BY DAPO AKINREFON

MR Manager Seigha is chairman of Niger Delta Nationalities Forum in Lagos State. In this interview with Vanguard he bares his mind on contemporary issues including the challenge from the Boko Haram sect and the proposal for a single term for the President and Governors. Excerpts:

THERE have been mixed reactions to the proposed six years single tenure for the President and governors. Most people are of the opinion that the president should focus on developmental projects instead of the proposal. What is your group’s position on the proposal?
Our group is aware that there are mixed reactions to it but we want Nigerians to know that it is the best proposal that has come from the presidency. Our group thinks the president has started very well.

The Niger Delta Nationalities in Lagos support it because previous elections have cost the nation huge sums of money and this has to be repeated every four years. Nigerians have lost trillions of naira as a result of conducting elections in the country.

We think what the president is trying to do, is to reduce the amount of money Nigerians will be losing every four years. The economy is the one at the receiving end. What the president has done is the best thing that can happen to Nigeria. We also believe that Nigerians who voted for him should stand by him and support him on this proposal.

We have always identified four groups of persons who are against this proposal. The first group comprises of those who lost out during previous elections and feel the proposal will not be good for them. The second group comprises those who feel that their contemporaries have spent two terms in office and thereby they will be shortchanged at the end of the day if the proposal scales through. The third are those who have not contested elections before, who have not borrowed to run for elections do not understand what the single term means. For them, they believe that the proposal should not be.

The fourth group ferociously against it comprises enemies of the president. These are people who never liked him while aspiring to become president. They are mobilizing their people to make sure that whatever comes from President Jonathan should not be accepted. We are urging Nigerians to come out and support this bill, they should appeal to their legislators to support this cause because it will be good for Nigeria at the long run.

Aside this proposal, what areas does your group think the president should focus on in the next four years?
For our group, the president comes from our geo-political zone and we are very worried that he is representing us. In the next four years, if the president fails to perform well, it will rub off on all of us and that is why we are agitated. What Nigerians want from the presidency is for him to tackle electricity. We think if he spends most of his time to fix the epileptic electricity, Nigerians will appreciate his administration.

Nigerians are not after who will occupy office for four or six years, they are looking for a president that will do their bidding and that is why we think fixing the electricity problem is one thing he can achieve.

We know that he has set the ministers to work; he has given them a standard and his only thinking is to provide good leadership. What we also want him to do is seek advice from foreign experts to tackle the electricity problem. If he does that, he would have done a great job.

What do you make of the president’s transformation agenda?
The president has garnered a lot of technocrats who have excelled in their chosen fields. However, there are three significant things we will want the president to focus on. We would want the federal government to withdraw itself from federal roads because every nook and cranny of this country belongs to everybody. If it were possible, the federal government should share all the federal roads in the country among all states of the federation.

Each state should tar the roads. Another significant thing we would want him to do is for him to make a mega city from each of the geo-political zones. That will be another landmark achievement for his administration.

Negative implication

The activities of the Boko Haram sect have raised issues of insecurity in the country. How can the federal government tackle this problem?

First of all, it is not our place to say Boko Haram should not be given amnesty, but giving amnesty to Boko Haram has its own negative implication. A negative implication in the sense that you are asking other self determination groups to demand for amnesty, that negative tendency should not be allowed.

Giving Boko Haram amnesty is not the best, but the generally known method of carrot and stick is adoptable.