Vincent Ujumadu
1 July 2009
(Page 2 of 2)
"My advice to you is that you cannot afford to go back. If you go back, history will judge you harshly. We are sure that whatever happens after this, nobody will be able to reverse the good things in Anambra State.
"But it will not be sufficient to keep what you have done in a closet. You don't light a candle and put it under the table. You need to let the world see and know more about the work you are doing in Anambra. By the time you finish doing that, it would be a kind of mass mobilization of the people at the grass root and on their own, they will be able to come out and decide what direction they want things to go. I do hope that the people of Anambra will not deny themselves the opportunity of sustainable development," he said.
Somehow, Obi's problem emanated from the fact that before he became governor, he had never been a politician. For instance, on the day first day he met Chief Victor Umeh, the APGA national chairman in 2001 and told him he wanted to contest for governor, Umeh was somehow unsure of him since he was not a major political player in the state.
But then, the APGA national chairman encouraged him and the rest was history.
Indeed, the opposition against him began early in his administration because the political giants saw him as a neophyte. "At a stage, I started asking myself why I had to get involved in it. But then, it became more and more a challenge," Obi told the editors. But as he was busy trying to provide answers to the numerous problems facing the state, the impeachment came.
"It was a situation where all the members of the House belonged to another party and I found myself in a situation where I was saying, please accept me. It wasn't up to six months and I was impeached illegally over allegations of stealing N4billion. I did nothing to merit the impeachment except that some people said; we don't want to see him," he said. Obi jocularly told the editors that he was happy that the level of his stealing had come down from N4 billion in 2006 to N250 million in 2009.
Then few months after he came back from impeachment, there was 2007 election and, according to him, two months before that election, everybody already knew who the next governor was, adding that all he was doing was just marking time and waiting for May29, 2007. Even on May 27, 2007, when he wanted to leave the Government House to go to Abuja, security operatives said that he should not leave with anything, even his briefcase and they said it was a directive from the incoming governor.
"We are facing a situation where our party does not have any member in the House of Assembly. I am the only governor of a state where most of the major political players are not with him. So what they do everyday when they wake up is to say, this man must go. If you go out there, they will tell you I am not doing anything, even when they see what I am doing. Their reasoning is that if they allow this man to succeed, they are finished politically.
"They keep saying I collect N500 million every month as security vote and I have not seen 40% of that amount. In 2008, the House, which has no APGA member in it approved security vote for me and I did not spend 60% of it.
"Again, in this state, I am the highest tax payer, having paid over N52.8 million in the last 10 years. No other person has paid close to that. I paid this tax even when nobody was taxing me. I came here to serve the people and not to waste their resources.
Apart from the house in my village, I have only one property in Nigeria and that is a house in Festac Lagos. No other place in Nigeria do I own a piece of land and they keep saying I have property in Abuja and all other places. So, the story of seeing guns and dollars in my cars was all part of the type of politics being played in Anambra State ."
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