PDP Is A Mafia Group

Chief Audu Ikwuta Innocent Ogbeh, former National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and now a stalwart of Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, lauded Independent national Electoral Commission, INEC, for a good showing in the just concluded general elections in the country, but says the electoral commission still has many rivers to cross. Ogbeh in this interview with UBONG GEORGE also describes the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, as a mafia group and not a political party

Sir, what is your appraisal on how INEC handled the just concluded general elections?

Let me tell you that INEC has been quite innovative, I think they made quite an effort. We must appreciate the effort they have made because Nigeria is a very complex and large country with 130,000 polling units. That is very difficult to manage. The first success INEC has achieved is that even though rigging didn’t stop, INEC has put a bar on the capacity for anyone to rig, by doing a registration of voters and accreditation process where no matter how much you want to stuff a box, you know you can’t exceed a certain number. There were cases in the past where there were 500 registered voters and they returned 4,000 votes. That at least has been officially made impossible. Two, there is some clear evidence that the INEC leadership in Abuja, with maybe one or two exceptions, was determined to do something reasonable and honest about the election and so they have tried, but there is still a great deal of myth surrounding some of the impossibility which we have seen, especially in the hands of those who want to be dishonest. Where do they get extra ballot papers to stuff? Who gives it to them? So, at the lower level, there is still room for connivance between INEC officials and corrupt and dishonest politicians. So, INEC must carry out a major examination and re-examination of the elections. They shouldn’t be too comfortable with the feeling that they have done very well. They have tried, let them do more research and hear complaints about what really they have left to do and one of the issues they may have to deal with is to find out from India how India eliminated election rigging.

India became independent in 1947, that is the year I was born and you know what? India prescribed death penalty for anyone cheating in election and they did execute a number of people and since then nobody in India thinks of cheating in an election. They don’t try it, because they know if they are caught, they are dead. And as long as we keep joking with the issue of election, particularly when somebody is caught and he is released without him facing the penalty for the offence committed because somebody phoned a police chief from the Senate or a Minister called the Commissioner of Police and said ‘please release him, he is my boy, please forgive him’, then election rigging won’t stop.

In this same election which we have just finished, there was massive rigging all over the place; stuffing of ballot boxes. For instance, in my local government area, Ogbadibo, we caught somebody who loaded a fertilizer bag with thumb printed ballot papers. Thank God, the soldiers caught him and he was handed over to the police. So, you see, election rigging has not stopped. INEC has tried, but by and large it is been a lot better than many people feared it would turn out to be. So, we congratulate Nigerians and INEC and we can say we have a future here, but INEC must still look inward and do a thorough examination and re-examination of the post-election exercise.

Would you say President Goodluck Jonathan’s clarion call for ‘One Man, One Vote’ was a reality in the just concluded election?

Nigeria, as we all know is a very complex nation. When President Jonathan made the clarion call for ‘One man One vote’ I sincerely believed in him, but the reality was that, it wasn’t one man one vote nationwide. There were places where one person was given ten ballot papers to thumbprint and still went ahead to cast his vote. So, if there is a forensic analysis, you will find out that there are many cases of one person thumb printing so many ballot papers. I believe President Jonathan stood for an ideal, which he also expressed during his campaigns. Whether that ideal was translated into a reality in most of the places, it is something to be desired. But we have a President who led the one man one vote, who said repeatedly ‘don’t cheat for me, I don’t want it’ and he did a thorough campaign, rather costly though. He went round the 36 states of the country and sold his message to the people of this great country and by and large the response was clear, that the people across the length and breath of our great country reacted positively to his message and he won. However, with the elections over, I think, he himself needs to see a report, a detailed forensic analysis of the process of the election, the weakness of the electoral process and then help INEC improve on the elections which are going to come up next year for governorship. The major tragedy though, is that a democracy is as strong and as honest as the economy it manages. As long as people are poor, they would be easy to manipulate. They would be prone to dishonesty and as long as politics has become the only major industry in this country, there will never be an honest and entirely free and fair election in this country. Too many desperadoes who must get into office at all costs are all over place, because the scholarship is for four years, for doing absolutely nothing for the people of your constituency, but only to return with some Maggi cubes and bags of salt for another election. So, he needs to assist INEC so that we can have a more credible election next year.

What are the major issues you will want President Jonathan to tackle as soon as he is sworn in on 29 May 2011?

Well, he should tackle electricity. He must continue to work on that vigorously and they shouldn’t tell him any story about relying on nuclear energy. It won’t work here. The Germans have stopped all the nuclear plants. The Japanese are battling with nuclear disaster. The Americans have not built a new nuclear plant since 1999, most of Europe and US still dependent on coal. We have thirteen coal sites in Nigeria, let us put the plants on the coal sites and save ourselves the trouble of trying to carry the coal from one location to another using trucks. We don’t have a railway system now. It should be revived. They must pursue the coal project and once this is done it would stabilise power and in the process make it possible for industries to be revived. If the issue of power is tackled head-on, we would have been able to address to a very large extent the crisis of the youth, because the crisis of the youth is far more dangerous than anybody can imagine and nobody has cared to address this issue. We talked gibberish about it and it is taking a very dangerous dimension. The youths are doing drugs because they are not engaged in any meaningful venture and they are not listening to anybody. This is very dangerous for the country. So the issue of power is very critical.

What is your take on the violence that greeted the outcome of the presidential election in some parts of the Northern states after President Jonathan was declared the winner of that election?

It was an unfortunate development. I don’t think that response was sensible, because you don’t burn down the country that belongs to him. Nobody knows who to blame now, because we hear there is going to be an inquiry. It will not yield any fruitful result because no inquiry has ever got anything out in the past. We rather allow events to go and then forget them and then console ourselves that it won’t happen again, which is unfortunate. I think it is a very dangerous trend because if everybody chooses to become unruly, then it will not augur well for us as a nation. Probably if someone from the North had won and Jonathan lost, some people in the Niger Delta may have reacted the same way. But we can’t have a country where people think that this four years will bring Nigeria to an end. There is another four years, and so forth, even when we are no longer here. So violence is something that we should detest and condemn in its entirety. It is not necessary and I think that is a pointer to my worry about the North, and I remember I expressed this about seven or eight years ago at a lecture I delivered in Kaduna.

The Northern crisis is going to be one that is near impossible to solve. It is fundamentally economic; poor education, poor economy, a declining productivity and increasing idleness, with a terribly fast growing population. The population of the north is growing faster than that of the south. There is massive serial polygamy. People give birth to children and leave them to fend for themselves. I am not going to say there should be population control so that I don’t become an enemy of churches and mosques across the country. But it is terribly irresponsible to bear a child if you have no guarantee of how to feed and educate the child. It is not enough to say God will feed the child. Because the Bible says increase and multiply, nobody has the right to produce an armed robber in this country you might have the right to produce a child , but you don’t have to produce an armed robber to torment my life at night. That is another side of the matter.

So the Northerners at that level must begin to look at themselves and ask where are we heading to. There are too many crises always bordering on religion and ethnicity in the North and we sit in our comfortable domains and think it is not an issue. It has begun to affect Emirs now and the Vice President. I don’t know who will be spared when the crises envelops the entire system.

Two of your kinsmen, Chief Stephen Lawani of the PDP and Alhaji Usman Abubakar of the ACN were running mates to the governorship candidates of the two prominent political parties in the state and we gathered that Lawani is your bosom friend. At what point did you dump him for the ACN candidate?

Well, we began the PDP in 1998. I directed Ekwueme campaign before the unfortunate assassination attempt on me in Benue in December 1992. In 2001 I became Chairman of the PDP. At that time he was in ANPP. He joined PDP later, while I was still in office as the National Chairman of the party. I fell out with Obasanjo and then I quit the party. I quit on principle and people have been asking me to go back and I said I am not going back. If I quit ACN now, I will retire. I don’t need to be running around, going back and forth. I don’t like the way PDP operates. I think people have turned that party into a mafia and not a party and I have several reasons to support my submission. I saw things there, some of which are persisting. The internal killings that took place; none them has been solved. I think that at the end of it, all of us will face the Almighty God when we die. There will be no lawyer there to argue our cases before the Almighty God. I think there are certain things the party should not allow to happen among its members. Lawani is in PDP and I am not but I am also concerned about issues in this country and I thought about where I can freely discuss the issues and realised that it is only on the platform of ACN. Before I joined ACN, Lawani and I parted ways. For about four years I was lying low here until I joined ACN, and I needed to work for my party to succeed. I want to say it is a contest of ideas that made us to belong to separate political groups and not a conflict of personal interest. I joined ACN because I felt that ACN as a party can solve some problems confronting our people. Looking at what Fashola and Adams Oshiomhole and the governors in the South West are doing, I said as time goes on, they will begin to set a standard which we will want to emulate, since governance is about how political parties can ensure that the dividends of democracy are within the reach of the electorate. We have witnessed how father and son contested vigorously over the chairmanship of the Labour Party. So, we are not enemies, but what exists between us are fundamental differences, but we are still friends. There is an issue agitating my mind. What is happening to local government funds? In spite of the fact local governments are getting between N80 million, N90 million and N100 million a month, there hadn’t been any road graded in Ogbadibo here in the last four years. The people who voted for us here are not slaves. Where is the cash? What happened to it? When I was Chairman of PDP, I called PDP governors to my office to ask them, ‘why are you tampering with local government funds?’ They sent a delegation to me to complain that I was too harsh on them. N80 million a month for four years and almost nationwide now the governors don’t allow one dime to go the local government to use in developing the local government, to repair classrooms, to repair markets, to grade their roads to enable them keep their lives going. The question is, who is keeping the money? Where is the government or the party checking on the governor? We can’t go on like that. I am talking about the crises of the youth. It was because of these basic principles that I left PDP for ACN. So we are still friends.