Bakori: Shema is Alleviating Poverty in Katsina

Chairman of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) in Katsina State, Alhaji Rabiu Gambo Bakori, in an interview with select journalists, says the state governor, Alhaji Ibrahim Shema, has been able to pull people out of poverty with his development programmes. Zacheaus Somorin was there

 

 

How has it been since you were elected as Katsina State ruling party Chairman?

I became the party chairman precisely in April 2010;  so it is getting to four years since I have been here. We thank God, but running the party has by no means been an enormous task, it has simply been challenging. For one to say everything has been good and fine will amount to deceiving oneself, but then, on the aggregate, I want to state that the PDP has been solidly rooted in the state since my assumption of office. The party has through the leadership of the governor brought succour to the people of the state through various programmes and policies geared towards alleviating poverty. So in Katsina State. I used to say that it is the people that are talking and not the government like we have everywhere. Essentially, the concept of practical politics has been introduced by the party leadership to make sure that the ordinary person in Katsina State embraces no other party but the PDP.

 

In the 2011 election, the party lost some seats in the House of Reps and the Senate. It appears to be a signpost that the PDP is gradually losing grip on the state. Is that perspective correct?

 

 

That is what some people would say but in politics you cannot assume that you must win in all cases. Nevertheless, internal challenges caused the party to lose some seats in the National Assembly elections in 2011. And what we did apparently and quickly too was to go back to the drawing board to critically look at what went wrong? In politics, you have to make amends (adjustments) here and there. This explains why despite the large votes they got in the National Assembly elections, when the governorship election came, we won by landslide. And you will agree with me that the governorship election is the most important of all the elections in the state. It tells how popular the party is in the state. Even then, the so-called opposition party in the state is neither here nor there. Even among the members of the opposition party in the National Assembly, there is crisis. And many of the people in the opposition returned to the PDP during and after the 2011 elections.

 

With the emergence of APC (a coalition of several parties) in the state and the party parading eminent people like Major General Muhammadu Buhari, many people believe that winning the governorship election in 2015 would be very difficult for the PDP. What do you say?

 

 

PDP has been and still everywhere in the state, just like there is nowhere in this country that you will not find PDP. PDP is a national party; other parties, including APC, are regional parties. In Katsina, for instance, you can talk of only PDP and CPC. If you go to Yobe and Borno, you talk of only ANPP. If you go to Lagos, you are talking about ACN. Everywhere there is APC, the dominant party there would be the party the people knew before the emergence of APC. So for us here it is CPC. But what gladdens the mind in all of this is that if you assess these members of the opposition party individually, you will see that they cannot match that of the PDP, because it is the PDP that is doing what the people want; we are the one providing the infrastructure everywhere. It is easy to know the dominant party in Katsina. Go to the streets and ask people about the dominant party in the state and the benefits they have derived since the Shema administration came in. Make your findings. It is not because I am here; the fact is that you cannot change the truth. It is constant. The development this state has witnessed in the last seven years is unprecedented. I am yet to find it. The kind of transparency in government of Katsina State is hardly anywhere else. Tell me which state government would be open and transparent such that the proceeds of its investment would be used to build the seat of government, that is, the Government House and the Governors Lodge in Abuja? The cost of these two projects is more than N6billion, and this is just profits from investment.

 

Internal democracy challenge is one of the reasons some of your members at the state and national levels are leaving the party. What are you doing about it?

That is relative. It depends on how you look at it. Where they are going, is it better? If it is better, why are some of their members joining us, the PDP? So that suggestion is debatable. Though there is nobody that would be happy that its members are leaving the party, any right thinking leader would do everything possible to have more members than losing them. However, some of the reasons they are giving are circumstantial. You know you must give a reason why you are leaving the party. Some of the reasons are mere cover-up. Some of these defectors have held positions in the party at the national level, important positions for that matter. The question you should be asking is why are they decamping? Majority of them have their personal interests which they think is bigger than those of the party. So the only thing left for them is to leave but they must have something to tie to their leaving. If you are a true party man, if you have something against your party, I think the best thing is to make that thing known to the party and try to iron it out rather than defecting.

 

What are you doing now to see that the defectors are brought back to the party?

Fortunately, there is no defector from our state. If you say at the national level, there may be, but we don’t have such scenario here in Katsina State. The only one that is prominent in the state that decamped was a former deputy governor of the state. Before then, what was he? This party is cohesive in the state. The party is fully on ground here. To me, whether you are in opposition or not, if somebody does something good, let us commend him. Politics is not about war. It is about service. That is the message the governor has been preaching, that we should use politics to serve the general interest of the people. You can criticise. Criticism should be for the improvement of certain things, not because you are in the opposition; just because you want to be heard or known. Criticise constructively. In Katsina, majority of the politicians that criticise do it for criticism sake and are what I call absentee politicians. Most of them are in Abuja.