Sen. Eyinnaya Abaribe.

…’They want to use Igbo head to break coconut’

…Says Peter Obi, Charles Soludo can be President

…‘Only Ndigbo man can weld Nigeria together in unity’

In the second part of his interview with Sunday Vanguard, Senator Enyinnaya Harcourt Abaribe, Minority Leader of the 9th Senate, speaks on the state of the nation and the 2023 zoning controversy.

Let’s discuss the state of the nation. The government campaigned on three issues of fixing the economy, tackling insecurity and corruption. Have they met the expectations?

I did an interview a short while ago at Radio House in Abuja, it was done before the NBC came up with their five million Naira fine and they became the National Assembly that makes laws and the judiciary that imposes penalty, and so they became a part of everything: The executive, the judiciary and the legislature.

So, when I granted that interview and they asked this same question, I said I will answer using an allegory from Fela Anikulakpo Kuti; that Fela sang a song called ‘Confusion break bone’ and, in the opening part of the song, he spoke about mismanagement and stealing by government; saying “everything na old news be that”.

So, what you’re just talking about sounds like old news, sounds like a broken record repeating itself and that is the most pitiful part of everything.

The same things that this government complained about when they came in 2015 have even got worse and, of course, when they were getting worse before the last elections, we complained and people were also complaining and pointing out to them that “you guys are doing exactly the same things that you complained about and nothing seems to be getting better”.

And at that time the APC government always had a fallback position and that fallback position was that “PDP left this place in shambles and we are coming in to repair it”. Fine! It is now five years after PDP and they have left the place in even worse shape than they complained about, and so we are now looking at them and remembering Fela saying “old news”. There is nothing you can do, this government has lost it. So, when we talk about the state of the nation today, I think what we actually ought to pray for, which was what I called for on that day, is that it is about time patriots step in. By the time they finish, there will probably be no Nigeria left and we will continue to say it. There will be none and if there is no Nigeria, then all these things that we are doing, all the running around, all the ups and downs become an exercise in futility.

Many people think the National Assembly is collaborating with the executive. A good example is the suspension of investigative hearing into some of the MDAs being carried out by the House of Reps. Tell us your perspective?

We also have to take this in perspective. When this government came to power in 2015 and the first set of leadership at the National Assembly at that time led by Bukola Saraki and Co came in, what we heard from the executive was that the National Assembly was hampering whatever efforts they were putting in; that they were antagonistic and all the things they wanted to do, they couldn’t do them.

Now fast forward to 2019 and the present National Assembly and, on the day we were to choose our leadership, all the lawmakers of the APC showed up and there were efforts to ensure that they toed party line. Now after getting what they wanted, we still have not seen any change in the circumstances of Nigerians, rather things are worse.

So you can now see that even with a National Assembly that is collaborating with the executive, they are still unable to do well and that is why I said you must put this in perspective so that you don’t look at the National Assembly and say “oh, the National Assembly is collaborating with them”. When the National Assembly didn’t “collaborate” with them, they will now explain their failure away from themselves by blaming the National Assembly.

It is just like I told you before that they were also explaining their failures away by blaming PDP which had left office and who they said they were coming to change. And in fact, one of the very funny things that we always got was a default position where they said “after all, PDP did it”. I mean, that never made sense.

And I always came out to point it out to them by saying “how can you say PDP did it and therefore that is why you are doing it?” You came into office saying those bad things that PDP was doing you were going to eliminate them and that is why you were carrying a big white flag and so what do we get?

But you have almost same number of senators as APC. You could have checkmated some of these things…

No, we don’t. We have more senators in APC than in PDP. We have never had equal number.

READ ALSO: Presidency: Kokori, Okwor make case for the S-East

Isn’t there anything that you can do as the opposition?

Our job as the opposition is to oppose and say “no” which we will continue to do on the floor but the provisions of our rules and democratic ethos say on the floor of both chambers, voice vote and cast votes determine where you go and so, despite your opposition, the votes still say that they should toe the line of their party. We have no options left.

Going forward, 2023 is almost here and parties are clamoring to grab the most powerful seat at the federal level. Where do you think the pendulum will swing because the APC is out there trying to retain power and your party, PDP, is also strategizing?

Well, I think the verdict is already out. 2023 is not almost here, it is three years away; we are in 2020. The other day the President came, trying to find a lame duck way to say “I will leave some legacies”. What legacy is he going to leave?

He is just going to leave a legacy of debts, a legacy of difficulty and the most important legacy which the President has left or will leave will be a legacy of making things totally impossible for whoever takes over from him to govern and I will tell you how it goes. This government has been the only government that has gone against the laws of this country.

It has gone against Section 14 (3) of the Constitution which talks about Federal Character. It has gone against the Federal Character principles that were even brought by previous governments before us in order to weld us together in terms of unity.

Even the Federal Character Commission itself that is supposed to be the ombudsman that would check the breaches of the law by government was also compromised by this government where today both Chairman and Secretary are manned by people from the northern part of the country.

Before now, you had a Chairman from the northern part and you had the Secretary from the South and this is what I am talking about that this government is going to make it extremely impossible for whoever takes over from them to do well.

Assuming somebody takes over and he is from the South-West, will he follow what this government has already instituted, for example, by putting all security agencies, the 14 or 16 of them, under people from the South just like the Federal Government has done today by putting all under people from the North?

How is it going to function? Assuming it is somebody from the South-East, will he put everything under people from the South-East?

Will this country take it? So, what this government has done is to lay landmines that will destroy this country and when we were shouting and telling some elements that they are laying conditions to make this country rupture, they said the President needs to work with only those that he is comfortable with and now you can see the consequences of that.

Now that he has instituted nepotism as a fundamental part of the architecture of government, somebody coming after him, supposing his own people come to him and say “it’s been done before” just like they are telling us “oh PDP did it before” and so, if I become President and I decide that all my brothers from the South-East will take over everything and so, I retire everybody and put my people because it has been done before and, if you talk, I will say, “listen, Buhari did it”.

You set dangerous precedents you don’t even know. What happens in a country, how do you build a country? You build a country in a way that even things that you want to do against your natural instincts, you think of others and you think of tomorrow.

You have a holistic view of everything, but we have a very narrow-minded and provincial person who just does not care. And so, it is the implications of what these things are going to bring that we have continued to talk against and that is why we are in this conundrum today. And coming to the question of APC; APC is dead today.

APC swallowed its own Chairman and brought a Caretaker Committee and what will the Caretaker do? They will just be modeling along but when the time comes, they will now say “let’s do a convention and bring up a Chairman”, where are they going to get the Chairman that will not trigger the same things driving APC apart?

That is the first issue that APC will have to confront. The second issue that APC will have to confront is, where will the presidential candidate come from? Any which way it goes, APC is in trouble.

So, you find that when we talk about the future, we want to go from today to tomorrow and be sure that there is even a country and that is why my very good friend, Peter Obi, some people were asking him the other day, “do you want to be Igbo President?” and he said, “listen, why can we be talking about that when we have existential problems right in front of us?” Can this nation survive?

We have the Covid-19 pandemic which, combined with the drop in oil price to zero, now led the country to go into a borrowing spree to fund recurrent expenditures and so, a few days down the line, where do you think we are doing to go?

So, the debt situation calls for concern?

I do not even think that the truth about the debt situation is very open and you will notice that every time they are questioned, they flare into a rage. The question is, you are a public official and you are acting on our behalf.

We elected you into office and we raise legitimate questions and you don’t settle to even answer us in a very supercilious manner. You now say we ought not to have even asked that question. And one of the unfathomable things I heard from a minister was that even this loan you are talking about, it was signed under PDP. Can you imagine? So, if PDP signs a MoU and you come in and the thing hasn’t been…, is it not your job to do due diligence and review everything? There are some things that we don’t just want to see and one of them is the reluctance of those who are driving us into this debt burden to tell us that we don’t need to ask questions.

This is not a military regime. I am elected to ask questions for my constituency so that if I go back and I am having a constituency reach-out and I am talking with my constituents and they ask me questions, I should be able to proffer reasonable answers based on the documentations and all the things we get. But everywhere, we are in over our heads.

That is what we are seeing and you know that what they tell us about our capacity to borrow is not true. It is not about the size of our GDP, it is about the earnings that we have. Do we have the capacity from our earnings to finance these loans?

If we are spending, as some calculations have it, up to 70% or 80% of our earnings on debt repayment, what it tells us is that the little portion of 20% that is left is not even enough to pay for recurrent expenditure and so we borrow more. And we have just eased ourselves into a debt trap of an unimaginable proportion.

I don’t blame President Buhari because if you had listened to Obasanjo and others, they said they knew he was weak in economics and all that but they felt that because he has so-called discipline, he will be able to, at least, bring proper managers but now water don pass garri.

There is the clamour for Igbo presidency in 2023. The Igbo are saying it is their time and also in the North, they are clamouring even though we have seen Governor El Rufai of Kaduna State making a case for a southern President in 2023. Do you think it is time for the Igbo to produce Nigeria’s President in 2023 or power should be taken elsewhere? Another thing is, what do the Igbo really want? Sometimes they say it is restructuring, other times, presidency. I think we should be clear about what the Igbo really want.

I ask you a simple question, what do the Yoruba want? This is the problem we have. When it comes to the Igbo man, Nigeria will always set a different standard. What do the Hausa-Fulani want? Do you know? And so, you turn around and set a different standard for us by saying Igbo, come and tell us what you want. Are Igbo not in APC? Did Igbo not struggle to put Buhari in power?

So, why is it that you label us and then you turn around and tell us that we should try and determine for you to know what the Igbo want? Do you know how many Igbo are on this planet? We have the largest group living outside of Igbo land. Will you bring all of them together and now say “oh, what is it that you people want?”

We think that when people start to make that allusion, then you are shifting the goal post. There is nothing wrong in having an Igbo President. There is nothing wrong in having a President of the South-East extraction. You see, these are all the nuances that have now started to come out when you now say Igbo President. We have capable people who can be President but what do we see every time? We see a conspiracy of Nigerians to use the Igbo head to break coconut, apologies to the late MKO Abiola. At every time it comes.

In 1983 when then-NPN government was in power and Dr Alex Ekwueme was Vice President and all indications had been given by President Shagari that immediately after his tenure Ekwueme (Igbo) will be President, what did we have?

We had somebody who is now a civilian President coming in to truncate that to make sure that it never happened. Then in 1999 a party was conceived by Ekwueme and some other patriots and they looked at it that Ekwueme was going to coast to victory, we also had a conspiracy of the overlords at that time to come and also deny him that.

So, you now come today and say “bring somebody” so that there will be another conspiracy to deny him, we are not going to give them that opportunity. So, what we are saying today is that political parties bring candidates, all Igbo who are qualified and can also be President should get into the parties.

They should work hard and emerge as candidates of their parties. One thing I can guarantee you is that Igbo have one abiding principle and that principle guides the worldview of any Igbo man which is why he can live anywhere and thrive, that principle is ‘live and let live’.

In other words, given the fractious nature of Nigeria, given the fact that we have all manners of people within this country with different worldviews, it is only the Igbo man that can weld all of us together in unity.

And so you want this country to be in one piece, you get an Igbo man. But, for me, if you bring an Igbo man who is like Buhari, I won’t support him. Why will I support somebody who would be parochial, who will be sectional and who will be nepotistic? So, you must bring the true Igbo man who embraces our worldview which says “live and let live”.

So, an Igbo man can be President in 2023…

I don’t see why not because there are so many of us: Peter Obi can be President. Charles Soludo can be President. Dave Umahi can be President; even I can be President because I know that the man who is now the President of Nigeria, how can you say that he is better than me?

But a report said that your party has zoned the presidency to the North in 2023…

It is not true. As far as I know and I am a top member of this party, there has been no such discussion concerning 2023 and it is to too early for a party to say because there are too many factors that will play out between now and then. So, who is the party? It is us. I am part of the party and I haven’t heard it.

One surprising thing is that some northern leaders are sympathetic to a southern President as reflected in what Governor El-Rufai said…

I don’t believe El-Rufai.

Why?

What antecedents does he have to make a promise and keep it? Just look at his management of his state. He couldn’t even find a Christian to be his running mate and he is telling you this and you want to believe him, why? The South is full of Christians and a man is unable to even work with a Christian in his state except those he pays.

I think really that it is by somebody’s actions that you actually assess him. I do not believe in the spoken word by somebody whose antecedents have shown that he does not also take people at face value. I am not going to start jumping because El-Rufai said that. Nobody should believe him.

The President just listed areas that he would be concentrating on in the next three years: Education, health, poverty reduction among others but he left out security and, whether you like it or not, we are going through serious security issues at this point. What do you make of that situation? Number two, National Assembly has severally called for the sack of Service Chiefs. Do you think keeping them still makes any sense?

No. I was never part of the call for the sack of the Service Chiefs. If you remember the day we did the debate, I said the buck stops on somebody’s table. So, we don’t blame the people the President hired. We hired him to do a job for us.

By voting, citizens have hired him to be the President and so the President is unable to do his job of providing us security and all that and then we turn around and, instead of blaming the President for his ineffectiveness, we turn around and say “oh, Service Chiefs should go”. We don’t need to tell him what to do. That is why we hired him.

So, I think that is not a question that we need to consider. The question we consider is that is this President up to the job and the answer is NO. He is not up to this job and when I say it, they say “oh, you are coming from the perspective of an opposition person”.

Fine! If he was doing well, would this thing have encompassed us in this manner, this question of insecurity? If you go back to all my interviews and all my interventions on the floor, I have always said that if you pin them to one side, they will find another reason and if you pin them to this, they will say they will find another reason. There is only one consistent thread in the apologies of the government: never blame Buhari.

Meanwhile, if we go back just a little bit, 2014, 2013, 2012, I can give you all the things Lai Mohammed said against former President Jonathan. They never said anything about Service Chiefs. They just continually said Jonathan was incapable and now, we have seen that their champion is incapable.

They want to change the narrative. Just like they were doing with fuel subsidy and we shouted and said “but you are still paying fuel subsidy that you said was a scam”, and they turned around and called it under recovery, yet, they were paying billions out.

So, you could see that the APC government is a master in double speak and so you can’t challenge them on double speak and so, I do not want to know whether Service Chiefs are right or wrong. If I hire you for a job and make you the General Manager of my company and you have to hire other staff members and then the company is not doing well and I call a Board meeting, it is the MD that answers for it and so, you fire the MD.

And so we need to fire the man that is responsible and the way, of course, to fire the man, you know, it is via an election which was why I said I don’t know what APC will campaign on. Now they are trying to shore up themselves which is why you have this new list of saying “we are going to concentrate on A, B, C”. Of course, the job of a government is always to try to say “we are going to do this and that” but I can tell you that, from today, all that is nothing but mere talk.

You are not going to see anything. You are not going to see any movement; you are simply going to see the same deterioration because you have the same personnel. So, what is it that they are going to do that is different?

He hasn’t fired any person. He hasn’t brought in any new person that we didn’t know. He hasn’t let his economic team steer him in directions that we didn’t know. So, that you simply come out and list out a set of things that you are going to concentrate on; of course, this government has always had plans.

They had always said that “we will concentrate” but let us go back to the basics. In 2015, this government told us they were going to concentrate on three things and they failed in all three.

Vanguard