Minister of Information, Mr Labaran Maku, made the declaration while fielding questions from State House correspondents, shortly after the weekly meeting of the Federal Executive Council (FEC), noting that though the opposition could challenge the policies of government, blocking the budget would cut off the oxygen that gave life to the country.
“Challenging our policies is different from blocking the oxygen from flowing, because the budget is the oxygen of the economy. So, you are asking people to commit suicide because you have disagreement with the government? I think this is not the right thing to do and I am urging APC leaders to think again,” he said.
The minister said he was surprised that the APC gave the directive to its members in the National Assembly to block the budget, in spite of the gains made on the economy, pointing out that lawmakers were elected to serve the interest of the country, though they were elected under political parties.
According to him, “democracy is about service to the people and I am surprised because everybody knows that once you are elected, you are no longer serving your party members.
“What happens is that the party offers you a platform to stand for an election, but the real election is done by Nigerians, who may not even belong to a particular political party. They believe that you can serve them at that particular time and not by party members.
“So, I am shocked that in a period where we are making economic gains, where the economy is growing at seven per cent; where, consistently for three years, the world has said the Nigerian economy is the best managed in Africa, in a period policies that we lamented in the past are now being transformed into opportunities for investments; in a period where we have been able to move from net importer to a net exporter in cement.
“Where we didn’t have telephones, we now have telephones in every village in this country; where power became an issue, but now power is an opportunity for investment, because new policies have been unfolded to give opportunity to grow the economy; in a period where agriculture was to buy a few tractors and do fertilisers scams; where you now have agriculture as a policy transforming farmers into business people and supporting them.
“Now, this kind of situation means that all our hands must be on deck to grow the economy. If we grow the economy further, it does not belong to Goodluck Jonathan, it is for the people of Nigeria. So, I’m shocked that anybody will go to the National Assembly and urge people to block the budget of a country.
“When you block the budget, you are stopping the work of the market woman, you are stopping the work of the farmer, you are threatening the survival of the teachers in the street, you are threatening the survival of a patient in the hospital, because a lot of what happens to these people depends on the budget.
“So, we must separate narrow, negative partisan politics from the survival of our people. We believe that every budget needs to be robustly debated by the National Assembly, but not on the standpoint that my party asked me to stop passing the budget,” he said.
He warned that if the APC lawmakers carried out the directive, Nigerians must hold them accountable for their action.
“See, they are not yet in power and they are already threatening the live wire of the country. How can we then trust them with power? If tomorrow they come to power, what are we to expect?
“It means the nation will not have a budget? This is very serious. No argument is acceptable for anybody to go and ask people to block a budget. These arguments pale into insignificance when you look at the real danger that the kind of call places on the live wire of Nigeria,” Maku said.
The minister also reacted to the defection of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and others from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to APC, saying that PDP was losing weight in order to gain strength.
Describing the defectors as nomads, Maku observed that APC was a political party with neither political focus nor ideology, but desperate for power, a development that made it willing to accept and celebrate those it hitherto described as monsters while in PDP.
“No party would be happy to lose its members to any party, because every political party would wish that it is able to retain all its members as number itself is good and no organisation would want to lose its members.
“It is not something you will beat your chest and say you are happy when your members leave. But I have always made a point that sometimes you need to lose weight to gain strength and that is exactly what has happened in PDP.
“When a number of these people were leaving PDP, I said the party would be healthier in the long run. First of all, if you look at all the people that have left PDP, some of them are the people that have caused all the headaches in the party, they have been the ones attacking their party, they are very quarrelsome, they have oversized egos. Some of them cannot stay under the same roof with anybody for one week without the top blowing up.
“A number of these people who left, if you take a look at the history of our party and look at their antecedents, you will see that they are migrants, they keep migrating from one place to another.
“So, a party needs to have members that believe in its ideology, that settle down because they believe in the party. A party is not just a market for people to stand for election, but a number of people who are leaving see the party as a market place for election, a number of them will come in because they want to contest for election, but if they lose they run out.
“As a political party, after 15 years of democracy in our country, we must begin to settle down. Let us know those who believe in the party, those who believe in its programmes, not because they have an electoral ambition, but because they want the party as an organisation that would develop the society, improve its policy and improve the country.
“Now, as we grow older in PDP, we are beginning to see that after these people left, the party is gaining some stability. All the parties to which they have defected, none of them has a programme yet, none of them has any ideological focus. The new parties they have gone have no registered members yet and they are yet to have a convention.
“So, you can see clearly that even within this small period since some of these elements left PDP, they have caused significant problem in the new party they ran to. They are already causing a huge problem there.
“There is already an explosion in APC in Kano, because Kwankwaso went straight and took over a party he was not part of and insist that he must be the leader. In Sokoto again, Wamakko went immediately and hijacked the party from those who formed APC in the place.
“These people went and hijacked the party, took it away from them, so even from the point of view of justice, you were looking for democracy and you saw nothing wrong in going to another party and hijacking the structure from them.
“You can see they are not democrats, these are serious desperadoes who believe that unless they are in charge, nobody should be.
“If you are a democrat and you join a new party, you will work your way through. You will give confidence to the new people in the party, but they went straight, hijacked the structure and sacked those who formed the APC in Kano and Sokoto.
“The same problem is going on in Adamawa and most of the places today, APC has two structures. The structure of the original founders and the structure of those who are joiners, who are struggling hard to displace those who formed the party,” Maku added.
Source: Tribune
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