Dr Ogaga Ifowodo, a lawyer and human rights/political activist recently informed his Isoko people of his intention to represent them in the House of Representatives on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC). He told BOLAJI OGUNDELE in this interview why he joined the race.
What was that gathering a moment ago all about?
It was to declare publicly my intension to enter the race for the Federal House of Representatives to represent the Isoko Federal Constituency. The Isoko people have only one representative and I intend to be that representative.
They have a representative until now, why would they need another one in place of the current occupier?
It’s obvious, I don’t think he has represented the Isoko people well, there is nothing we can say or that can be attributed as a gain or benefit from the federal government that his representation has made possible, nothing. In fact, the loudest cry out of Isoko land right now is that of extreme marginalisation, to the point of near ostracization, as if we are not part of Nigeria, like what is part of Nigeria in Isoko land is its oil and gas, not the people, not the land, but the oil and gas and which is of course piped away under our feet and the one that cannot be piped away is flared into the air to further pollute the atmosphere. In terms of the people and the land in Isoko, here’s no federal presence, it’s as if we are not part of Nigerian and if a representative of the Isoko people in the federal legislature has not been able to draw attention to this, then he’s not been doing a good job, obviously someone else needs to do that job.
What do you think you will be doing differently if your people decide to send you to the House of Representatives?
Of course, it automatically means that I will be a louder, more effective advocate of the people to redress the injustice, the long running injustice being done to Isoko land. I can list a whole lot of things being done to Isoko land; Isoko is almost being excluded from the amnesty programme, which leads to the training of youths of the Niger Delta to develop their human capacity, acquire skills that can make them productive and responsible citizens. You can go through the list of all the people who have been benefitting, may be you’ll find a handful, but even there, within what is meant for the Niger Delta, Isoko is being excluded. I know that the job of a member of the House of Representatives is not limited to his constituency because it’s a national law making body, I am a lawyer of 23 years standing at the bar, I’m a human rights and democracy activist, I’m a writer and scholar, I think I know what it takes to make good laws for the country. I’ve been a public commentator right from my days as a student and I currently write a column for Vanguard every fortnight so I have been deeply entrenched in the issues of Nigeria right from the start, you will only say I am only now turning my attention to so called local issues, but all politics is local, you cannot separate the local from the global. You cannot separate the absence of good drinking water in Oleh from the absence of good drinking water in Kafanchan. You cannot separate insecurity in Ozoro from insecurity in Yobe or Mubi. So all local issues are in the end global, it is only now that I’m actually drawing my attention to the local issue, knowing full well that they are also global. But I am fully conscious of the fact that as a member of the National Assembly, my duty is not only to my community, but to the whole of Nigeria and I am sure that under any standard objective measurement, I will be the best candidate to occupy that seat.
Before we start about what will you will be doing when you get there, let us talk about the process of getting there. Nigeria’s politics depends very much on money, they say, are you ready to spend money the way of Nigerian politics?
One of the reasons why I’m going into this race is that I hope, by my campaign, to point towards the direction where our politics should go. I hope to show that if you involve the people, you don’t necessarily need to rob the bank or loot the treasury to the bottom before you can be elected to office, in fact the truth is that money politics does not really work. What we have seen is that the will of the people is never allowed to be expressed; people vote one way and fictitious results are announced somewhere else or they prevent voting all together, snatch ballot boxes, cause confusion, hire thugs who will be shooting on that day and scare people away, they thumbprint the ballot papers and announce results.
If you allow the will of the people to prevail, as we saw with June 12, as we have seen in pockets of elections here and there, money becomes a factor, but not the determining factor and it is a factor because we know to move from point A to point B you will buy petrol, you will pay to print posters. You will do some other things which money must necessarily do. If it’s only that kind of money that you spend, we will not say it’s moneybag politics, it’s just the necessary amount of money you need to spend. However, I’m fully aware that our politics has been so corrupted and sometimes you can’t blame the people; they vote for a candidate and just four years the candidate has become a multi-millionaire and when time comes again, the people will say ‘we voted for you and all you did was becoming a millionaire’. So in a way, it’s a certain kind of demanding something back and it’s their money that has been stolen.
The only message I have for those who will come under the influence of money politics is ‘if they bring their money they have stolen from you, take it, prepare yourself a good meal, eat it, but then go to the polling booth and vote your conscience. I can assure you that in my campaign, we will rely on ordinary people, people who want change in Nigeria, who will be willing to contribute their money to the campaign and they can only contribute only as much as we need to do the necessary work of organising, not to buy votes, that’s not what our money will spent on.
You have chosen to vie on the platform of the APC and they say around here that the South-South is exclusively PDP, what do you hope to do to turn the table?
That is a fiction, a myth; that idea that Delta state is a PDP stronghold. If you know how all the elections have gone, they have been very contentious, even going as far as the tribunals and the Court of Appeal. So that already tells you that it is not a place where PDP can come and have a landslide. We also know that the PDP is a rigging machine – that is the only way they get to power, they don’t win free and fair elections, not only in Delta state, everywhere. May be now and then there are good candidates and they win free and fair, but in general the PDP has been a huge votes rigging machine and this is not only me saying that; after every election monitors will issue their reports, after 2003 it was deemed as a joke, even Yar’adua himself admitted it and that was why his promise was to set up an electoral reform commission, which he did and Justice Uwais issued a fine and brilliant report on how to save our polity from the rigging machine called the PDP. Of course, I know that other parties rig, but it’s the party in power that takes the biggest blame for rigging.
We saw what happened to the Justice Uwais report; they cherry picked it, selected the ones they wanted and left the meat of it and threw it away. Delta state is not a PDP fortress, late Senator Ewerhido won from a minority party, the DPP. But speaking for Isoko land, I can assure you that Isoko land is far more progressive than that and that they will resist any attempt to rig this election and that if their will is freely expressed then the APC will have what will amount to a landslide because APC stands for change, the people of Isoko land, whom I’m going to represent as Isoko Federal Constituency, are yearning, pining, dying for change and they will go with the APC
