Six Questions with Jude Feranmi
A random google search of his name shows that Jude Feranmi is the current Executive Director of To Build a Nation, amongst other remarkable work. In this interview, we speak to him about his work with To Build A Nation, the KOWA political party and why he is hyper-focused on young people in Nigeria.
(The Election Network): Why did you start To Build a Nation (TBAN)?
(Jude Feranmi): To Build A Nation was not started by me, I assumed the role of Executive Director for TBAN in August of 2019 after my Public Policy Masters in the Netherlands. However, the reason for accepting the offer is also because I align with the ‘why’ of the organisation. TBAN is a non-partisan citizens movement that is focused on political and structural reforms for Nigeria, irrespective of which party or individual is in power. We all agree that our country needs to move forward along some certain directions and that reforms need to be made for us to move towards that.
What we usually try to do is wait for every election cycle to elect someone who is aligned with these same thoughts to get elected and then make those reforms happen. Most times, these good-intentioned people do not get elected. TBAN’s approach is to mobilize citizens especially in the younger generation to say, “this is our country and these are the reforms that we know will make us progress and those reforms must be put in place now”, not in the future. The convener and chairman of the board of trustees for TBAN is Professor Kingsley Moghalu, who ran for elections in the 2019 and realised we will have to do better as citizens if we want our country to become a better place in our lifetime.
(TEN): You are a community organizer, especially active in getting young people to participate in politics. Why the focus on young people? What are some of the factors that prevent young Nigerians from participating in politics?
(Jude Feranmi): Yes, I am proud to identify as a community organizer and more so with the younger demography in our country. This is so because I believe that the only way to live a full life as a human is to be sound individually but also sound as a collective. In Nigeria, we have individually sound humans, what we have found hard to do is create collective benefits for all of us. I want to help solve this and it is easy to see why my focus will then be amongst young people. The demographic pyramid in Nigeria is very thin at the top and very wide at the base. Anyone older than 30 years of age in Nigeria is in the minority and our population continues to increase on a daily basis with even younger people. If we young people have the numbers, what it means is that we also have the power to make the change we want to happen socially and politically.
A number of factors prevent young Nigerians from participating politically and they are many; the history of living under a military regime where participatory government is alien to our parents and that is what they pass over to we, the children; the state of the nation and the economics of survival that a young Nigerian has to face before thinking about what benefits us all collectively; the risks and hazards of political participation in a country like ours where the previous generation insist on retaining power and not interested in handing over political power. Fundamentally, I believe the definition of political participation is also a strong reason why young people stay away because it is assumed that political participation is only about running for office. That is just one out of the many channels for political participation, especially off-election cycle. This is the message we have to keep passing across. There are so many others that we can discuss. To assume that these reasons are not valid reasons will be disingenuous, but good excuses are still excuses and they limit us from achieving the Nigeria of our dreams, which we must achieve.
(TEN): Do you think Nigerians are more politically aware than say, a decade ago? Why is this?
(Jude Feranmi): Well, I am not sure of how to measure this political awareness, especially in our generation. Social media has helped to drive a lot of conversations which almost didn’t exist 10 years ago and this has helped to spread even more information about what is happening politically and what opportunities young people can seize. However, it is expected that this awareness should lead to some form of consciousness. This is what we are yet to see on a large scale. This is evident in the way that there is a whole lot of outrage about policies on social media and when the time comes to resist the implementation of that policy, only 20 people show up – the recent Okada and Keke ban in Lagos is a case in point. So while social media has been helpful in spreading awareness about the issues, it has also provided a false enclave that people can speak from and not carry out the real task of influencing policies or making real change happen.
(TEN): In 2018, you resigned from KOWA party, what informed this decision?
(Jude Feranmi): The party joined the CUPP Coalition against my principled stance. I had stated then that the primary goal for the party was to see young people who had joined the party in their numbers across the entire state had the opportunity to run for office and get elected. I had proposed a sole campaign for focusing on electing at least 25 young people into the house of representatives and directing all the party’s energy and resources including one which we would mobilise towards this effort and had made it clear that the party stood the risk of being deregistered unless we won seats during the election. For me, building a campaign that was focused on a legislative agenda and asking Nigerians to support the agenda and fund it was compelling enough for me as a case we could take to the Nigerian people.
This did not fly with the leadership of the party at the time. A few leaders like Professor Sonaiya agreed with me of course because they saw the vision and believed it was time to focus as a party. Unfortunately, that did not fly and the party then chose to join forces with others in a coalition that was bound to endorse PDP. This was anti-everything we had said in the last three years of the core organising the youth population of Nigeria and I just couldn’t go ahead in the name of politics. I made it clear to the party that I was going to tender my resignation as a member of the party if the party joined the coalition in a leaders meeting that was organised solely for that purpose and when the party officially joined, I stayed true to my word. I then convened Raising New Voices Initiative to support 25 young candidates who were running for house of representatives in 2019. We were successful to the extent that only one out of the 25 we supported got elected. I still feel strongly that if this campaign was within a political party that had built the kind of momentum with young people that KOWA PARTY had built, we would have been more successful and probably the party wouldn’t be a part of the recently deregistered parties by INEC
(TEN): Should we expect to see you run for office in the next elections?
(Jude Feranmi): I will definitely be running for office in future elections. I am not sure whether that future will be as soon as the next general elections but time and chance will dictate that.
(TEN): There are many items on the electoral reform bill that has been pending for so long, what is that one important reform you will love to see take effect in future elections?
(Jude Feranmi): I would like to see the introduction of electronic accreditation, collation and transmission of votes in the current voting process in our laws. What this means is that the card reader will be included as a criterion for accreditation of voters. With this simple introduction, it takes away the power of traditional politicians to write election results, takes away the power of the courts to pronounce judgements where the number of voters is more than number of people accredited, takes away the power of political party agents to rig election results at the collation centre because there will literally be a live check and balance for what they do there when voters have gone home, it takes away the inefficiency of INEC’s inability to announce results in real-time, it takes away the power of political thugs to disrupt polling centres or even snatch ballot boxes, it takes away the possibility of multiple voting. In summary, it makes our electoral process saner. As you said, there are lots of reforms needed, but this is one introduction in our laws that I want to see before the next elections.
I think I should mention that TBAN is currently mobilizing citizens to write the National Assembly on these reforms and we have gotten more than 2000 Nigerians to write the lawmakers. Our target is to reach 100,000 Nigerians to write our lawmakers stating that this is what we want. To join those who have written these letters, details will be found here www.tobuildanation.org/100000letters. An online petition is also being circulated.
Thank you for having me once again.
This story is part of our new series on Nigeria where we analyse electoral reform in the country ahead of the next general elections in 2023.
