Atiku: Me? Step down for Buhari? Well…

If you don’t obtain the ticket, will you be willing to throw your support behind any APC presidential candidate?

I think I have proved that I am a pragmatic politician. Recall that in 2010 when I failed to get the PDP ticket against President Jonathan, I and others went to try to bring about an electoral alliance between the CPC and ACN. And even when Buhari eventually disappointed a group of us, myself, General Babangida, General Aliyu Gusau and Mallam Adamu Ciroma, I still went out of my way to support Buhari even in CPC. So for me it is not a big deal. I think I’m a pragmatic politician and I don’t know of others. What I know is that we have an understanding to support one another. I don’t know of the rest, but I can say of myself, I can support anyone that emerges.

Some analysts believe Jonathan holds the advantage going into the 2015 elections, going by the number of states controlled by the PDP, the incumbency factor and the teething problems APC is battling with. Do you agree?

I disagree. If all institutions operate and stay with their mandate, incumbency becomes irrelevant. If the institutions are misguided, the courts are there for restitution. But on the field, the APC has the momentum and Nigerians are yearning for a change and they are willing to defend their votes as demonstrated by the election in Osun State. We count on your constituency the press, the civil society and our development partners to contribute their quota in ensuring that the voice and the votes of Nigerians count in the 2015 election. That done, the victory of APC is assured.

What wrong impression do people have about you that you would love to correct if only you could?

It would definitely be the perception that I corruptly enriched myself during my tenure as Vice President. This is especially because I’m the most investigated politician in Nigeria’s history. At the height of my rift with my former boss, several investigations were ordered against me, yet none came up with anything. Long before politics, I was a successful businessman. I first declared my assets in 1993, I was a multimillionaire in dollars. My company, NICOTES was already the top oil services company in Nigeria far back as then. I was not a poor person because I worked hard and took risks. I had enough money to buy as many pairs of shoes as I wanted. In 1998, I helped register the PDP. I spent over N500m getting the party sorted out. I rented the party secretariat and later bought it for the party. I was already a co-founder of one of the most profitable companies in Nigeria in 1999. I was never accused of corruption before my disagreement with my boss.

I remember when the American Congressman Jefferson came to meet me about a fibre project he was promoting on behalf of US companies. I sent it to my technical people, who told me it wasn’t feasible. I told him so and he left. When I travelled to the US later in the year, he came with a lady to meet with me. He later asked the lady to leave, upon which he presented the same file he brought to Abuja. I quickly told him “look, this thing will not work”. He left. Unknown to me, he had collected money from people and said he will ‘persuade’ me to approve contracts in Nigeria. He had collected about $100,000 from people. When the FBI arrested him, He was charged for fraud and Conspiracy to bribe a foreign official. They searched his house and found $90,000 in his fridge. He had spent $10,000 out of it. He was found guilty of fraud and jailed. The Charge of bribery was dropped because he was found to have lied about that. Yet, I hear people link my name to Jefferson. It’s annoying sometimes. Why would I take $10,000 bribe from anyone, when my shares in my companies were worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

The then DG of BPE, Nasir El-Rufai went under oath at the National Assembly to testify that I had never made any requests or acquired anything during his tenure at the BPE. Yet, after my disagreements with my boss, he went and wrote a book that I was corrupt. I remember Nuhu Ribadu coming to my home to apologise because he was running for president. I asked him: “Nuhu, I forgive everyone, and I forgive you, but will you go back to the public and apologise about all the lies you told about me?” He was then concerned about his reputation. Of course I was wondering if he had cared about my own reputation when he was bearing false witness against me and illegally locking my friends up trying to force them to generate evidence of corruption against me.

Some people said that I am wanted in the US. I am glad that United States of America is an open society. They keep records and sometimes keep them too well. The list of every person currently banned from the United States is online. It is called the DSN LIST. But I’m glad I did right for my country. I effectively midwifed the birth of EFCC. That was my contribution to helping improve transparency in Nigeria. However, EFCC was bastardised and was used as a tool of persecution and maligning political opponents. This is why I am proposing major changes in the structure of anti-corruption agencies in my policy document.

How did people come to term you as corrupt then?

Honestly I also think people are not being fair to us, particularly when I was in office when they started labeling me as corrupt. Why is it that in the first four years nobody labelled me as corrupt? It was only when I started having disagreement with my boss (Obasanjo) that the issue of corruption came. And when the issue of corruption came, of all the investigative panels when was it that I was indicted by the panels? So, it has a political undertone. It is always easy to malign people. There was nothing that we have not explained to the best of our ability in this country, whether in the print media or electronic media. People have hung on to it because they believe they can use it to my disadvantage. Particularly, there are people who believe that maybe if I get there I won’t forgive them for using all these things against me. You can’t sit down to start dealing with personal issues when you have grave national issues to deal with if you find yourself in government. Of course, there may be small minds, but I don’t have such kind of mind to take on people personally or individually because of the fact that I was accused at one time or the other.

One of your supporters, in trying to defend you, said you were vice president for eight years and Obasanjo was petroleum minister for six to seven years and the VP does not have the power to approve contracts or control money.

I can tell you better about this argument. In fact, I am very angry. Not only that we had no minister of petroleum in six or seven years, but the oil and gas sector is the important revenue earner for this country for decades now. I don’t know what happened in other governments before us, but in our government the oil and gas sector was never transparent. Every contract was brought to council of ministers for deliberation and approval, but not anything from the oil and gas sector. The president was the minister of oil, so it was between him and the group managing director of NNPC. No minister will ever tell you he knows anything about oil and gas. And the same thing is happening today.  Yes, there is a minister of petroleum but they don’t bring anything to the council of ministers on oil and gas. There is absolutely no transparency. And this is something I have vowed to correct. There is no way you can have the most important aspect of your economy and it is shrouded in secrecy. Complete and total secrecy. Nobody knows what contract is given to whom. Nobody knows who is getting those contracts, at what price, nobody knows how much is money comes in. Honestly it is unbelievable.

So, if the minister of petroleum comes out to say this is all what I get, nobody challenges her, because nobody has any other evidence to challenge her. Maybe Nigerians don’t know this is a sector that there is no transparency.  We attempted to do it once before. We called for tenders. After that first exercise, subsequent exercises nobody knew who was lifting crude and at what price and what came and what did not. The only thing during budget time they will tell you this is what is earned. How it is earned, you did not know. So there is still complete secrecy in that sector. There is no transparency at all. Nothing will stop me from not bringing it out in the open. You know what happened after eight years, we were given memos that the president approved between himself and the group managing director of NNPC for ratification in the council. I was the only guy who raised his hand and said I want it to be recorded that I was not going to ratify it.

So the way it is structured, you are saying the VP is not in charge of money?         

No. the VP is never in charge of money. Let me tell you the power of the VP. When we came in, we said the power of the minister to give contracts was N50 million, that is also applicable to VP; even if you are giving contracts in your own office… because that is the only place you can give contracts. And most ministers if there is half a billion contract, they break it into N50 million in many places and make sure it does not come to council. As a vice-president you only do so within your own small office. The issue of me giving contracts is not there. The second part of my tenure as vice-president I was using my own money to run my office because the president removed all the money from my office, even money to buy paper. Until I finished and left I was using my own money to run my office. As VP you don’t have that capital vote like ministers. So, there is no point of giving contracts to myself. The point is I came into government wealthy, and people say how did I get my money, but they forgot when I was paying for everything, paying for the secretariat, the printing of membership cards because we were just forming the party, and nobody was bringing money on the table. I was using my own money.

There is this belief among a section of the public that you are not free to enter the United States on the basis of a perception of corruption. We are wondering: when last did you visit the US?

The last I visited the US was after I left office. And when I went to see my family there, and from that visit my family relocated from the US. I was to visit the US last year, because I had the visa to go. I was on my way, and then they said I had a wrong visa because I was given a diplomatic visa instead of a normal visa. And that I should come and exchange the diplomatic visa with a normal visa. Unfortunately, the time was very much against me, because the way I planned it, because I was to go to the US just over night and then after attending the function there make a u-turn to Spain because I had another programme in Spain. So I decided to forgo the US event, and flew straight to Spain. If somebody says I cannot go to US, everything about the US is public. There is a site you can access and see those that are banned from visiting the US are. My name is not there. You can access the site and see whether my name is there. Of course I was going to visit my family before, but they are no longer located there. They relocated first of all to the UAE where she took up a professorship at the American University there, then later UK and then later here. She just passed her bar exams. In fact, they live here.

We understand you are very angry with America because of the search of your house…

That is a long case. It was not my house. It was my wife’s house. So diplomatically, you cannot say it was covered under diplomatic immunity. So the fact that I was staying with my wife who is also an American does not exempt our house being searched if there were grounds for that. And I believe they went to the courts to obtain the necessary documents. I don’t think they would have breached any diplomatic protocol to have searched the house. I am not angry. What for? What did they discover anyway? Nothing. They thought they were going to find huge sums of money Jefferson collected from the lady. They didn’t find the money there. Eventually they found the money in his own house, in his own fridge. In fact, I think there is too much politics in it. Jefferson faced several charges. Of all the charges, the only one he was discharged and acquitted was bribing a foreign national. That was relating to me. That was the only charge he was discharged and acquitted. All the other charges he was convicted. I see it more as political blackmail rather than actually based on facts.