•We must not play politics with Chibok schoolgirls

Special Adviser on Inter-Party Affairs to the President, Senator Ben Obi, spoke with journalists after organizing a sensitization workshop for Osun state political stakeholders. Says with recent experiences gathered by stakeholders, the Osun election will be more peaceful and freer than recent elections. He also spoke on the yet to be rescued Chibok school girls and controversies at the National Conference among others.

By Clifford Ndujihe

Aregbesola and Omisore

THE workshops, on the face value, appear to aid peaceful election where they were held. In Ekiti, the election was peaceful but the APC complained of scientific rigging before the election…
After many years of being in this game, it is difficult to flog a child and tell the child not to cry. The rhythm of the cry will always be different from one child to the other. There is nothing you do that a political party will not have reason to say this is why we lost this election.

What I am trying to say here is that we are going through a process of re-engineering and at the end of the day we would come to the reality that we have to understand that the style that was adopted by Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State is probably a civilised and modern day approach, that when you lose an election and you are convinced, you congratulate the winner.

Kayode is not a baby. Kayode is one of the best brains in this country. So, he must have given a deep thought before he made his broadcast to the good people of the state.

Some observers say that the presence of the military was the reason for the violence-free election in the state…
There are places that are volatile and when you identify such places you need to beef up security to make sure you don’t allow people to disrupt the activities on ground and then guide and protect the votes of the people.

Heavy military presence
Yes, they have been complaining of heavy military presence on ground but the complaints did not come as using the military presence to promote party A or party B. When you notice areas that are volatile, your duty will be to beef up security. There are some other states where you do not need to deploy the military because they are not as volatile as others.

If we adopt that as a pattern, during the general election, if we have six to seven volatile states, what do we do?
There is what they call operational order within the security services. If they have made it an operational order, I am sure that they would go back to the drawing board to see how they will be able to do virtually the same thing in 2015.

You will look at the flash points across the country and that would help or guide you on how to deploy your men. What I am trying to say here is that you have to keep improving as time goes on. We have not arrived there yet. People were skeptical about INEC particularly after the 2011 elections but Anambra was better last year, Ekiti was better last month. You could see the improvement after seven months.

Negative intervention
The lapses you noticed in Anambra were completely covered in Ekiti. When you try to make sure that you cover such lapses, it reduces the possibility of manipulation or intervention negatively.

From what you saw in Osun, could you predict the outcome of the election given the history of Osun as another hotbed of political violence in the South-West?
All the people that spoke at the workshop spoke in favour of peaceful and violence-free election. But again, until the campaigns wind down, this temperature will remain high. The candidates themselves, all of them are big boys on the political terrain; they are very senior players on the terrain. I think the temperature will drop as the campaigns wind down. I am not a soothsayer but I believe it would be so. Even the necessary agencies are doing their best to ensure that nothing goes wrong.

On comments that scuttling the report of the National Conference may split Nigeria given the derivation controversies that led to abrupt adjournment of the delegates and comments by Chief DSP Alamieyeseigha that Niger Delta was facing earthquake because of oil exploration
Nobody wants Nigeria to split because they know that the strength of this country is her size and unity.

Strength of the country
So, I don’t think there is anything wrong with the decision to end the National Conference the way it ended. The president has set up a small technical committee to cross the ‘T’s’ and dot the ‘I’s, so to say.
Nobody wants this country to split. Even from the confab, you saw how they were able to manage themselves from the inauguration till the end of it.

DSP may be conveying the message of his people to the National Conference; they will listen to him and look at it. DSP is also a leader of that zone (South-South) by every stretch of imagination that you may look at it.
At the appropriate time, other leaders may sit together and be able to say, are we doing the right thing? And if not, let us do the right thing.

However, this is not the way we want to go about things. It is give and take. Whatever we do, we will end up reaching some understanding. Before reaching the decision on the issue of state creation, all of them in the Confab had reached an agreement that that of the South-East has become a clear case of injustice. It is an issue of give and take. People must be allowed to vent their views and disagreement, so that you know where they stand and how they feel about the issue.

Over 100 days since our girls were abducted at Chibok they have not been rescued even with the aid of the international community. What do you make of the situation?
We are talking about a very delicate assignment. Even the international community sees it as such. The intention of every one of us is to rescue the abducted girls alive. So even when you have information of the exact location of where the girls are kept, and the inclination to attack, you don’t intend to storm it because what they (terrorists) will do is to use them (girls) as shield.

So it is a very delicate assignment that requires a lot of experience and a lot of tact to subdue and overcome the terrorists. It is painful that we are talking about 100 days after the abduction, but we want these girls back safe and that is what the president has been concerned about by having regular meetings with the service chiefs and security agencies again and again. It is not an easy task because of that peculiar nature of the assignment. There is no magic to it than to be very careful and tactful in approaching it.

So far, the reports have been indicating the possibility that they would be rescued sooner than later. I believe that this matter is very sensitive and once we talk about it, we have to also remember that their parents are there. Anytime we raise this matter, we also raise their feelings one way or the other. So we have to be very careful and continue to pray.

Anybody who is attaching politics to this matter is making the biggest political blunder. This has nothing to do with politics. This is a challenge that we all have to live with.
We must be realistic and understand that the only way you can defeat terrorism is that we must unite as a people and not play politics with it. We are talking about the North-East today; it could be any other zone tomorrow. So I plead with all of us not to bring politics into this matter.