Ben Agande And Gbenga Oke
1 December 2008
interview
He looks very urbane with his fairly gray moustache. Ben Obi, as he is simply known, was Atiku Abubakar's running mate at the 2007 presidential elections on the platform of the Action Congress, AC.
For a man who had served as Political Adviser to the National Security Adviser, Aliyu Gusau, Obi was largely seen by many as an Aso Rock power house of sorts. However, when his quest for the Senate from a district in Anambra State suffered a discount in 2003, it became clear that his membership of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, had become tenuous.
He won the legal battle which spanned some 18 months and got into the Senate, by which time it had become discernible that his days in the PDP were numbered.
In this interview with Gbenga Oke and Ben Agande, Obi opens up on how he found himself in the Obasanjo administration but points out that Obasanjo messed up big time. And whereas some might argue that his position may be opportunistic considering the fact that he served four full years in that administration, his views cannot be faulted on why Nigeria remains underdeveloped.
Excerpts:
How has it been like since you lost the elections?
Well, it is a known knowledge that we are in court and we've done the last heat of the battle and we are now waiting for the judgment. The Supreme Court at the last sitting when they adopted our briefs of argument reserved judgment.
So, whenever they are ready, they will certainly communicate to our lawyers and our lawyers would inform us accordingly. So, to that extent, one has been lying low, and this is also an opportunity to do an appraisal of where the country is and where the country is supposed to have been.
There is enough time to attend to one's pressing family problems putting in mind that in this part of the world, you have the extended family, so you now have time to ask who is where and who does what.
Since you now have all the time, I guess that you would have had time to sit down and reflect, have an assessment of what is happening in the country today. What can you say is really wrong with this country and what is your assessment of the country?
Well, it is a pity that we are still a country drifting by the second. I was in Lagos for three days and there in Ikoyi for the three days I spent, I stayed some 72 hours, I do not think we had electricity for more than eight hours and to think that I just came back from Arusa , Tanzania .
So, you now talk of the African giant, Nigeria, any factory that wants to survive in Nigeria runs on diesel, so you find out that what is supposed to be the profit of these companies are now diverted to buying diesel, therefore, they can't survive, and so workers are laid off, so you have un-quantified level of unemployment.
So, what do you want to say about the country? What do you want to say about the leadership? Look at how Nigerians surrendered themselves to Obasanjo in 1999, Nigerians were over-jubilating because they thought truly that the messiah had been found, the messiah who will come and put the country in its rightful place in the comity of nations, but less than 18months after Obasanjo took over, it was clear to some of us that the man did not know anything about governance, the man did not know anything about running the country.
18 months, I started telling people that, this man cannot handle the situation and people said, you just don't like this man, I said it is not a question of likeness, it is a question of looking at this and seeing through what is happening.
You know, I started politics at a very young age and I met the likes of Great Zik of Africa, the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Mallam Aminu Kano, Ibrahim Waziri, and I played politics with people like that, you can quantify in terms of political tutelage, so I ask you my good friends, what else is there to say? People say because you are from the opposition, you would not have found anything good.
Well, let them tell you the good we have seen since 1999, what good has the Obasanjo administration brought to bear in this country? The place is there with complete squalor, decadence, corruption, if nothing else, what the House of Representatives has exposed, talk about the Power sector probe, talk about the oil sector, these things stink to high heavens. But unfortunately still, we do not have a dynamic government in place, we are still crawling, still trying to find our feet, so that is the situation as far as I'm concerned.
Are you saying there is no hope with this government?
I do not see any hope from this government, but I have hope that ultimately, the Nigerian nation would find its bearing, I have hope that ultimately, Nigerians will rise up to the occasion and take the bull by the horn.
Having said that, in the situation Nigeria has found herself, what do you think is the way forward?
Well, when the incumbent president came on board, he was honest enough to say that the elections were flawed and promised to do some reforms. He did not need anybody to tell him, he said so because the world had already said so, that is exactly why when he put forward his question, I said to him, which election are you talking about?
The one that the whole world came to witness and passed judgment on or the one that you conducted yourself? It was clear that the election was flawed and the man said so, but as time went by, I kept hearing that 'oh I won the election', he has changed tone that he won the election.
Now, we have had some cases of re-run, they were worse than the election that was conducted in 2007, conducted by these same people, the same INEC. So, if this country must move forward, today everybody is screaming Obama, Obama, how many times did you find policemen moving round polling centres and I beg to say that almost 75 per cent of Nigerians watched the American election if not more, did you find soldiers being deployed, did you find policemen, did you find INEC officials moving around? You will find nobody, people just went and they voted and when they had problems with their votes not reflecting, there and then, it was corrected.
In 1983, when the NPN came with their so-called landslide, the great Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, were in shock, they had never experienced anything like that, Zik was so shocked and he could not speak, when the media confronted Chief Awolowo, he replied and said that he was so shocked about what has happened and that his prayer was that, if this was allowed to stand, our dear country may never again witness election and ever since then, the various elections that have been conducted have been going from bad to worse.
If you take 1999, you can simply say that, the elections were rigged. If you take 2003, Obasanjo invaded the whole of South-West, even though to a large extent, his brothers still reasoned with him and typical Obasanjo, he betrayed them and used the power of coercion to snatch away from them.
In 2007, that is when they threw all decency to the wind.
If you play back what Chief Awolowo said in 1983, that is what is called wisdom and I want to say without any fear of contradiction, that by 2011, election will just be, "my friend, this is the candidate, full stop, don't waste your time," and if you come out, they throw you in the boot of the vehicle and take you wherever police will take you to. We must do a complete reform of the election process, a procedure whereby the members of the electoral commission are appointed will also have to be enforced to include the political parties.
Those that will form the members of the commission - the civil rights must be included, Nigerian Labour Congress, and we also need a truly Nigeria Police Force that will not be subservient to the man who appoints it. Then you can now start to talk about the true potentialities of a great Nigerian nation.
The impression out there is that opposition parties in Nigeria are just opposition on the pages of newspapers and nothing is on ground and what role is AC playing to ensure virile opposition?
I will tell you here again, that it is not everybody that knows how to be in the opposition party. Opposition calls for a lot of practical, painstaking guts; it takes a lot of guts, a lot of Nigerians do not know what the opposition is because everybody wants it on a platter of gold, everybody wants a properly dressed bed that you will just go and lie down.
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