Alhaji Umar Farouk is that National Secretary of the Labour Party. In an interview with EMEKA NZE, he speaks on the reconciliation between the Julius Abure-led Labour Party and the Lamidi Apapa group, the faceoff with Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the party’s measures to recover seats from lawmakers who defected to other parties.
The reported story of your reconciliation with Lamidi Apapa group, does it hold water?
Certainly, we had some of our former NWC members that were not happy with some of things that were going on, they were aggrieved and they took advantage of some of our radical youths in Edo state who went to the national chairman’s ward and unconstitutionally sent a press release that he had been suspended from the party, and you know, after the elections, we had so many issues. So many people are coming in to destabilise the party. Immediately, some people grabbed that opportunity. They went to court and asked the court to declare the seat of the national chairman vacant. But we swiftly moved in, we went to court, we went through our own constitution. We have three or four level of leaderships – the national, state, local government and the ward- every chapter has its roles and responsibilities.
So there is no way a ward chapter can say I’m disciplining a local government chapter without coming to the state. So the discipline is from top to bottom and not from bottom to top. So with that, the party and the national chairman took those people to court and got a restraining order that they don’t have legal status to say they will discipline the chairman. So this so called Apapa faction emerged on the basis of that illegality and they also went to court and asked the court to declare the seat of the national chairman vacant. That case went on for almost about six months to one year and then at the end of the day, we appealed. The Appeal Court said they have no jurisdiction to even entertain that matter because it was an internal affair of the party. So based on that, having had the judgement, there is no more crisis in the party.
Didn’t they go to the Supreme Court?
To my own knowledge, they didn’t go to Supreme Court. Having had that, we felt that they are our colleagues, we reached out to them saying we know you have done this based on the fact that you were aggrieved. Come back, let us see how we are going to move this party forward. And since they can’t go against the ruling of the court, some of them came but some of them had already left and joined other political parties.
Can you name those that returned and does it include Lamidi Apapa?
We are very friendly with Apapa, he has already come, we had a meeting with him. He is an elder in the party. Also others like Arabambi, Daramola, Bishop, Favour and a lot of others, we have reconciled with them and we all agreed that we are going to work together.
What about the former youth leader Anselem Eragbeh?
The former youth leader had already left the party. He’s not reaching out to us. I can’t just say he has left the party or not because already he’s under suspension. Those people who have taken those actions, the NWC and the NEC suspended them, but after the convention, we said those people reaching out to us who want to come back can come back and some of them are reaching out and we are working with them and we look forward to reintegrating them into the system because the party is a large party, it’s growing.
Are you not suspicious of their future actions because their coming back might be with a sinister intention?
You know you cannot do without having suspicion but we cannot say we are suspecting you until you have done something wrong. After all, there are those who are not in the Apapa group but within the party as it is now we are still causing some problems and who are the people causing the problems? They are some people in the party. Before the emergence of the Apapa group, we did not know that the people we were working together with would regroup and begin to fight us. There’s no how you will remove crisis from a political party. There must always be disgruntled elements because a political party is a group of varying interests that converged and if the party leadership is not tilting towards their own interest, they are going to object to it. So it is there in every political party. Among them are those who lost election, there are those who lost election within the party and election outside the party. It’s all about interest, that is why managing a political party is very herculean task. But we thank God, we have continued to move forward as an emerging political party which is poised to ensure that we entrench good governance and ensure that every citizen of this country enjoys the fruit of good leadership. We want to bring in a new order as far as politics in this country is concerned.
Why were you barred from attending the last INEC meeting?
Actually, we were not barred. INEC writes to political parties on quarterly basis if there is any need to meet with political parties. When saw that the Labour Parties name was omitted, naturally we write because it could be administrative or typographical errors. Immediately when we saw the omission, we wrote to the chairman to observe that the name of Labour Party was omitted among the registered political parties. They didn’t get back to us to say we are not inviting you, because INEC is clever. INEC doesn’t want to come out clearly and have an open fight with the Labour Party. And why they are doing that now is because they have been pressurised so much by the NLC, NLC has threatened to picket INEC. The NLC has written severally to INEC that they should not recognise Labour Party to the extent that they threatened to sue INEC for contempt of court. Which contempt of court? Is there any judgement that said that INEC should not recognise Labour Party or the leadership of Abure or the entire NWC. There is none whatsoever. The convention we had in Nnewi is legally upheld. We had followed the due process.
It is clearly stated that if a political party intends to have a meeting to elect officers, whether administrative or elective officers of the party, they should give INEC 21 days notice. Infact we gave them eighty-something days notice. During that time, we had the issue of time, we wrote to the again that with reference to our letter, that is the initial notice we wrote to the them, we are changing our venue from so, so to so so place and INEC said if you want to change your venue, you should give them 7 days notice. That is in their own guideline, it is not even in the Electoral Act 2022. We met all those requirements. Two days to the congress, we notified INEC again and they said they are coming. We made all necessary logistic arrangement for INEC to come, including security and whatsoever.
They didn’t come. For goodness sake is that our problem? We can’t go and pull INEC to come and monitor our conventions where as the law says they may or may not come. In fact even in the face of the law INEC should be punished for not attending because the law says if it is a shall (shall), you will, why didn’t they come? Because it is a punishable offence. If the law says I must inform you, then you must come, if I didn’t invite you, then it’s null and void or in another way the law says I should be fined N1 million for not informing you. So it’s not that INEC said the law says we should be disregarded or the result of the convention should be disregarded. There had been so many judgements on this kind of situation in other political parties. It’s not only Labour Party that is involved in this kind of crisis in the first instance.
So because of the pressure NLC is piling on INEC, then INEC unfortunately stood on the fence. So when that late invitation came and we observed that the name of Labour Party was not there, immediately I wrote to INEC to inform them. Since we informed them, because INEC did not say Abure you are not the chairman of Labour Party or Farouk you are not the secretary of Labour Party up till now. Up till now INEC he’s not said it does not recognize Labour Party’s convention. We are waiting for INEC to say that they did not recognize the convention. They know it (that claim) cannot stand by law. We are law abiding. If INEC says it does not recognize our convention, go and and do something else, we will quickly go to court. But INEC decided to have a romance or take sides or whatsoever with NLC. In the first place what is NLC in the management of Labour Party?
How did you achieve the feat of getting the Registrar of Trade Unions to stop NLC from hijacking the party?
Sincerely speaking, NLC initiated the formation of the Labour Party. They brought along some interested people, among them, were the leadership of the trade unions. And that was after the challenge by the former president Olusegun Obasanjo, when the leadership of Adams Oshiomhole was harassing his administration. At that time, trade unions were very vibrant and they could push any government because they had ideology, not this present union which doesn’t have the strength or the ideology to cater or pursue the interest of the masses. And that is why we are having this crisis. If NLC and the Trade Unions had consistently achieved the objective of unionism and all these strikes had yielded positive results, all these protests we are having would not have happened, they will not. Why you are seeing all these hoodlums and youth coming out is as a result of the failure of the organised labour movement, organised pressure group that can push the government to say the people are not happy with this policy and they can cause the government to change its policy direction. In the absence of that, obviously, the masses take to the street and that is why they are doing what they are doing now. Coming to the relationship of Labour Party with the NLC, we have enjoyed a very cordial working relationship, we don’t have problem. Our constitution recognises the presence of NLC.
The Labour Party constitution clearly states that the leadership of the NLC president, the NLC secretary general, the TUC president and TUC secretary general are members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) and in addition to that, on the National Working Committee, one Deputy chairman should come from NLC and one deputy chairman from TUC. Whether they come for election or not, they are statutory positions that are given to them.
But the problem we are facing now is that they want to take it all. They can’t have it all. Someone like me who has been in the party more than 10 years, and who has been in the political scene for quite some time now and have enjoyed democracy as a seasoned democrat having being a local government chairmen, having participated in the state assembly election, national assembly election, having contested for the governorship of my own state, with this kind of credentials as a graduate, then masters holder of two different degrees, we laboured when the Labour Party was even nowhere, we were there.
Some people came because some people like us are in the party and we tried to make sure that the party is overhauled completely from being a handbag political party to a real ideological based political party and then, people like Peter Obi came and joined us. So we have laboured and achieved and people from outside, those who have gone out of the NLC, who have retired from active unionism in the NLC now said we cannot continue to watch from behind, let us come back and take it over. And then, some of the people in the NLC had their own political ambition.
So they felt that Labour Party is the only platform they can come to use it against their opponents. Even if they are to use it to improve their own political career, that is even normal, let them come and join us. In Jigawa, we gave one of the leaders, a gubernatorial slot, in Rivers, in so many other places. At the end of the day, they even came with some arrogance and say ‘hey this leadership, we are the one to determine the leadership’, they want to take it all. How? The constitution of the party clearly states how the leadership emerges. It emerges from congresses, convention and so on and it’s elective.
What is the party doing to recover seats of defected lawmakers?
The law is very clear. If you leave the political party that has fielded you and produced you as a legislator or any elective position, the day you leave is the day the seat becomes vacant. That is the law, it’s constitutional, the Electoral Act has it. So when such a thing happens, we write to the appropriate legislative body and ask them that so, so person who has decamped from our party, we demand that his seat be declared vacant so that INEC can organise another election. We have done that one. Then we go to court. All these actions we have taken them. What is happening in Enugu state with our six assembly members that have decamped to PDP, we are already in court and we will get judgement and you recall, Labour Party, we are very persistent when it comes to legal matters. In Uyo, a particular lawmaker, after he had finished his tenure, we got a judgement against him.
That thing is on record because we want the record to be straight because that judgement can be cited. We went up to Supreme Court and the court asked him to refund all he collected as a lawmaker. Like I said earlier, we do not have any faction, we do not have any internal crisis but we do have external crisis and that external crisis is being perpetrated and sponsored by NLC and now the regulator of NLC (Registrar of Trade Unions), thank God, has come out clearly and reprimanded them and if they didn’t, we we could write to the government, we could write to the Attorney General of the federation and say look, NLC is breaching their rules and obligations to Nigerians, so take necessary action against them.
