By Peter Okutu

Senator Sonni Ogbuoji representing Ebonyi South senatorial district in the Senate in this interview bares his mind on the imperative of the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, on the welfare of the Niger Delta region, the dilapidated state of the Abakaliki-Afikpo expressway despite the huge funds ploughed into the project and the need for the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP to remain focussed ahead of the 2015 general election. Excerpts:

What is delaying the passage of Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and will it ever be passed?

The long answer is that the process that it (PIB) will go through is what is actually happening now; various interest groups have to be taken care of.  We are also aware that our brothers in the Northern part of the country feel strongly that the petroleum industry bill will serve the interest of the Niger Delta and not the north; so to that extent they are battling it to see that it doesn’t come through but we are convinced that sanity will prevail at last because it is not only petroleum that is the natural resource of Nigeria; almost every state in the federation is endowed.

Natural endowment
We should even sympathize with those states that have petroleum that is even exploited now which means that sooner than later their own natural endowment will exhaust and we will all run back to our own.

What has been the effort of Ebonyi Senators towards the completion of the Afikpo-Abakaliki Expressway?

As legislators in the National Assembly in the 2012 budget we usually have what is called intervention funds and for Ebonyi state it was N2 billion. We held a meeting and agreed that N2 billion of our zonal intervention funds should be ploughed into Abakaliki-Afikpo road; it was quite a huge sacrifice by members who may not necessarily bother with that road but we felt that it was an arterial road that links the northern to the central and to the southern part of Ebonyi State.

Ogbuoji

But to our greatest dismay, the Federal Ministry of Works has not kept faith; that is our greatest disappointment. My colleagues and I will be in touch with him (Minister) as much as practically possible because we don’t want to sound over bearing but at the same time we want to be responsible to our constituents who put us here in the National Assembly.

But after all the troubles that we have had, you all are witnesses that that road is not yet completed; it is not just that it is not yet completed but that the pace of work is disappointing. If you have travelled from Enugu to Abakaliki recently, you see what SETRACO is doing; the number of equipment that they have on the site; the amount of work they are able to deliver for every man-day; you cannot say the same thing for Abakaliki-Afikpo expressway.

These people (contractors) are using payloaders to scoop coal tar; they are even using ordinary trucks to fetch un- tested laterite; so we find out that the work they are doing there is terrible; I have lately called the Minister of works and sounded our own feelings that we are very disappointed because we entered into a gentle man agreement with him that apart from what will be the normal allocation that will go to that road; we were handing over our own intervention funds for that road and after what we’ve done no results. I can say with every confidence that all members of the National Assembly from Ebonyi state are very disappointed because we have not seen work and we don’t know where our N2 billion went to even though that was where we put it into.

Are you worried that in Ebonyi state that the clamour and consideration for political positions ahead of 2015 is overshadowing the attention that should have been given to good governance?

It is unfortunate that  most times we don’t find statesmen who are politicians because as they say, politicians are always interested in the next election but statesmen are interested in delivering democracy dividends first to the people before they start talking about the election and on that note I want to say that our governor, Chief Martin Elechi is a statesman because right from 2007 when he came into office, he has never really focused on the next election, rather his focus has always been how do I transform, change, move the state forward; how do I give these people a sense of belonging; how do I tell this people that even though we are waking up late among our brothers in the eastern states, yet we will overtake them.

Yet Chief Elechi has continued to demonstrate in all ramification that we will not just catch up with our brothers in the south eastern states but that we will overtake them through what he is doing.