There’s no pact on 4 years for Buhari – Sen. Ibrahim
Senator Abu Ibrahim (APC, Katsina) is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Police and the Chairman of Board of Trustees (BoT) of the National Committee of Buhari Support Groups (NCBSG). He is in the senate for the fourth-term and has been with President Muhammadu Buhari for over 40 years. In this interview, he speaks on the purported plan to impeach President Buhari and the politics around the move, internal security and the planned gang up against the president. Excerpts:
Daily Trust: Why did you defend President Buhari’s unilateral decision to pay for the Tucano aircraft from the US? You made reference that Obasanjo, Yar’adua and Jonathan did same but can two wrongs be right?
Sen. Abu Ibrahim: First of all, it is not unilateral. The senate president himself admitted that they participated in convincing the American congress to support the deal which means that the leadership of the National Assembly is aware. That $1billion was approved at the National Council of State to be withdrawn from the Excess Crude Account. The president discussed this at the National Executive Council. So, the issue of unilateral action is not there. Most importantly, this purchase had been negotiated since (ex-President Barrack) Obama era. Buhari met it as president and he was able to get it because of the change of leadership in America, therefore it is not a unilateral decision but a decision that had been negotiated diplomatically.
DT: What the National Assembly is saying is that Buhari should have contacted it before making the payment…
Sen. Ibrahim: To me, I still stand my ground that there is no need for Buhari to come to us for approval. If you look at the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), the provision for Excess Crude Account is there. After the price of oil is determined, the barrels of oil to be sold, then we get the total amount of money, then the sharing formula is there, certain percent for the federal government, certain percent for state and local governments, certain per cent for the Natural Resources Fund, another per cent for ecological matters and 1 percent for the FCT. It is all there. That is why I still insist that this thing is in the budget. So you can’t tell me that the $1 billion approved for security must come to the National Assembly, that it is not budgeted for. What would you say about the one per cent for ecology? Does the president come back to the National Assembly to put it in another budget? What about the 1.5 percent for the Natural Resource Fund? Does he come back and put it in the budget? They are parts of the budget. So I would argue even today that President Buhari must not come to us for approval. And lastly, the one billion we are talking about was approved by the National Economic Council, all the governors were there. You see, 47 percent belongs to the states, we don’t approve it for them before they spend it. In fact, this $496m for the jets would have been covered by the 47 percent for the state and their local governments which were approved by their governors. Therefore, the reason why I came out clearly for this serious defence is that it has become political because under normal circumstances, how Muhammad Buhari acted showed commitment to national interest. We need these things to fight insurgency, he went for the aircraft as a transaction between government and government, no intermediary, no profit, nobody will make money out of it, so why can’t you give that person (President Buhari) little praise since he acted based on national interest and then said next time he should bring it to the National Assembly? Again, if you go back to what happened during previous administrations on this particular account, Obasanjo removed over 17 billion and paid the Paris Club debt and he didn’t tell anybody and nobody asked him any question and even the governors were cowered down they didn’t ask him any question. If you look at the 20 billion Jonathan spent from 2010-2014, what remained was only about 4 billion. What did he do with the 16 billion? Even Yar’Adua who spent something out of it, it was later that he came to the National Assembly and said ‘I’ve taken 2 billion from the excess crude account.’ At that time, they didn’t even consult the state or National Assembly and we didn’t even know what they were doing with the money. But this time around you know exactly where the money went, it went to the American treasury directly and if you ask for a return, the American government would release the money but Nigeria’s image would be brought to disrepute diplomatically. There is shear hypocrisy in the whole thing.
DT: Hypocrisy from which quarter?
Sen. Ibrahim: The PDP said during their NEC meeting that they would not defeat Buhari alone, they said they want alliances, they want to get an untainted person. And later when this issue of $1 billion came out, they went and told their members in the National Assembly to rebuke Buhari, they asked why he released the money. How can you start talking of impeachment on this simple issue? Impeachment is done because of gross misconduct but is it a gross misconduct to work for something good for your country without pecuniary interest and without stealing a kobo? And you know we need this kind of equipment because of insecurity. I was in Kaduna recently and the Commissioner of Police spoke about Birni Gwari, Over 25 villages have been vacated because of hoodlums and armed bandits.
DT: There are allegations that there is more insecurity than it was before this administration. Are you not worried?
Sen. Ibrahim: Let me tell you that internal security is extremely underfunded. Take the UK for example, they charge for family security, every family pays tax which goes to the police apart from the budget allocation. It is only in Nigeria that the police rely on the federal budget alone. In other places they have sources of revenue coming to them directly. The Nigeria Police is extremely underfunded. The Commissioner of Police in Kaduna told me that he gets 100,000 quarterly as running cost. A DPO would then get N3, 000 for their daily operations.
The support groups were almost 198 which worked for him in 2015. However, in 2016, I realized that these groups were disappearing and becoming frustrated. So, I managed to tell the president that we needed to get them together, unite them and see where they could be beneficial and we started communicating. The 198 different groups are now communicating and relating with us.