They are migrating there to put their investment and most likely harvest a huge profit, more so that all the institutions of democracy appear to have collapsed into this transactional politics, whether it is the electoral body, the judiciary, or the legislature, all are participating. It is business, not politics. The defections are just the movement of businessmen from one company to another.

TheCable: Recently, you said the cabal surrounding Tinubu’s government is more dangerous, sophisticated, and ambitious than the clique that cocooned ex-president Muhammadu Buhari. Can you break this down?

Dalung: Each time I am asked to speak about this cabal, it amazes me. Do Nigerians not monitor what is happening? A cabal is a group of political elements that are stationed within the power base. Because they are strategically placed, they distort the course of events in favour of their interests.

This is very common in the Nigerian presidential system, which places more power on the executive president. He cannot exercise this power alone except through others. The exercise of these enormous powers through others is what breeds the evolution of a cabal. This cabal has been there in every presidency, depending on how active and intellectually sound the president is.

If the president is much younger and his intellect is active, he will be able to develop the monitoring capacity to ensure that instructions given by him are followed to the letter. But if you have an ailing and old man, then he is, in fact, a victim to be feasted upon by this cabal. Unfortunately, from Buhari to Tinubu, we have had the graduation of the cabal into a more sophisticated clique with more dangerous credentials.

The cabal in Tinubu’s government is made up of people who are more experienced in politics and have spent many years in power. They are also educated, unlike the group that hijacked power under President Muhammadu Buhari. Now, this power hijack is done through distortion.

It doesn’t mean that the president is not in charge. The president is in charge, but his instructions are not at all the ultimate instructions he has given because of distortions along the line. That is what the cabal does. That is practically what is happening. You can see the way things are going under Tinubu. The worst of it all was that people were purported to have been nominated by the president and their names sent to the national assembly; some of them were recalled while they were about to appear in the national assembly.

There was an argument from Kano state by the national chairman of the party that he didn’t know who nominated a person. That is the work of the cabal. They distorted the nomination. You have the one from Delta, who was also recalled. This is something known to Nigerians, except that we have been gagged by either the power of dollars not to talk, or we are afraid of talking so as not to be arrested.

TheCable: Increasingly, there have been coalition talks ahead of the elections in 2027 with pro-coalition politicians asserting that it is the panacea to defeat Tinubu. Do you agree?

Dalung: These are arguments of pseudo-transactional politicians. A person is reelected based on their performance. Tinubu’s two years in office have been the worst governance ever witnessed by Nigeria. People today cannot afford to feed themselves. So many children are out of school. The hospitals are abandoned because they are unapproachable. These are issues that affect the electorate.

The electorate are the people who will determine who will rule them. The issue of a coalition to defeat Tinubu, in my own mind, is just an academic allusion of politicians who are pro-Tinubu. They are beneficiaries of Tinubu’s largesse, and they use that to discourage the people. Tinubu can only be reelected based on performance. Tinubu can only rig himself back to power, if rigging is going to be the issue, if and only if he will deal with the 80 percent of Nigerians who are dissatisfied with his government.

Results are not going to be fabricated using artificial intelligence. They must originate from polling units. Are you telling me that this hungry set of Nigerians will watch anybody who would want to tamper with their results at any other point to allow them to go back into this situation again for another four years? Coalition is not the issue. The defeat of Tinubu can only be impossible if he performs. But if Tinubu fails to perform, no miracle can save him. A coalition is an arrangement of politicians as to how they reposition themselves.

But Nigerians ultimately will defeat Tinubu with their votes. I am waiting to see how those who are shouting APC now will be able to market APC in 2027, if we actually get there.

TheCable: Nasir el-Rufai recently joined the SDP. What is your take on this?

Dalung: I don’t have any take because I don’t think for him. But I welcome him to our party. He is a Nigerian. He has the freedom of association as guaranteed by the constitution. He has made the choice of joining the SDP as his political party. We received him and created the enabling environment for him to make his contribution to the development of the party.

TheCable: He has been promising to lobby opposition leaders like Atiku, Obi and others to join the SDP. Do you see this happening?

Dalung: If lobbying them to join the party is not a crime and he has not broken any law, there shouldn’t be any issue with that. After all, the APC is going around using public funds to buy people to join their party. Has that not been happening?

If the APC is buying governors, members of the house of representatives, with either positions or money to join their party, what is wrong with the former governor Nasir el-Rufai lobbying? He didn’t say that he would bribe them. Lobbying is the major weapon of democracy. I think there is nothing wrong with it. If he lobbies them well, and those people he lobbies believe in Nigerian democracy, they will align with him to solve the problem of leadership, which is bedevilling Nigeria now.

TheCable: If they eventually align with the SDP by joining the party, how do you think the party will be positioned ahead of 2027?

Dalung: Nigerians will now be prepared to do justice to the second oldest party in Nigeria. The oldest party is the PRP, followed by the SDP.

If you are following trends of events, all the gubernatorial candidates of the PRP have joined the SDP. There is now a coalition of the two oldest political parties coming together to do justice to the SDP, which won the election in 1993. The election was annulled, the military took over the party, its sources and offices, and also arrested the winner, who died in detention.

Up to today, the Nigerian state has not done justice to that party. It is only because the SDP is made up of people who are patriotic and passionate about the country. They have no business doing politics because of what was done to them. But you can see they are here. After 25 years of wandering in the wilderness, there is no political direction. Nigerians now are saying, let’s go back to where we missed our steps. We had the freest election in Nigeria, which was not consummated. Let us go back to that point.

So, what is happening in the SDP is not just the movement of people. No. It is the decision of Nigerians to go back to their roots and trace their step where they missed them.

TheCable: There have been arguments that Tinubu’s government is hellbent on crippling opposition party. We have seen what has become of the PDP, LP and NNPP. Do you share this sentiment?

Dalung: Wha is politics? Politics is the competitive struggle for interest within a political space to influence others to accept your opinion. If the president feels that he has not performed very well and if he is going to contest again, he may not be reelected. So the only thing he should do is to weaken the political space by creating crises in the political parties; then that is his style of politics. That means he is not a democrat that he claims but a despot and tyrant who metamorphosed as a democrat just to get power, and so he is only unveiling the character behind his democratic credentials.

So, it is not something to worry about. Other political parties should also adopt that style of infiltrating the APC and disintegrating it. Most of the political actors in the opposition have better credentials in politics than the president. They can also influence and make sure that they destabilise the APC because the president has taught them that politics is that of weakening your opponent. For me, I don’t see that as an issue.