Category: Saturday Magazine

Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe is the Senate Committee Chairman on Information. He was also the deputy to former Governor Orji Uzo Kalu in Abia State from 1999 to 2002. He had a frosty working relationship with Kalu and survived three impeachment attempts. In 2007, he was elected the Senator representing Abia South Senatorial District. He was a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship aspirant for Abia State in 2011. In this interview with Assistant Editor, LINUS OBOGO, Abaribe relives his trying times as deputy governor, saying that he was naïve at the time. He also speaks about the Nigerian project, insisting that the Igbo nation has not been fairly treated in the national scheme of things. Excerpts:

A lot of Nigerians have advocated a sovereign national conference but the President opted for a national conference, which the National Assembly endorsed. Why this conference when similar ones had offered nothing in the end?

If you recall the last NBA Conference in Calabar, the Senate President reiterated the need for a national conference. And it was on the September 17 when we resumed for the 2014 legislative year that Mr. President, in his speech welcoming senators back from their vacation, also reiterated the need for a national discourse, so to say.

Let me say that it is necessary at this point for us to engage ourselves in a discussion. The reason for the discussion is that we seem now to have got into a position where people, rather than talk to each other, are settling issues through violence. In every part of the country, what we are seeing is violence from one end to the other. Things that could be resolved by mere discussion and seeing another person’s point of view, we just try to resolve them with people taking extreme positions.

The essence of democracy is to be able to see the other person’s point of view, aggregate it and be able to reach some form of accommodation if we have to all live together. The only way to do that is by having a discussion. That is why when the Senate President mooted it, the Senate was behind it. And once the President also agreed and announced it during the Independence Day broadcast, the Senate quickly endorsed that position.

The bottom line, of course, is this: it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war, like the late British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, once declared. That is exactly where we are now.

But why is the word ‘sovereign’ so dreaded by political office holders as well as lawmakers?

It is because of the word ‘sovereign’. We are operating a system presently where we have the sovereign state of Nigeria with three arms of government. When you now wish to introduce another sovereign, what that means is that you are willingly giving away the sovereignty that is already embedded in the established structure of government. No two sovereigns can exist side by side. It is either you have the sovereign that is already embedded in the constitution, that we are already running, or you abrogate it and bring in another one.

Sovereign national conferences happen in countries where you have already decided that you no longer have a country; you just want to have a means to secede. If it is a question for us to sit together and discuss our differences and determine our way forward, that can be done without necessarily having to abrogate the systems of government.

We also feel that when you now put in such a thing and you want to call it sovereign or whatever name, what you are looking for is anarchy. I say this with due respect to those who seek to have a sovereign conference.

What we are saying is that if you want to go ahead to talk about a sovereign conference, you are going to deal with who confers that sovereignty on the sovereign conference you are looking for? Sovereignty comes from established process, established protocols and established structures that we already have and I think that, that is the reason why we really shouldn’t waste our time dealing with the semantics of the word ‘sovereign’.

I can give you a simple example. I am an Igbo man, I come from Abia State. Even within Abia State, I come from the Ngwa stalk. Even within the Ngwa stalk, we have the Nkwa-Ngwa nationality. So, at what point will we decide who will represent us, assuming, as it is commonly said, we have between 250 and 300 ethnic nationalities in Nigeria? For the Igbo race, would we be represented by one person? The Igbo nation has five states. Are we going to be represented by five different persons? If we would be represented by five different persons, who will represent me in Abia State? would it be the person that comes from my own ethnic nationality, the Nkwa-Ngwa, or somebody that comes from the Ngwa nation itself? Or is it going to be somebody that will represent Abia as a group?

You can see all the questions that will arise when we start to pursue this aspect of sovereign conference. In fact, I read something interesting that was said by Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano State in which he said what was the need to have a conference when we already have people who are representing us in the National Assembly, at the Senate level on equality of states and at the House of Representatives level on constituency basis? Why would we now seek a different set of people to represent us? You could see that there would be all manners of questions that would arise from the conference.

But for us in the Senate, what we say is that if Nigerians want to talk to each other, if Nigerians are presuming that there would be something to be gained from a discussion between various groups, we are all for it. That is the position of the Senate.

Recently, Prof. Ango Abdullahi made a statement to the effect that the North is not afraid of Nigeria breaking up and the people going their separate ways. Is that an indication of what the conference is all about?

He is correct. You should not live in this country with fear. The North shouldn’t be afraid to make their positions known. But as I told you, which North is he referring to? Is it the physical expression or the geographical expression? Is it an emotional expression? There must be some point in which you must have to locate the statement because that same statement may not be agreed upon by somebody from the same place he comes from, who may have a different position.

What we think is that for a dialogue of this nature, everybody must come to it with confidence. You shouldn’t come to it with a gun to your head, so to say. When he says the North should not be afraid, I agree with him. Nobody should be afraid. You should come and lay your cards on the table and let us know what is it you want and other parts of the country would also respond accordingly. That way, we would be able to reach an acceptable conclusion for all.

What do you think should be the agenda of the Igbo with regards to the conference?

I think the Igbo nation and the disparate groups within the Igbo nation will all meet and take a position, and when our position is enunciated after our meetings, then we can come up with something. I am a small person in the larger Igbo nation. I am representing Abia South. In the Senate, there are 15 other senators and one thing that we were taught as representatives of the people is that you should not put your own position forward until you talk to your people. I will confess to you today that I have not had any meeting with my people in Abia South to enunciate or to determine what our position would be. And until that happens, I am not at liberty to presume to speak for them for whatever may be their position.

I will plead that you give me the time to talk with my people before I tell you where we would need to go. Also, I think that the 13-man committee set up by Mr. President would first of all set out their modalities and that would also guide us in the ways that we would also meet and make our positions known.

In general terms, would you say that the Igbo nation has had a fair deal in the Nigerian enterprise?

In general terms, no! We think we have not had a fair deal. We think that we the Igbo nation contribute so much to the country. We think that the Igbo nation is actually the glue that continues to hold the country together and we think that that fact has not been properly recognised by the rest of the country as it were.

What are the Igbo senators doing to galvanise that recognition?

Part of the reasons why we are having this conference is also to be able to ventilate these feelings. I am not a pessimist. By my profession as a politician, I am an optimist. Therefore, I would continue to feel that something good will come out of this conference.

Given that we have had several of these conferences in the past and nothing came out of it, why should Nigerians be hopeful this time around?

I will agree with you that sometimes it looks that way. But if you are an optimist, you will also feel that the mere fact that something had failed in the past does not mean that it will fail again. And so, an optimist would always want to try and continue to try. When I was younger, part of what we were taught in school in order to be able to do well was that if you try and you do not succeed, try, and try and try again. I think that if in the past we had conferences and those conferences did not achieve their results, nothing says that this particular conference will also not achieve its own resolve.

Even at the time we had those conferences, I don’t think that we had been faced with the type of challenges that we are facing today. I think that there is no Nigerian who does not recognise that we need to deal with the problems we have today to be able to confront our tomorrow.

Let us talk about your party, the PDP. The PDP has finally imploded to the point that its centre can no longer hold. Where does it go from here as the crisis continues to simmer?

I do not think that the PDP has imploded. I do not agree with that assertion. I belong to the PDP. I am of the PDP. What I think is that a few persons within the PDP are dissatisfied and are expressing their dissatisfaction. This does not mean we are having a new party and so forth. But that is simply a way of expressing their dissatisfaction.

There are several ways of expressing your dissatisfaction. You could decide to leave or go to another party. You could decide not to participate in what they are doing. But that does not remove the fact that PDP is still there as an entity. That is why if you noticed, at a point in our debate in the past couple of weeks, somebody tried to bring it up in the Senate and we said no, you cannot bring it. This is not the place where you ventilate party disagreement. You should go and deal with party disagreement at party level outside of the chamber. I think that the crisis will be resolved and very soon.

The PDP in Abia State where I come from, there is no disagreement. All of us are working with our governor and all of us are committed to the PDP in that state.

Would you say in all sincerity that all is well with the PDP?

I will say all is not well because there are some disgruntled people. But what we have to do will be to resolve those issues with those who are disgruntled. But that does not mean that the PDP has imploded as you said. That is too strong a word to use.

You were recently confronted by a group of protesting youths who demanded to know how much senators earn. Were they convinced by what you told them?

I think what happened was that they probably did not expect that they were going to get a response. My feeling is that they came, assuming that they were just coming after sending a letter saying that they wanted to meet with the Senate and that nobody would bother to see them so that they would go home and claim that it is normal that our leaders are insensitive, they don’t want to talk to us, they don’t want to do anything.

So, they were surprised that we actually came to see them, because I was in the chamber and the Senate president called me that he just got a letter now in the chamber, that there were a group of people who wanted to engage the Senate. We had no problem with that because they are Nigerians. They have every right to come to talk to us and we agreed to go and see them.

The Senate President asked me to go with some senators to speak to them. I went there and they started listing their demands. You could see how rowdy the situation was. It was rowdy like I said because they never expected that we would come. Be that as it may, they now reeled out their demands. Their spokeswoman made allusions to the National Assembly budget and so forth. I needed to correct the impression because what I felt was that all along, there had been this impression given that the cost of governance is located in the National Assembly. I had to make the point that the total budget of the National Assembly, being the third arm of government, which includes the staff, the bureaucratic staff under the National Assembly service Commission, over 2000 persons, the running of the National Assembly as it were and the running of the different offices of the people who are there, including the offices of the National Assembly Commission and so forth, everything amounts to three per cent of the total budget.

I then said to her: ‘If you are looking actually for reducing the total cost of governance, this is actually the wrong place to come to because you have 97 per cent residing elsewhere and you are coming to find out what is happening to three per cent. I told them that it was not that we did not want to answer them, but that you might do much better to cast your net wider than you are casting it here. They insisted that our salaries are jumbo salaries and all that, and I said I was going to give them my pay slip so that they could see that I earn the same thing as a minister and I think as well as a Supreme Court Judge.

That is how it is actually done by the Revenue Mobilisation. But when they want to call the salary of a Supreme Court judge, they don’t call it jumbo salary. When they want to call the salary of a minister, they don’t call it jumbo salary. So, why is it that the same salary that comes to this arm of government is referred to as jumbo salary? It is the words that are being used in that manner that tend to pit the public against us. That was exactly what happened on that day.

You were reportedly shunned by the traditional ruler and elders of your constituency on the allegation that you were not transparent with the botched visit. How did the plan crumble?

That is what happens when you have what is called jaundiced journalism. Nobody asked the question, how was I shunned for coming to my place? What did they mean by planned visit? The point really is that the person who wrote that story simply went ahead to write what I would describe as yellow journalism, which we all know about. What was the visit about? That is the question that was not asked. The story was just concocted.

What really happened was that the governor of the state made a statement stating that in the interest of Abia Chatter of Equity, come 2015, there should be a rotation of the office of the governor among our three senatorial zones. Abia North has produced a governor, same with Abia Central, and that it would be the turn of Abia South in 2015. Certain people within the Abia South Senatorial Zone decided that we would meet to thank the governor. But because some other people also want to run for governorship from Abia Central, they organised themselves and said our visit would mean their preclusion from the governorship race and that it was not in consonance with the constitution. They went to make a complaint to the governor and the governor said he did not want to heat up the polity, and advised that we shelved the visit. That was how the visit was shelved.

Rather than report the truth, somebody now turned around and didn’t report what happened. They simply said that I wanted to come home and I was rejected. Does that make sense? It did not make sense. I did not bother to refute it because there was absolutely no need to. Those from Abia South know my relationship with them. These are the things that happen once there is a looming clash of interest. All sorts of people will say all sorts of things. Really, it doesn’t mean anything. When the time comes, it is certain that everybody will know who actually is loved by his people and who is not loved.

I have been in politics since 1999. I left government house in March 2003. I ran for election in April against the incumbent governor and I lost. Yet I bounced back in 2007 to win the senate against the incumbent governor with the whole machinery of government in place. That should offer an insight into the type of political asset that I am. I have built one of the most enduring political structures in Abia State and it is still there till today. Those who are a little scared of it think that they could get at me by planting all these things. There is no need to bother about that.

What has been your relationship with your former boss, ex-governor Orji Uzor Kalu?

I really have no relationship in the sense that his interest is different from mine and I am representing the people in the Senate. Our paths do not cross. Since our paths do not cross, we have no interest that overlaps in any way.

What was your relationship with him like when you were deputy governor, given that you survived about three impeachment attempts under him as governor?

Let me say that the whole country had an idea of the type of relationship we had. A relationship that witnessed three impeachments as deputy governor was not a relationship that you will call a very good relationship. I would think that our relationship was not the relationship that would be described as very good. I think we have learnt a lot of lessons, especially for me. Kalu made me to grow up quickly. I was a little naive at the beginning but I quickly grew up because of what happened.

Be that as it may, that is now in the past. I do not want to waste my energy recalling or reliving those experiences. I have taken the lessons from what happened then and I have moved on.

If you have another opportunity to work with him again, how readily would you jump at it?

No, I won’t.

Why not?

Because I do not think that our personalities would be agreeable with each other.