By Festus Ahon

‘GENERAL’ Kingsley Muturu is the Chairman of the Delta State chapter of Phase Two of  Amnesty Programme. In this interview, he speaks on  the Amnesty Programme among other issues.
Excerpts:

2015 elections  are around the corner and five governors have left the PDP to join the opposition APC. What do you think this portends for the PDP and the re-election quest of President Goodluck Jonathan?
Freedom of association is guaranteed in the Constitution of this country, so nobody can question their decision to leave the PDP to join forces with the APC, but I can assure you that their action will have no negative impact on the PDP. The PDP as the biggest party in the country will continue to wax stronger with or without them.

The grouse of those governors, particularly those from the North, ever since President Goodluck Jonathan came on board, is that somebody from the South-south  and not a northerner is the president  of Nigeria. Rather than give him their support to succeed in taking the country to the next level, they have been going about orchestrating their campaign of calumny against  Jonathan.

Of the 53 years of Nigeria’s independence, the north has ruled for at least 39 years and it is not on record that any South-south or the people of the region have done anything to destabilize or their administration or carry out any campaign of calumny. We have always supported all the successive administrations. This is a geo-political zone on whose resources the country have been depending to survive and, for the very first time, one of its indigenes is the president and some people are say saying no? This is  preposterous.

Despite provisions of the Constitution that one is entitled to contest for the presidency for two tenures, some people came out in the name of G7 Governors to challenge the president’s right to contest.
What we are saying is that President Goodluck Jonathan has the right to contest and nobody, no or any group of individuals, no matter how hard they try can take that away from him.

Governor Rotimi Ameachi of Rivers State is not from the north. He is from the south-south and he is among the governors who have left the PDP to join APC.  What is your view on this?
Rotimi Ameachi is wasting his time. It will dawn on him sooner or later that he has made a great mistake. If he thinks he is going to control Rivers State, he will be surprised to realize that it will be a different ball game when the chips are down. The people of Rivers State know that the President is from that area and they will want him to continue till 2019.

It is clear that Rotimi Ameachi has the ambition of vying for the position of vice president in 2015, but what we in the South-south want at this time of our political life is not the vice president. The aspiration of the people of the South-south is for President Goodluck Jonathan to be re-elected for a second tenure.

Recently, the leaders of the Phase Two of the Amnesty Programme were complaining about their exclusion in the award of the pipeline surveillance contracts. What exactly was the problem?
Our grouse was that when the pipeline surveillance contracts were first awarded, they were diverted and we in Phase Two were not considered for reasons that were unknown to us.
Somewhere along the line, the contracts were terminated and the re-awarding process is ongoing. What we are saying is that we are also ex-militant leaders but the Federal Government is not looking in  our direction in the area of the pipeline surveillance contracts.

We are entitled to our fair share of the contracts, because we have been playing our role in the maintenance of peace in the Niger Delta. So we are calling on the Federal Government, particularly the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, to give us our share of the pipeline surveillance contracts.

There have been pockets of complaints by some ex-militant leaders, particularly those in Phase Three of the Amnesty Programme that they are not being carried along by the Chairman of the Amnesty Programme, Mr. Kingsley Kuku. What do you have to say on this?
Ex-militants are over 30,000 and Kingsley Kuku has been doing his best to ensure that every one is carried along. You know it is ex-militants he is dealing with, and sometimes some of them say he is not doing well.
Sometimes people find it difficult to control members of their own family and, when disagreements arise, they seek the intervention of outsiders to resolve settle their disputes.

Kuku is dealing with over 30,000 ex-militants for crying out loud. You see, it is easier for two herdsmen to control a hundred cows than for two leaders to control 50 persons without some of them trying to generate problems.
The problem with Phase Three is not Kuku’s making. Most of the Phase Three ex-militants are accusing Kuku of not giving them enough slots, but the truth is that it was not Kuku that allocated the slots; it was the Federal Government.

Besides, the 3,600 slots given to Phase Three are not enough to accommodate the ex-militants in that phase. For instance, the number of slots allocated to Phase One was over 19,000 and phase two over 6,000, so you can see that 3,600 slots for Phase
Three are grossly on the low side; so that is why we have been calling on the Federal Government to revisit the issue of Phase Three by way of providing more slots.