Senator George Akume was the first Benue State governor to spend two terms in office, a feat his former political loyalist and incumbent governor, Daniel Ortom, is seeking to replicate. Akume told Assistant Editor JIDE BABALOLA, that his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) remains in control of Benue State in spite of Ortom’s defection to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). He explains why the leadership of the Senate has not changed, among other issues.
MANY Nigerians are wondering why it has been difficult for APC to use its numbers and the capacity it claims to have in taking control of the Senate…
Well, APC has numerical strength in both chambers. Even right now, we have the numbers. But the leadership of the National Assembly emerged from a different perspective. It was not in tandem with the thinking and positioning of the party. Our party had carefully zoned these positions in line with the realities and diversity of our country.
But again, we still want to give credit to the President and the executive that we have a measure of stability in the National Assembly. We can all recall what happened between 1999 and 2003. The leadership turnover was massive, almost a game of musical chairs. Leadership change was sometimes every year or every six months—Enwerem, Okadigbo, Anyim, Wabara. Then we ended up with Ken Nnamani. So, you see, this is the difference between the approach and policies of Muhammadu Buhari and the understanding of others who came before him.
Before Buhari, there was massive intervention in the National Assembly based on the special interests of the Presidency. There was no respect whatsoever for the concept and practice of separation of powers. That is the difference between Muhammadu Buhari and those who came before him. I do know that given the same scenario under an Obasanjo presidency, things would have changed. But here is a man who is resolute that the National Assembly should run its own affairs as best as it can. So, the ordinary man must take cognizance of this. We are all students of history. What we have before and what is happening today are worlds apart, and this is because of the different personalities and their orientations.
You were the first to be elected twice as the governor of Benue State with several other political victories to your credit. With your erstwhile political associate, Governor Samuel Ortom, moving to the PDP, do you think that the victories of the past can still be replicated by you and your loyalists in Benue State in the forthcoming elections?
Politics is a dynamic game. It is as dynamic as law. That is why you cannot rule out the question of alliances in political formations and the critical behaviour of political actors at any given moment. One thing that is very clear is that you can never read adequately and correctly the human psyche. You can never understand a human being fully from the way he presents himself, and that is why Shakespeare said that there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. Very true! When you transfer this into the political arena, it is even doubly true.
The present Benue State governor was in ANPP (All Nigeria Peoples Party) when we won election in 1999. We brought him later into the party and made him the party secretary and started building him up. He later became deputy party chairman and rose to become a Minister of State at the national level. I fled the PDP at that time because there were forces that were deliberately constructed to deconstruct me politically. So, I had to flee to seek expression of my political career on another platform.
Along with my colleagues and associates, we built a very formidable platform, the ACN of Benue State, and made it sufficient strong to confront the non-performing government of Gabriel Suswan and we defeated them. But we were denied victory because of the Nigerian factor and, of course, we continued to soldier on, and we formed the APC. I brought Ortom in from the PDP. Of course, he is always coming from another political party. I planted him and he won the election. I gave him a copy of the manifesto of our party, he digested it to the best of his knowledge – at least, that was what he told me—and we expected quite a lot from him because of his humble background, just like me.
I look at myself essentially as a village boy thrust out by society to support the under-privileged and to work for common goals. That is my mission in politics. I thought that because of his background, he would do the same thing. But we are in a situation that a governor cannot pay salaries for over 12 months or pay pensions for over 14 months and primary school teachers in various local governments too. Then you have a crisis!
My emphasis has always been that the welfare of the civil servant is paramount and our party is sufficiently committed to the welfare of all. When you work, you must be paid your wages. Guided by the understanding of this and the position of our party, the President decided to give special support to Benue and other states. He released a lot of money to clear arrears of salaries. Most of the states took advantage to clear the arrears accordingly, but why is Benue an exception?
There is no project in the state that was initiated, completed and commissioned by the governor. There is nothing!
In one of his recent interviews, Governor Ortom explicitly said that he was a billionaire before he became a governor, and that you once told him that you could not run a company.
He showed you his asset declaration forms that he was a billionaire before he became a governor? What business was he doing that he became a billionaire? He had a small printing press which I supported. And when I left government, it collapsed. Gabriel Suswan’s elder brother took over the printing jobs in Benue State but the whole thing he (Governor Ortom) was running collapsed.
Abubakar Tsav said don’t run faster than your legs can carry you. We shall be there. The billionaire man who became governor! So, he is the first billionaire to become a governor? He was not a billionaire. He couldn’t even finance his campaign, so, what is he talking about being a billionaire? Does he have the tax records to prove it? I know what we harvested from our party and ploughed into his gubernatorial campaign. He wasn’t a billionaire. Let him show us those papers – taxes and asset declaration forms—and prove it so simply. Unless he was a seer, anticipating becoming a billionaire in the office.
What I am basically saying is that with him, we thought the party and the state had a wonderful opportunity to work for the people. I gave him advice. I told him that the late Aper Aku remains a sign post in the development of Benue State. He had fundamental ideas and started faithful implementation of these ideas. His policies were sound until the prices of oil collapsed and it became very difficult for him to pay salaries. It was a challenge across the board in the entire country. The nation’s economy was affected. Aku found it very difficult to win election in 1983.
Gabriel Suswam didn’t pay salaries for four months, we capitalised on that and he lost the election. Ortom is owing salaries for how many months now and, therefore, he has no right to run. What we keep telling the people of Benue State is that if you are in the public service and you want to overtake Aliko Dangote overnight, then, certainly, you have no business being in the public service. Aliko Dangote is a hard working young man. He hails from a family of businessmen and, of course, don’t forget the fact that ancient trade caravan routes passed through Kano, so they could draw from that centuries old experience. But see somebody who was born in the bush like many of us, and suddenly, you say you are a multi-billionaire, you are chasing Dangote, you are about to overtake Dangote.
The local government system has collapsed absolutely in Benue State. Chairmen of local governments are being sacked left and right, especially those who refused to move with him to PDP. But to him, it is perfectly right, legal and constitutional to move with our (APC) mandate to PDP. And these are the people who talk about impunity at the national level! We must always commend President Buhari, because if it were Obasanjo, he would have been removed long ago! And don’t forget what Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, the PDP candidate, said in Kogi that if you don’t pay salaries as a governor, you are not fit to come back for a second term.
Alhaji Atiku said that as VP, he worked against the re-election of Mbadinuju of Anambra State for a second term because he couldn’t pay salaries. He said he told President Obasanjo not to support Mbadinuju for a comeback. I believe that he was also indirectly addressing Ortom. The leadership of his party is clearly sending him a message. Then, remember what governor Wike said about him; that this man could not even pay salaries while Rivers State was busy empowering young people and he (Ortom) was busy giving out wheelbarrows. Even that his wheelbarrow, how many of them were given out to youths? Three hundred and fifty. I am not a governor, but I supplied 500 Keke NAPEPs and over 500 motorcycles as a deliberate effort to empower the youth.
Are you aware that since the unfortunate events of January last year, some of those leading PDP in Benue state are alleging that APC is the party backing the herdsmen?
I want to put things in the right perspective. The killings in Benue State started in 2009. We had always co-existed peacefully with the Fulani. I saw it when I was a boy growing up in the village. They would come to graze, my father would give them a place and when they finished, they would leave and come back the next year. I never knew where they came from or where they went to until I got to secondary school in 1968. And the movement had always been seasonal.
I was governor for eight years. The Fulani were there, but did you hear of killings? No. Suswan came in. In 2009, there were killings. Jonathan never sent anyone from the Presidency to go condole with anybody in Benue State. And I remember what Suswam said then; that Tiv people were eating Fulani people’s cows; that they liked cow meat. But when people were killed (last year), President Buhari sent General Dambazau, the Minister of Interior, to take a look at it all and condole us. We went to the mortuary, they addressed a press conference and so on and so forth. Who was sent next? The Vice President. These never happened under Jonathan’s presidency.
And Buhari, the President himself, came to Benue State after the Vice President’s visit. The President ordered the security chiefs to handle things with dispatch. Through ‘Operation Ayem A’Kpatuma,’ sanity has been restored. Have you heard of such killings again? It is not because of Ortom. What has he done to stop the killings? So, this has nothing to do with objective reality. They have nothing to do with APC.
Was APC in power 2009? When Boko Haram was ravaging this country was APC in power? When they were bombing somewhere in Kano, bombing mosques here and bombing churches there, was APC in power?
