Not given to hitting below the belt, ex-labour leader and Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, takes a serious look at political developments in the land and makes case for preservation of democracy and good governance. Assistant Editor (North), CHUKS EHIRIM, presents excerpts of the encounter.
South South as Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) enclave
It depends on who you are speaking about. I am a Nigerian and I am a well-known Nigerian. I am not in the PDP and I will never be in PDP. Edo is the heartbeat of the nation, and we are in the South South. How can you suggest to me that this is a PDP zone? It is not. PDP has never won any clean election in the South South. Often, they had taken advantage of the terrain and if you do your analysis very well in the voting pattern, you will find that PDP has always lost elections in the cities, and turn in ghost votes from the creeks. But in Edo, we neutralised their rigging machine as far back as 2007, and since then, we have won every election in this state. In the last election that was held here on July 14, 2012, I won in every local government. So, how can you suggest to me that South South is PDP zone? It is not.
Exorcising godfatherism in Edo politics
There is no magic. The truth is that, our media sometimes just take statements from the surface. There are concepts that we use so freely without problematising those concepts. For example, when you say Mr. Fix it, what does that mean in the Nigerian political dictionary? What was it that he fixed?
Those are the people that have the history of electoral fraud and they have to be so described because the ordinary meaning of “fix” is that something is in tatters, disorganised and somebody with special skills knows how to make an order out of something that is disorganised. But that is not what you refer to when you say Mr. Fix it. Someone wins primaries, as he is celebrating, the loser is announced as the winner and you say Mr. Fix It has fixed it again.
So, for me, those are the ways which the media inadvertently tend to celebrate electoral fraudsters who have defrauded the electorate over the years. And in Edo State, we have to organise. Don’t forget that I am basically a worker, and a worker mobilises. I know from my union experience that members of the traditional ruling class don’t communicate with the people; they just talk at the people. They make assumptions about who the people are. They look at the people condescendingly and all I needed to do was to do what I have always done in life: organising the people, speaking with the people, identifying their needs and reducing political discourse to a level that they can relate to the message and help them to understand that they are not spectators in a democracy.
The real beauty of democracy is that the people are the actual players; they are the drivers because with your voter’s card, you hire and fire. It is not like a football match where you might blame the coach if your team loses or you congratulate the coach if it is otherwise. In a real democracy, the role of the electorate is not just to clap; it is to determine the outcome, both the beginning and the end of the process. So, that was what we needed to do, and once we connect with the people, give them confidence, have a message they can connect with. You saw that they voted on the basis of facts, not on the distribution of ‘Maggi’ cubes and packets of salt and sugar at the eve of elections.
No one has been punished for perpetrating electoral fraud
For me, you can’t take these issues in isolation. There is a general culture of impunity in the country. Electoral offence is one of those offences.
If you look at every aspect of our national life, you can effortlessly see how things are decaying, and the level of abuse of office, both in public office and private authorities; those with economic power know how they subvert the laws with impunity and so on. Until we revisit the whole question of obedience, rule of law and enthrone a political leadership that has the will to enforce the rule of law, you will continue to experience what we currently have. You can’t deploy ways, for example, to prosecute electoral criminals if the general attitude to crime is that you rather cuddle it.
So, I don’t think I want to really spend time trying to understand how I feel about excusing electoral fraud. I rather talk about my general bitterness about the state of impunity in our country, and that is why nothing seems to be working because there are no penalties for breaches.
Assessing Jonathan administration
This president has been in office for six years, and that is important to bear in mind because there are things you could do in six years that you probably can’t do in four years. There are projects that require a longer gestation period, and so in evaluating this government, we should be asking the question; four years ago to now, are we better off?
I have to try and answer this question based on what in Edo we now call “eyemark”. We have moved away from earmark to “eyemark”. Those are part of the things we have had to explain to the ordinary Edo voter that you are used to politicians saying we have earmarked X billion (of naira) for schools in this budget and you will clap. People will say “Ah! it is a very good budget if only it will be implemented. It is the best budget ever. It provides for this, this and that” and the following year, another budget is rolled out and nobody has taken a proper audit of the previous year’s budget. Again, we just celebrate the abstract, the numbers.
But in my union training, when you elect your union leaders and on the day of election some resolutions are taken, at the end of every year, you will have what we call report on activities. Those elected will present the report on all their actives and those who will elect them will debate the report and see whether there is a gap between the promise and what has been realised. But in our politics, people make all kinds of promises and the next election you move on.
So, if you ask me to evaluate, I will try to be objective. It is not about APC (All Progressives Congress) or PDP now. As they say, facts are sacred, opinion is free. I want to deal with facts, so I free myself from the burden of subjectivity. What was the promise of the president about power six years ago? We were told that by 2013 there would be full power supply; that they were carrying out major reforms then. Later they said by 2014. We are now in 2015. Check the records, both reported and official records of PHCN, and you will find that about six years ago, we were using almost 4,000mw – between 3,500mw and 3,800mw. Today, power generation has dropped to 2,500mw or thereabout, after the government had spent billions of dollars.
So, I just deal with the facts and I will put the question to you: has this government delivered on the promise with regard to power?
The facts are stubborn. I was in NLC; then I used to interrogate power, so I know what I am talking about. When I say “interrogate power”, I don’t mean the electricity power, I mean political authority. It is 16 years now and PDP has no clue on how to fix power and they will never be able to fix power and because of all that I have seen, I have arrived at the conclusion that as long as PDP is in power, Nigerians will be out of power. Nigerians will never have power, whether to run their homes or to run their businesses, whether poor or rich, young or old.
Now, what is of concern here is that it is not just the failure of policy to deliver power but the ruthlessness of the state in allowing individuals to collect money precisely for delivering darkness.
It doesn’t just add up. Public policy must be designed and implemented in such a way that it seeks to affect the most vulnerable group which is the rural poor, but also as a sensible tool of protecting the environment.
The government is subsidising few people in Abuja and the result is the 100 private jets you have in the old domestic wing of the airport. If you move across to the public side, you don’t have more than three aircraft. So you have such dysfunction that you are using the tools of subsidy to transfer public fund to a few pockets and pauperise even those who are already poor. So, for me, this is apparently unacceptable.
Then you look at the job sector, you can’t have jobs. It is not about tokenism, I mean talking serious economics. It is tokenism, symbolic projects, SURE-P (Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme), you name it, are pet projects. No. You really want to have labour-intensive industries that can add value. You are exporting your crude oil. I saw the presidency saying they don’t want to be exporting products without adding value, but the core product of Nigeria is crude oil and we are exporting it in full. So, what that means is that we are exporting our jobs and importing unemployment.
Sixteen years down the road, we don’t have any refinery and yet, visit the statement by successive budget speeches, they tell you so, so people have gotten so, so number of licences; but there is no refinery. I don’t know which sector you want me to look at; but my sector, the textile industry, is dead.
In Kaduna, we used to have about 30,000 workers within the area we call Kakuri. In Port Harcourt, we had Michelin and we had Dunlop in Ikeja. Where are they? Gone! Some have relocated to Ghana, taking advantage of West African protocol to produce in Ghana and sell to Nigerian market. Without industries, where are the young ones going to work? So the challenge is running a job-led growth not jobless growth, because if a growth is not job-led, it creates its own problems. Statisticians are celebrating double digit growth, eight per cent growth, six per cent growth, you are the largest economy in the continent, but you also post the largest number of unemployed people. What a contradiction! You can re-base the economy and generate numbers that have some appeal. But this doesn’t translate to prosperity. You don’t rebase the wealth in the pocket of people who are poor. So I am not going to say somebody has done well or didn’t do well. I am going to look at specific elements that affect the people and try to speak to the facts I find in them.
APC controversy and likelihood of its government going about perceived opponents
The law doesn’t say that every Nigerian must vote, if he is not willing to vote. The law doesn’t say every Nigerian must register to vote if he doesn’t want to register. That is why there is no penalty for failing to register, and there is no law that says if you register and you refuse to go and collect your Permanent Voters’ Card (PVC) that you have committed a crime. That is why you can’t charge anybody for failing to collect.
Now, all that the law says is that every eligible voter who wishes to vote must have the opportunity to vote. Now, to be able to express your willingness to vote, you need to also comply with the requirements. If you choose not to, it can be deemed that you are not interested in voting and you can’t be compelled to vote. In any case, what was the number of votes that brought this president to office? How many people voted? As far as I can recollect, it was about ‘24 million’ votes, including ghost voters.
But even with those ghost voters, the total votes that brought this president and even the previous one was not more than 24 million votes. Add those of Buhari, you have not more than 36 million votes.
In Edo, I scored about 75 per cent of the votes in the last election where I won in all the 18 local government areas. The total votes I got were less than 500,000. All those who voted in Edo were less than 600,000. Over 800,000 people have collected their PVC. So, if the rest refuse to collect, you can’t compel them, but you can’t stop those who have collected from voting, that is the law. The law doesn’t say that if the turn out in an election is less than 50 per cent that the election is not valid.
As far as I am concerned, Nigeria is greater than any individual and we have to be careful. There are too many political vultures who are flying in the evening market wanting to mess everybody up, and I think we must find courage to speak to the fact and then secure our democracy. It doesn’t really matter to me who wins an election; it matters to me how people win it.
