All Progressives Congress (APC) chieftain Audu Ogbeh spoke with JAMES AZANIA on the general elections and the people’s quest for power shift.
What’s your position on Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi’s call for a peace agreement between President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari,to avert post-election violence?
The most realistic peace agreement they can sign is to determine between God and man that each of them will abide by the electoral rules that guide all elections; avoid cheating, avoid using instruments of state, namely: The State Security Service, Police, Army and Navy to rig the elections to favour the incumbent. Government has the capacity, Buhari doesn’t have them. Those are the things that provoke actions; there is hardly any need for any agreement to be signed, because it won’t be worth the piece of paper for which to sign, if we lack dignity and integrity to be genuine patriots and say to ourselves, let the people decide.
Some are of the opinion that there is no ideological difference between the APC and PDP. What could be responsible for this?
Worldwide today, tell me what the ideological difference between political parties are? Where are they? You can’t see a clear difference between the British type and the American type.
The Americans belief literally, in the uncontrollable capitalists, the British has welfarist arrangement within their own capitalism. But in APC, we will also want to think of ourselves as social a welfarist that promote the wellbeing of the people, by solving some of the problems which has been instituted in the last 30 years.
These outrageous interests prevent individual Nigerians from realizing his or her ambition. Dealing with power supply, this major issue alone if sorted out, the interest rate alone in this country can be under any circumstances be close to one digit, this can sort out electricity and provide security. What are the big ideological differences today?
Even, China cannot claim to be exactly a communist state anymore, so which ideological differences are we talking about? What are they? The ultimate ideological philosophy of any party is the ultimate wellbeing of the people, freedom from fear, molestation, threats and assaults by extra-legal forces.
If the presidential pollsgoes otherwise, what will the APC do?
The party has made its position very clear, if we have reasons to believe that the elections are free and fair, we will congratulate whoever wins, whether we win or PDP wins or somebody else wins. But like I said, if we have reasons to believe otherwise or like what they did in Ekiti and Osun States where 38,000 policemen, SSS and soldiers were drafted as if we are in war front, masked, with instructions to make sure PDP wins, in such case how do you expect us to react? Go to court? We will take decisions that will become absolutely necessary, to tell the world and ourselves that we can’t keep surrendering to slavery, whatever the interpretation you give it is up to you,
What is your expectation, if the APC eventually wins the presidential polls?
The expectation is to govern this country, to deal with Boko Haram. We are in a very tragic situation, Nigeria Army has been everywhere; in Tanzania, Congo, Liberia, Sudan etc, on peace mission and they performed well. What is it that has turned the Nigerian military into Boys Scout movement running away from a rag tag Boko Haram, nothing but corruption? The morale of the troops is dead and they know it and we know it. That is the issue number one.
The second issue is the cutting down of corruption, as no country has totally eliminated corruption, but you know the address and the precedence of our presidential candidates on corruption.
With the power of incumbency and resources at President Goodluck Jonathan’s disposal, do you think Buhari can defeat the President?
This is for Nigerians to take. They already have their CVs and they know who can salvage the country from these mess. It is only a stranger in Jerusalem who cannot recognize who Buhari is. We don’t need to advertise him. Buhari is not likely to encourage corruption or see corruption and do nothing about it. He is not likely to allow the Boko Haram to continue ravaging the country because he had certain military experience. The man became an Army General and a Head of State. I think that says he has gotten some distance in life, those two are more than enough to tell Nigerians that this is the man for the job.
Of course, there are attempts to say he is a fanatic. Again, I can say this man they referred to as a fanatic or religious extremist has been to Hajj only once in the last 14 years, if they need to know more about him they can, so we are not about re-selling or re-packaging, those who know him, know him.
We know a number of people who are scared of his emergence because he will throw everybody in prison, which is not true, there is more work to do than setting up prison and throwing people inside. If you keep jailing and taking people to prisons alone, when will you have the time to deal with power supply, to deal with health, education, infrastructures and grow the economy and reduce the high interest rate and solve the problems of poverty in the country. There are so many things to do, however. If the government of General Buhari decides that this corruption business has to be curtailed to the barest minimum, his body language alone will do far more than the EFCC and the ICPC put together.
You said power has been the bane of our economic development. Do you think with an APC government can stem the tide?
So much money has gone down the drain in the power sector; $16billion, $20 billion and nobody knows the figures and privitization is expected to help the system better managed but the reverse is the case, there are 15 private groups, now the groups seems to be more powerful for government to control. They refused to give meters out to Nigerians rather they use estimates, they became consortium licensed to defraud the society and cannot be controlled by the government, whereas we are supposed to be given meters and we pay what it reads, but they refuse, knowing fully well that we have no choice, is that not taking us captive? Because if I don’t pay you will come and cut off my electricity, is that not part of the corruption we are talking about? Who got these licenses? That is the first thing.
Number two, what happened to coal in this country? There are 13 coal deposits in this country, one of the biggest coal deposit is in Kogi State, one in my state, Benue, also in Enugu and every other places across the country. In the world they are still using coal to generate power, but we insist on oil and gas, which there are inherent problems there in the upstream, downstream. People blowing up pipe lines here and there has become a major challenges. How do we want to industrialize and match the rest of the world and how do we hope to participate in these so called global game? How does Nigeria want to go on without being a victim of globalization and beneficiary? If electricity is not available, how? This is what the APC will address.
Asari Dokubo was reported to have threatened that, if President Jonathan does not win the 2015 election, Nigeria may not know peace. What’s your reaction to this?
Is President Jonathan elected as a regional president or Nigeria’s President? You see, already, his people are seeing him as a regional President instead of seeing him as Nigeria’s President. Why will anyone issue such a threat? This is quite unfortunate. I have heard comments and people saying helicopters have been bought and warships are coming in and we also hear that containers of weapons are coming too. Suddenly we don’t hear anything about them. We do hope that is not their intention and we hope that President Jonathan will recognize that he owes more to Nigerians than to allow his ethnic warlords to talk that way. The same way we are warning anybody else from any other parts, whether is in the APC who will say if we don’t win they will bring Nigeria down and I think is less than responsible talk.
Our education sector is in shambles.How will the APC rescue the sector?
You know sometimes we see all kinds of very dramatic reforms in this country, one of them is Structural Adjustment Programme. This reform was condemned by Jeffery Sachs who was Economic Adviser to Koffi Anaan, the former UN Secretary General and Paul Robin Krugman, the American who won Nobel Prize about eight years ago, both of them condemned SAP, that it was imposed on Africans by the Western world as the worst assault on Africa since the slave trade.
Again, one of the reforms that destroyed our education in Nigeria was the disruption of teacher’s training colleges in Nigeria, and APC is going back to it. We have to train teacher’s that will teach our children from nursery to secondary to university level. Unless and until we restructure and bring back that very basic foundation of training of teachers, if not any other thing we are doing is just like applying cosmetics. There are some private schools ?that are charging N1 million per annum in Abuja and Lagos, and only the rich can afford to send their children there. If that was the situation in the past some of us wouldn’t have gone to school. So whoever that introduced the reforms that NCE is enough, whoever he was did a terrible and irreparable damage to Nigerian educational system.
Already, the APC states met in Kano and this was one of the issues we discussed. We have to return to the teachers training colleges, we will find brilliant young Nigerians, send them to those? Teachers training colleges, train them properly to teach and pay them well. APC will start to reform the education from where it can be reformed, meaning the very foundation- the nursery schools- after that you don’t need to panic over what you have.
