Buhari has recorded tremendous achievements in two months

The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, speaks with newsmen in Abuja, on a number of issues in the polity. KOLAWOLE DANIEL brings excerpts:

THE South-East geopolitical zone has consistently cried of marginalisation in the sharing of the principal officers’ position in the House of Representatives. As the National Chairman of the party, what do you have to say about this?

The sharing process is not over; I want everybody to get that very clear. Even in the House of Representatives, it is not yet over, all these will be taken into consideration when other positions in the House are being distributed. I have no doubt.

Many people will not agree with that position, the argument is that there are six principal positions, with each zone meant to at least to get one. Now, the South-West zone has two and one zone does not have any. Whatever you are giving to that zone outside principal positions may not be equated to that.

Here we are talking of real life; in real life, there is no perfection; there are pluses and minuses and there are ups and downs. In real life, there are valleys and there are peaks. What is important is that the system functions. The system went out of gear with the very first election that was made. So, the planning of the party was thrown out of sync. So you have to walk back and resolve it as best as possible in the circumstances. In human affairs, there is no perfection.

How was the party able to resolve the crisis in the House?

Easily, one can say that presidential prestige came to play. That means a lot and it counts for a lot, but I won’t want to elaborate. I want to make it quite clear that we emphasised the fact that the people had not got his message before; he was re-emphasising it, that in this political system we are operating, the party is number one and everybody derives whatever he becomes from the party.

Many people believe that the party executive contributed to this problem for the part it played in the nomination of leaders of the National Assembly; they maintain that the party should have allowed the National Assembly to choose its leaders, noting that the mock election and writing letters to the National Assembly actually fuelled the crisis. What is your view?

We organised primaries for selecting our candidates who wanted to contest for public office, specifically, the presidential contest. What happened there was that all the aspirants cooperated. All the aspirants contested and a winner was declared and everybody agreed to work with the winner.

In this case and for whatever reasons, what you called a mock poll could as well pass for a primary, but if some candidates say they won’t honour the primary, it is a fundamental right of Nigerians; you can take them to court; you can discipline them, of course, according to the party. What the party planned is exactly what you are seeing. Indeed, our primary elections were to select better candidates for the various offices. But in the National Assembly situation, human feelings and being what they are came into operation. And in this situation where the voting is limited, very limited, everybody knows everybody, people reacted differently. The National Assembly election was not like our primaries where you have thousands of people forming the electorate; in the Senate, we have 59 and in the House we have 220 member-electorate, so you can understand why things happened the way they did.

While some people are not comfortable with the South-West having two principal positions, the Senate crisis is still there and it is being said that the APC is not yet satisfied with the emergence of Senator Ike Ekweremadu and you were quoted in the newspapers that you would approach the Senate crisis differently. Can you shed light on what you mean?

Simple, in the case of the House that we have just dealt with, they got to the bridge but have not crossed it. They had not named any principal officer, so obviously it was a lot easier to handle. The Senate has named its principal officers and by their rules, they can only be removed either when they voluntarily resign or when you command a two-thirds majority to vote them out. So, the approaches obviously will be totally different in the sense that, in the Senate, I also hear there is a court process underway, so that make a lot of issues sub-judicial. That changes the picture, doesn’t it? It is not enough for us with what happened in the House, but we are also watching that and we are going to engage the Senate situation and by God’s grace, it will also be resolved.

With the leadership of the National Assembly and Senator Bukola Saraki as Senate President, there are those who feel that the APC’s change agenda might not see the light of the day, what is your take on that and secondly, there are people making insinuations that the ongoing trial of the wife of the Senate President has APC involvement?

Change agenda? I don’t see how it will be affected; I will be very sorry for any member of the House who demonstrates objection to any measures or proposed laws, which are directed towards the change agenda. Someone will stand up and say he likes corruption to thrive? Who will stand up and say we don’t need to do what we need to do to restore peace; that is to defeat the insurgency there? Who will stand up to say that the power sector should not be made functional? Who will stand to say we should not ask for billions or trillions of dollars that have been stolen to be refunded or retrieved; these are the change agenda. I don’t think that will happen on both sides of the divide, I do not see that happening in the National Assembly. I don’t see that happening. You are speculating, so we wait until we see it happen.

I want to assure you without any doubt that the APC absolutely has nothing to do with the invitation of Saraki’s wife.  She is not on trial by the way. It is an investigation that has to do with the Senate President’s wife. You saw all the speculation in the media, as a matter of fact this could have been triggered by the opposition party itself; the PDP asked its branch in Kwara. They had to be nudged to make denounce that they were the originators of the petition or whatever triggered this investigation.

We are totally, completely, absolutely, innocent of it, what we have not done like in the PDP days is to rush and interfere with the processes of the EFCC, which our president has made quite clearly, everybody should be ready to carry out its legitimate functions without interference. The EFCC is doing what it thinks it has to do.

Your party issued a statement endorsing the president’s decision to probe the former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, but this has generated controversy, with people saying that the probe should be extended to other administrations. Sir, can you educate Nigerians more?

The president, I am aware, knows that he has only four years minus two months; so, it is not four years anymore and if he wants to probe past administrations, where does he stop? 16 years? 50 years? Where do you stop when you want to do that kind of probe? What is important is that the level of impunity in the last six years, the level of rot in the last six years the extent to which the economy has been damaged in the last six years; is phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. I do not know; I can’t speak for the president or the Presidency but I’m not aware there is going to be a formal probe, which will mean that a High Court judge and a few people sitting, but these things are there. Even if you don’t want to see them, they are right in front of you. The impunity and corruption are looking at you in the eyes. At a time, people were not bothered about hiding anymore. So when talking about probe, you can turn without seeing the damage, the theft, the massive theft, so that is the way I interpret it.

The president has told us why he has been taking his time. He has also spoken of qualities expected from his ministers. At the party level, what are you doing to contribute to the selection process? Also, a national leader of the party, Senator Bola Tinubu, said that the president and the party needed 100 days of honeymoon to hit the ground running; that runs at variance with your maxim and change agenda. What is your reaction?

If we have not hit the ground, how can we run? We are going to hit the ground and we are going to run. It’s just that expectations were so high that everybody thought  that the day he was declared president-elect things would start changing,. That shows you the anxiety among the Nigerian population.

One hundred days is just three months, when you start running you certainly will run and that is what we are promising this nation, once the government is put in place, with the kind of people we expect to man it, then you will see results and you will see results pretty quickly. Your question is a question for Mr. President. It is absolutely his prerogative and to the extent that we are having input into the process. But for the other details, he is the only one that can answer those.

So at the party level, you have absolutely no contribution on who becomes minister?

I can say we do to the extent they want our input in the process.

It was believed that the moment this government took over, the issue of security must and should be tackled. Can you to explain to Nigerians why the government has taken “a go-slow method” in addressing this issue sir?

You are talking from a point of view as if a lot of progress has not been made, but considering that the full government is not in place yet, the achievements recorded in the two months have been solidly tremendous. To start with, the one of prior concern to you, security.

 I want you to look at the fact that security is, in fact, improving. I want you to remember that insurgents, including foreigners in their midst, no longer holds the territory and form government in any part of the country. If that is not an improvement, I don’t know what is? I want you to know that one of the first things Mr. President did was to redeploy the operational headquarters back to the area of conflict. If that is not improvement, I don’t know what is.

 I would want to refer your minds to the fact of these basic ordinary things. But as you know a dying elephant kicks very hard, because the insurgents have been deprived of territories, they have now resorted to soft targets and let us face it, any fool, any idiot can bomb a church; any idiot can bomb a market place. It is very unfortunate; it is very sad, because these are soft targets.

What we are in the process of doing is that because the insurgency is being massively defeated, they have resorted to creating this atmosphere of fear by picking on soft targets; it is a slight re-orientation of priorities and tactics with the new and growing realities. The process of wiping them out or largely putting the insurgency under control and that is now underway.

If you want to think of achievements in two months, they have been tremendous. Look at the last visit to the United States. Something that has never happened before to any Nigerian president in over 50 years of our existence as a nation. In two months, Nigeria has suddenly become one of the nations to be reckoned with, not just in Africa but in the entire globe. The president has attended the G7, a privileged group and he has been received in the United States; no president has been received before. So, that status of Nigeria, that impression of Nigeria around the world, as always being a bad news, of either drugs or something else, has been obliterated in two months. In fact, the challenge before us now is to maintain and build on the achievements on just the two months of Mr. President, changing the image of the Nigerian nation and it is a precursor to foreign investment, which is a precursor to economic growth and development.

Since the level of rot found is not what you imagined, according to you, your party may not have the resources to meet the promises you made to Nigerians, especially when it comes to allowances you promised the aged and other welfarist policies, which you sold to Nigerians. Are you now telling Nigerians that based on what you have found, you cannot deliver on these promises?

We don’t have anything to tell Nigerians except the truth. If there is rot, we will tell Nigerians there is rot. The people of this country know, come to think of it, if anybody has not received his salary, in some cases up to one year; if that is not rot, what do you call it? Even the Federal Government can no longer meet its obligation; if that is not rot, what do you call it? Look at your airport road, Yar’Adua Boulevard’s contractors have moved out and that is what we see every week, because contractors have not been paid.

Look at the East-West road. It has not been completed up till now. Look at one of the few international airports we have, like Port-Harcourt, it is an abandoned project. When you add that to a nation where governments are unable to pay workers what is due to them, not for two or three months, if that is not a rot of the very worst kind, I don’t know what rot is.

You have to tell the people this: we are all prepared to bite the bullet if need be, but getting the nation out of that rot is why President Buhari was elected and there will be no excuse. We intend to accomplish that and we intend to embark on the process of fulfilling our promises to this nation. This is not a poor country. It is not and we intend to plug all the loopholes. Mr. President has said that quite clearly that there has been a massive leakage of our resources and massive theft of what belongs to the people of this country; when all these are corrected, there will be resources to meet the aspirations of the people and to fulfill the promises that the president made to the Nigerian people.