BY JOHNBOSCO AGBAKWURU & JOSEPH ERUNKE
Senator Odion Ugbesia represents Edo Central in the Senate. He is the Chairman, Senate Committee on Trade and Investment and the only serving Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the senate. In this interview, he speaks on how ministers have been frustrating constituency projects thereby making life difficult for the masses. He also speaks on national issues and defection in PDP.

There is belief among the general public that the recent merger or decamping of PDP governors to APC is going to have negative impact on the Party. As a member of the PDP, what is your take on this development?
Those who think so are entitled to their opinion as Nigerians but there are those out there who think also that it is a good riddance to bad rubbish. This is a democracy, more than that; it is an evolving democracy- a developing democracy.
It must go through this process and rigours before we can come to what we can consider to be a near-perfect and stable situation. We are not there yet, these are all trying moments, and these things are bound to happen, so I don’t see any problem there.

Won’t the development affect PDP membership and  leadership of the National Assembly?
No, leadership, take the Senate for instance, both APC or whoever they are, I don’t think there is anybody that is not happy with the David Mark presidency.
In the House of Representatives, yes, it may create some problems until it is stabilized. But here in the senate, we are not worried at all because David Mark has been one person in this country who has held it together.
He has saved this country in very critical situation. For instance, take when President Yar’Adua died when he invoked the doctrine of necessity.
That action alone saved this country from collapse . He has held the Senate together so tightly, so neatly that I don’t see anybody that will not be happy with him.

Does it not worry some of you that President Goodluck Jonathan is having some of his greatest enemies from the South South geo-political zone, where he hails from?
Who killed Jesus Christ? His people! So why should it be different? My own greatest opponents are from my immediate family.  So it happens like that, it is human nature. It doesn’t bother me at all.

Ahead of the 2015 election, don’t you think the crisis can  harm Jonathan’s second term ambition?
That is the point. There are things that are bound to happen. There is this saying in my native parlance that the tongue and the teeth in the mouth do quarrel, the teeth will bite the tongue, yet they will settle. Yes, there is crisis in PDP but who says the APC is not crisis prone? They will have their own crisis. This is what happens in a developing political system. It is bound to happen, so it shouldn’t bother you unnecessarily.

Let the 2015 come, it is a long way. What is happening now cannot stay till 2015, it cannot. There are bound to be changes. And on a philosophical note, if God says he is going to be, one hundred governors over there cannot stop him. But what I have been saying  is that the governors in this country have become too powerful otherwise why would the defection of five people bother you? It is because they have become too powerful. Drafters of our constitution did not envisage a situation where governors will be all this powerful.

Now that they have become like this, what is the way out?
They are that powerful due to the resources at their disposal. To deal with this issue, we must find a way through constitutional means. We must realize that in the first place, the constitution does not even recognise Governors Forum which is the source of this problem today.
The Governors Forum is alien to the constitution. So, if we are going to deal with it, we must find a way through constitutional means to reduce their powers by reducing the resources at their disposal and see how we can see a less powerful 36 governors. That is how I see the situation there.

Amaechi and Jang

How do you view  fears that the way things are going in the country politically may lead to military coup?
Military intervention is today an aberration, it is no longer a popular thing, and it is no longer an attractive option. In the past, you can say that but not today. Nigeria has become so sophisticated. How are you going to stand or stay to rule the country through military rule? The world today is looking towards democracy and not military dictatorship. The international community will frown at it, Nigerians will frown at it. Where are they going to derive the legitimacy with which to rule?

What is your take on the prediction that Nigeria might disintegrate before 2015?
Look, there are people who are naturally pessimists, but there are people who are naturally incurable optimists and I am one of such people. Yes, we may have some problems but the option before us, a better option before us is to stay together because I don’t see a situation where we can peacefully sit down and dissipate. If this country is going to dissipate or be divided into many parts, it cannot come peacefully. So, we must try to avoid it.

Do you think the proposed   national dialogue  is one of the solutions towards that?
Well, yes. I have also said in many occasions that the banner of peace, the banner of dialogue, the banner of negotiation is better than every other option available. If Nigerians say we need to sit down and talk and to re-examine our rules and co-existence, then we should do just that.
There is nothing wrong with that. But what is wrong is for people to just sit down in Lagos, Abeokuta, in Kano and begin to say that there should be no Nigeria. I am an unrepentant advocate of a unified Nigeria, a true Nigerian.

How are you seeing the threat by the leadership of your party, the PDP to deal with the recently defected members of the party to the APC?
That is the problem with democracy. Anybody can do whatever he or she likes. He can decide to go this way or that way, there is freedom of choice which everybody is now exercising-the right to choose where to stay, the right to choose who to follow and the right to choose  which political party to associate with. It is enshrined in the constitution, it is inalienable. Everybody is entitled to it and we are exercising it, we are taking advantage of that. So, you can’t fault them if they choose to do that.

What about the constitutional right of a political party to refill the seat of any of its members that defects to another party?
Well, the party has its own mechanism for discipline, If the need arises for the use of that mechanism, of course, I think the party will, without hesitation deploy such means but I don’t see that now because nothing is sacrosanct as it stands, we are still talking. I have always believed that in politics, you don’t fight to finish, you must leave a window of opportunity so that tomorrow, you can reconcile. The common thing about politics is that there is no permanent friend and there is no permanent enemy. What is permanent is your personal interest.

There is this allegation that the leadership of your party is so autocratic and that it does not give room for members of the party to express their views…
How? What is undemocratic about the Peoples Democratic Party? Is it rules like they have in the APC or how? There is nothing  undemocratic about the PDP. What people don’t understand is that there have to be leadership. Even in religious organizations, they have leadership, they have rules, rules of engagement, and they have code of conduct. These things must be there.

What is your appraisal generally in terms of implementation of the 2013 budget?
I must confess that I am not personally impressed with the level of implementation of the 2013 budget. But I am not also surprised because it has been like that.
We must do something about our style of budgeting. The question the National Assembly has about budget is on the issue of constituency projects. We are entitled to insert a given amount inside the budget as our constituency project and once that is done and reflected in the budget, it is now left to the whims and caprices of ministers to either implement, execute or abandon and in some cases abandon. And I have always said that most of these ministers don’t know the constituencies, they don’t even know their own constituencies. I have said that. I don’t even think somebody like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala ever voted in this country before she was appointed a minister the first time.
There are a few of them like that. So they probably don’t know what pains our constituents have. I go home every weekend and I know that my people this time around don’t have water. So if I put borehole as my constituency project and it is left for one minister to award that contract and at the end of the day, he does not award it, you expect me to be happy.
But I must confess also that they are doing better now than a few of the ministers that came and went.

Still on the proposed National Conference,  do you believe that the National conference will achieve its aim by addressing the issues believed to be responsible for problems Nigeria is currently facing or that it is another smoke screen that will lead us nowhere?
It cannot be. Like I told you earlier, I am an incurable optimist. It cannot be that it will lead nowhere, it will lead somewhere. We will vent out pain of feelings as to how we want to be governed, how we want to live together. The problem with it is the logistic problem, how do we suggest, who will discuss it at the National Conference. Like in my own senatorial district, if you say, I don’t want to pre-empt what the committee is going to do but hypothetically, if you are selecting two persons from a senatorial district, who would select these two? That will be a problem.

Again, we will bring religious thing into it, a political thing into it, so we will have a problem with selection of membership of that conference. It is a logistic problem that I see; otherwise, if we are able to assemble, it will address all the contending issues.

But whether the National Conference is not also superfluous is a different question entirely. Otherwise, we have the National Assembly; we have the House of Representatives that is representing Nigeria based on population. Then, you have the Senate that is representing Nigeria based on equality of states and these people have been voted for, these people have been given the mandate by Nigerians. So, this other one that we are trying to do may be superfluous because there is need for it, there is need for Nigerians to talk which we too here, are doing. We are doing constitutional review and other things here, all aimed at good governance.

In essence, do I understand your position to be against the proposal of government to subject the outcome of the confab to the ratification of the National Assembly, given your  expression that the National Assembly is equally handling similar responsibility?
No, no no. I think that will be the best thing to do. Whatever will be arrived at, whatever they will discuss and bring out, it has to come to the National Assembly for ratification so as to give it clean legitimacy, a better legitimacy by people who were voted for by Nigerians.

Assuming Nigerians decides that it should go through a referendum; will there be any need to subject it to ratification by the National Assembly?
No, what we are doing now is dealing with hypothesis. We do not know what the committee is going to recommend. The committee has been put in place; they will look around and find the way around in bringing about this National Conference. Supposing they say there would be referendum, so be it.

You said most ministers don’t know their constituents and probably may not know the pains they are passing through, does Senator Ugbesia know his constituents, and how has he been able lessen the pains of his constituents?
I have here my score card that was done early this year. As at early this year, I had done 22 boreholes in my senatorial district. Between that time and now, we have added another 13, so we are looking at close to 36 boreholes in my senatorial district. We have built about 13 schools, this is what representation is all about-knowing the aspirations of your people and be responsible to them. I will give you this so that you know what we are doing here in the Senate, it is not enough to talk grammar every day, you must find something that your people will remember you there.

Any empowerment programme like scholarship for the youths?
I have awarded scholarship to 140 students in tertiary institutions in the five local government areas of my senatorial district.

Foreign investors dominate investments in Nigerian, what is your committee doing to stop the trend?
Well, I don’t think that assumption is correct but let me say that the Nigerian economy, I have said it and I stand to be corrected, that the Nigerian economy, to a very large extent defies any known volunteers. What is evident, what is clear is that the Nigerian economy is a mono-product economy.