Prof Usman Yusuf is a former Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and a supporter of the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar. In this interview monitored on Arise Television, he speaks on the recent Chatham House outing of the presidential candidate of All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and why the North may not support his candidacy, among other issues.

What do you make of Tinubu’s absence at the recent town hall meeting organised by Arise Television for the 2023 presidential candidates?

I watched the town hall meeting all through because it is not an effort I sit down and watch television for that long but when presidential candidates go on television, they are auditioning for the nation for a job and people just watch them.

Not only how they handle the questions but how they comport themselves, what they wear, what they say and how their temperament is. That is the whole purpose and I did watch all three of them. All three candidates, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, ex-Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso and ex-Governor Peter Obi did very well and you could see that each one of them brought out his experience to bear.

The vice president will tell you what he did as vice president of Nigeria and Kwankwaso will tell you what he and Governor Obi did as well.

I was really impressed but why Town Hall Meeting does not make someone a president but it is important they appear before the people. I was very disappointed that Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not appear.

Presumably, you watched Tinubu’s outing at the Chatham House in London, what did you think about it?

You remember the last time you asked me if I watched the president’s interview, I said I did and on Tinubu’s outing in London, I needed a cup of coffee to stay awake. I watched it and to be honest with you, I was very disappointed.

And I have heard people defending him but a presidential candidate is auditioning for a job from 200 million Nigerians and there are 90 million eligible voters, you are not talking to us but you entered the plane and went out there to the Diaspora that has no vote.

So, you go and talk to people, who do not have votes for you in the election. My disappointment is seeing that a lot of our candidates are getting to a point where it is obvious that they have selfesteem issues.

Why do you have to go to America or London to say who you are when you have not put your house in order? I don’t understand why they are doing what they are doing now but the Chatham House appearance for me is a disaster.

What do you make of the speech which Tinubu gave and when it came to time to answer questions from journalists and the general public, he choose to elect his team to do that for him. Was that satisfactory to you?

Not at all! He read the speech and anyone can read a speech. I have a 13-year-old daughter who would read that speech better than he did, so it is nothing. The whole idea is not about reading the speech but about exposing yourself to peoples’ enquiries and asking questions.

He disappointed all Nigerians in Diaspora because he was meant to address a think-tank. I have never been to Chatham House and I don’t know how they do their things but there is a collection of Nigerians in the audience expecting to hear from him.

On the idea of outsourcing questions to his team; is there anybody there that we do not know of ? Is Nasir el-Rufai new to us or is it the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, who is new to us. Why is he auditioning them out there? Are they going to be the president?

Tinubu; it is you that the world wants to hear and see how you respond to questions and not outsourcing to people. And this is the problem because the current All Progressives Congress (APC) is to be blamed because Mr. President outsourced functions to ministers without checking on them.

Are we going to have a repeat of the same thing? My mind tells me that we are going back to the same old thing that is giving us problems. You cannot outsource your job as president to anybody else.

Are we going to elect Nasir el-Rufai, Kayode Fayemi, Femi Gbajabiamila or the women leader as president? We are going to elect Tinubu and we want to see how he handles questions.

Given that you are a supporter of the PDP; do you think that the Chatham House outing would hinder Tinubu’s success at the poll next year?

Instead of going to London, go to voters in Katsina State and empathise with the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Are you going to London to do what? Are the people in London going to elect you?

Let me tell you this and to be honest with you, I have always said that. Bola Tinu- bu’s politics has never been national. His politics has always been regional, in the South-West and mostly in Lagos, where he is the commandant general and nobody challenges him.

His inexperience on the national front is showing. When he started, it was the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, who is his very good friend that said Tinubu told him that he would not go to the South-East because it was a waste of time and money.

So, in the North, this is what I’m seeing. He is subcontracting the governors and political praise-singers to bring the votes to him.

And that is a political miscalculation which nobody is advising him on because none of the APC governors in the North has the goodwill of the people to deliver anything to Tinubu. If he is giving them money for that, he should get his money back. He needs to come and talk to us because as it stands, we don’t know him.

Let us compare and contrast him; a Muslim from the South-West doing the same ticket as late MKO Abiola and Kingibe, they are two different people. MKO Abiola invested in relationships in the North for a very long time, helping people since Shehu Shagari in 1979. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo also invested in relationships.

This guy, Tinubu thinks it is bullion vans that will get him to the office without talking to the people and meeting the people. I saw the questions that were asked and they are scandalous because he is not talking to us.

By us, I mean the people of the North because he is just talking to himself and Gandhi said whatever you do for me without me is against me. They do not understand this at all.

I know you don’t aspire to be a member of his team, but if you were one of his campaign advisers, what would you advise him to do going forward?

Going forward, he should talk to the people. He should appear in interviews. I like appearing to places where they are hostile to me in order to break that hostility because that is the only way you break that hostility.

Go and meet the people and don’t subcontract your campaign for presidency to surrogates as he is doing. Does he think Nasir el-Rufai will deliver Kaduna to him?

Does he think Aminu Bello Masari will deliver Kastina to him? Does he think that Abdullahi Ganduje will deliver Kano to him? Does he think that Mohammad Badaru Abubakar will deliver Jigawa to him?

Does he think that Atiku Bagudu will deliver Kebbi to him? The answer is no. So, whatever they are telling him, he needs to wake up because he has been politically naïve on the national front.

How is what Atiku Abubakar doing different from Tinubu’s campaign moves?

Look at this, Tinubu left and went to London, what did Atiku do on the same day, he went to Lagos, the lion’s den to sell his candidacy. That is politics.

But many people are saying that APC and PDP are cut from the same cloth, so when they talk about change they want something dramatically different from both parties…

I have never been involved in this political thing but I got involved because we must be involved. We have seen the damage these eight years of Buhari’s administration has brought to this country.

There is no way Tinubu can absolve himself from the eight year menace of APC. He is the grandfather of the APC.

He is the number two person in this administration because the vice president is his man. The number three person, the Senate President Ahmed Lawan is his man; the number four person, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila is his man; the former SGF, Babachir Lawal is his man; the former chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS), Babatunde Fowler is his man and the minister that got three ministries at once, Babatunde Fashola is his man.

So, there is no way Tinubu can absolve himself from the menace of APC or tell us that he is a different person. Now, he is using Lagos to campaign but there is a saying in the North that whatever happens in Lagos stays in Lagos.

Fellow Nigerians, whatever happens in Lagos stays in Lagos and essentially, what Tinubu did in Lagos remains in Lagos because Lagos is not Nigeria. The only thing he did in Lagos was essentially to clean up the city and improve the tax base and made a lot of money and still made a lot of money through his company.

We don’t want Tinubu to run Nigeria the way he ran Lagos because nobody challenges his authorities in Lagos. We saw that during the APC presidential primary. When the vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, dared to contest, he refused to speak to him after the primary.

So, we are not going to allow the same group that he is auditioning for in London that ran Lagos underground to return to power.

But Tinubu granted BBC Focus on Africa an interview where he talked about how his presidency will be different from Buhari’s even though they are from the same party…

He is not the richest man in Nigeria or in Africa but essentially what he is doing is holding all 200 million Nigerians in contempt and that we are not worthy of being spoken to. But he could go out there and expose himself to interviews.

This is exactly what we have seen from the current president not talking to us. A president is supposed to talk to the people who elected him into office. So, he is continuing exactly what this current president is doing. He is refusing to talk to us but he is going to London and talking to BBC.

Let him continue to go around the world, he will come back to us. Let us see how that will give him a vote in Kastina, Kaduna or Sokoto because they don’t even know that he has been to London. Another thing is that I don’t know whether you saw the nonsense they were doing in that beer parlour dancing.

We in the North from Adamawa to Zamfara are still burying our dead and a person who is aspiring to be a leader with his team is in a beer parlour in London dancing the Buga.

We will take that clip and show it to our people because we are suffering. I just came back from Kastina and I visited the IDPs and saw the sufferings of our people.

In that BBC interview, he was also asked if he had to choose between Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, who he would have supported if he was not running but he said neither of the two has capacity to the job …

All I’m saying is that Tinubu needs to expose himself for Nigerians to ask him questions. There are a lot of questions we want to ask about his health. I’m a physician of about 40 years and counting because I graduated in 1982 and clearly, Tinubu is not in the best of health. Are we going to repeat the same mistake we made in 2015?

In my culture, leadership and marriage are for health because you are not going to give your daughter out in marriage to a groom who is not well or the other way around. So, we are driving blindly into a ditch by going to elect a person who is not in the best of health. His health records must be made public to us. It is our right as citizens to ask for the health record of the person coming to lead us, his source of wealth and other issues.

He filled in his Visa application that he was born in 1952 and on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) form, he filled 1954. A lot of things about him are shady. Nigeria is not Lagos; you are auditioning for a job for 200 million people and we are going to ask you questions.

We are not going to allow you to just have your way by sending surrogates who appear on television without telling us what their principal is going to do. Nigeria is in a serious situation and we need a leader who is frank, honest, visionary and healthy, and I don’t see that in Tinubu. (New Telegraph)

Update news