By Emmanuel Una, Calabar

 Senator John Owan Enoh represents Cross River Central in the Senate. In this interview, Enoh speaks on President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption war and the efforts to rescue the economy, among other issues in the policy.

You have been in the Senate for about one and a half years. How are you finding things there after spending 12 years in the House of Representatives?

It is work in progress.  I was only leaving one chamber for the other; so    I did not have the initial teething problems    of    getting to know Abuja or getting to know the National Assembly. I had served in the House for 12 years before getting into the Senate. The only difference    is that, this time, I went to the Senate not as a member of the majority party    but as an opposition person .    The tide started changing very fast and the conditions are not the same; things are tougher, and of course, you are aware that the country is in recession. These challenges have been there    all along but I have tried to confront them.

The National Assembly is seen by some people as a mere    rubber stamp to the executive. Is the claim correct?

Senator Owan

I don’t know what you mean by rubber stamp. In the history of the relationship between our executive  and the legislature,    whenever there is no fight, it means that one of the arms,  especially    the legislature, is seen as a rubber stamp. Just last week, the Senate threw out the request of the executive for 30 billion dollars loan. If it was a rubber stamp, then the Senate would not have    been sensitive to the fact that    there are no details attached to the request, we simply would have passed the request.    If the Senate    asked for the details, it therefore means it is    not a rubber stamp.

Some lawmakers say politics is no more profitable. What is your perspective?

Politics was never a business. We go into politics to serve    and so    service is    required now more than ever before ; that is the more reason we must play    politics with decency. Part of our problem is the belief that politics is a business and I am sure that is why we got it wrong. Measuring it for profitability is wrong. We are also getting to that point    where we do not require    a President Buhari to chart the way for us.    It was sure to come earlier than    expected, but unless politics becomes less and    less attractive, we would run into problems as a country.    We will make progress only when politics begins to attract people who have made it in their own professions and are driven by service.  That is where we are going and whether this is the beginning of that evolution I do not know.    Things are no longer the way they used to be. The situation is tighter, so the challenge is that the public expectation on the politician    is not affected at all by the economic situation.    We will have to get to a point in which there is a meeting point.

Anti-corruption fight, has it been fair or not?

There should be no discrimination in it.    Corruption is corruption and It has no party colour. Whereas it may be true that the victims of the anti-corruption fight so far have been    more PDP.    We can say maybe it is so because the PDP people are those that have run government in the past 16 years. But there are also some PDP members that defected to the APC, so the war should be against everybody who is corrupt. Whoever is corrupt is corrupt.    The war must not be arms-twisting.    The on-going forceful collection of money in the name of recovering money that was used for election is not right. The person who collected the money may not know that the money came from a corrupt source.    Those who collected the money spent it in the course of the election and you are forcefully collecting the money from them. Are you not arm-twisting people?.

Nigeria’s economy is in the woods. What do you think should be done to bring it back to life?

Nigeria’s economy    is such a wide area. Be that as it may, I think that we are facing our biggest challenge in decades.  The reasons are simple: We are experiencing    a huge shortage of foreign exchange.    We are not getting enough and the demand is very high; so outside talking about sources of revenue,    our main task should actually be about diversifying our sources of revenue. If we earn more, we have no problem, but our trouble came  because our source has just been one, which is oil and whatever happens to oil affects us as badly. We have gone through this circle, but it is just that it may not have been as bad as this    but we have gone through it severally. Maybe, this is when we need to make that significant change that we require. If    all the talk about Agriculture, about minerals, about    all that    had been    put to real practice, I think we won’t be where we are today.    So the future of the Nigeria’s    economy, we need to diversify    sources of foreign    revenue earnings.    We need to conserve even what we earn, but if do nothing about the demand    side, everything, we want to import, it would continue to be a drag    on what we earn.    Whereas there is an international dimension to the current economic crisis, there is also the local one which has led to where we are    as a country. My hope is that    everything    that is being done is  done to respond to the situation so that things can improve.

There are allegations that several times you have made effort to impeach the Speaker of the Cross River Assembly.

That question deserves no comment.    It is just trash. I beg you to allow me not to say anything about that.

PDP    crisis. What is the leadership of the party at the National Assembly    doing to end it?

I am not in that leadership.    But it is also a concern and I think that every effort is being made to end the crisis.  It is that concern that led to the setting up of an inter-party    committee    by the National Caretaker Committee of the PDP to    meet with other registered    parties    which want to form an alliance with the PDP.    Some discussions have started.    So the hope is that all these end well.

What program do you have for your people?

One of things I did not mention was that    in terms of my engagement in the course of time, we actually sponsored about 600 people at the Ikom Centre    and 450 people at the Yakkur Centre for computer-based education and the outcome of that was quite revealing. I had cause to visit those two centres during    the course of the training to interact with the beneficiaries.    The reason for the training was that some of those getting set to write JAMB, have not sat before a computer and that training actually exposed them to computer knowledge.

On my programme for women, the    programme officer for my Foundation is a woman. The sports fiesta during the empowerment period has a female team too. The statistics after the educational assistance is formally announced, you will be amazed at how many women will benefit.    So, I don’t just use women for the purpose of campaign to win an election, but there are a few things that we are doing in our various local governments and wards, and      I always direct that liaison officers should    make sure that if there are two person needed at each point, one must be a woman.    I    have been a politician and I don’t lie about politics and about the things    I do, though we are not talking politics here.