The 2015 general elections may have come and gone, but controversies surrounding it are yet to die. Victor Umeh, immediate past National Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), is one of those raising the dust. In this interview with Assistant Editor (North), CHUKS EHIRIM, Umeh calls for a thorough inquest into underhand activities that characterised the exercise in the South East and South South, lamenting the betrayal his party suffered in the hands of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
How was it leading APGA?
I feel happy. You were present when the whole thing started. From a journey that was laden with uncertainty, we were able to hold the fort and crystallise our vision for this party, that today, despite the turbulence that we passed through over the years, we were able to firmly establish APGA within the political landscape of Nigeria.
Today, APGA is fully alive, under no threat of extinction. We have laid very formidable structures, having a governor still standing on the platform till 2018, 41 members of the Houses of Assembly now, and four members of the House of Representatives. So no matter the criteria used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to deregister political parties, APGA will ever qualify to remain on board. Anytime elections are called, if they are credible, APGA will continue to increase its strength.
The 2015 general elections have come and gone. We had hoped that the leadership would increase the fortune of the party in that election. Unfortunately, the elections turned out to be fraudulent in our strongholds in the South East. We are in the tribunals and we are confident that by the time the petitions are disposed of by the tribunals and all the appeals that will arise therefrom also concluded, APGA will have more governors, more senators, more House of Representatives members and more Houses of Assembly members.
So we thank God that as we are exiting, having served the mandatory eight years permitted by the constitution, we are leaving behind a party that is full of potentials ahead. We have also been able to stabilise the party out of trouble. The various litigations that were unleashed against the party and its leadership have largely been disposed of by the courts, to the extent that I can say that the new leadership that is taking over from us will experience more peace, more stable environment to operate to execute the party’s programmes.
I also want to say that we are happy that we have elected very credible people and very capable hands to pilot the affairs of the party. Nobody would have believed that Labaran Maku, former Minister of Information and co-coordinating Minister of Defence of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, will become National Secretary of APGA. This shows the level we have reached. The chairman who took over from me, Dr. Victor Ike Oye, is a veteran journalist and communications expert. So he has the experience, both in the political arena and in journalism, to continue projecting APGA at the political space.
Your party raised issues concerning the role PDP members allegedly played in the South East during the election, even when you had alliance with their party, especially at the presidential election level. Do you regret going into that alliance?
We are not happy but regret will not be the correct word to use. Regret comes when somebody denounces his action. What we did was what we considered to be in the best interest of the party and the people we represent. APGA represents Nigerians as a whole, but at the same time, we are carrying the burden of certain people on our heads. So you know, we agreed to support Goodluck Jonathan in the last election because we were pursuing our interest.
After the National Conference of 2014, we believed that Jonathan’s presidency would help us to resolve most of our nagging problems, particularly as he promised that he would implement most of the recommendations of the report of the National Conference which would have seen the Igbo getting an additional state, to make our own six. Our marginalisation has been a critical issue, affecting our people, through the structural disadvantage which we are subjected to, as an incidence of the war.
So while we were supporting him, we were doing that with the hope that if he had won the election, he would be able to take the report of the National Conference to the National Assembly where the implementation would see us coming out of our disadvantage. But it didn’t turn out to be so. That the election was not won (by PDP) will not make us regret.
But we detested, completely, the way the PDP betrayed that relationship, by coming all out with underhand practices and the use of security agencies to annihilate APGA in the South East, taking away their victories, given by the electorate. That was an action done in bad taste. Our people say that once beaten twice shy. We have learnt our lessons and our actions in the future will show clearly that we hold the PDP in very bad taste, following that ungentlemanly conduct. I was involved in not less than three meetings with the former president, where he promised that since we were supporting him in the South East, anybody who won the votes of the people should be allowed to go, whether PDP or APGA since we were united in supporting him.
So we took him seriously on that promise, but when the time came, he did otherwise. But there is no point brooding over it because he also suffered for that betrayal of APGA by allowing the PDP the use of machinery of the federal government, army, the police, SSS, INEC, to overrun APGA and its candidates. He never imagined that his own party people would sabotage him during the election.
Instead of working for Jonathan to win, they were working for themselves to win their seats in the National Assembly and they abandoned the president. I can say clearly, without equivocation, that Jonathan lost the election in the South East because if the atmosphere had been convivial, there would have been collaborative effort to ensure that he got maximum votes from the zone; but his party people were more interested in getting APGA National Assembly candidates down, than seeing Jonathan win the election.
Immediately after the election, Anambra State Governor, Willy Obiano, visited Muhammadu Buhari, who was then president-elect. Was he able to extract any promise from the president regarding some of the problems of the South East?
Governor Willy Obiano did not visit the president because of our failed election arrangement with Jonathan and the PDP.
The governor did what he should do. President Muhammadu Buhari, then president-elect, won his election to be President of Nigeria. And Anambra State is a federating unit in Nigeria. We are part of Nigeria. So he did the right thing by, first of all, going to congratulate him for winning the election and assuring him of his cooperation and the cooperation of his state in the president’s quest to give Nigeria good governance.
At the same time, as a leader of repute coming from Igboland, he used the opportunity, as he addressed the press when he came out, to ask Buhari to be even-handed in his actions; that he should carry the South East people along in his administration. It will be wrong for him to say that our people did not vote for him. No! That will be bad politics. Our people do not hate Buhari. They love him, especially because of his strictness. By record of his first coming into office as a military head of state, he was very firm on the issue of corruption.
So we know he has that capacity. Our people decided to support Jonathan because of that report of the National Conference. APC boycotted National Conference, if you could recall. I was a delegate to the National Conference. APC was not there. So we were very uncertain about what Buhari would do with the report of the conference.
That was why we voted for Jonathan. If the votes had counted, Buhari wouldn’t have scored as he did in the South East. If the election had gone well in the South East, he would have got better performance in the region. But the way the elections were conducted looked like he was rejected. It was not so. I knew people around me who voted for Buhari. If they had allowed the election to go very well, this feeling wouldn’t have been there.
But in his inaugural speech, he avoided anything about the National Conference, which tells you that we were right in supporting Jonathan who promised to implement the National Conference report.
Given the incidence of election rigging which seems to have become a recurring issue in the country, what recommendations would you like to see in the Electoral Act before the next general elections?
I think the elections in the South East did not have anything to do with Electoral Act or any other thing for that matter, but PDP as a party. PDP elements in the South East always make use of federal government officials to rig elections. While other zones in the country do not suffer this malaise, the hawks in the PDP in Igboland have never won any election through the votes of the people. They have always relied on rigging. This is the truth and they know it. They never allowed elections to take place anywhere in the South East. They always use the army, the police and INEC to do this, with the collaboration of the presidency. The 2015 election was the worst. Because while other zones in the country were experiencing good elections, South East and South South were pencilled for experiment as guinea pigs, to make Jonathan win the presidential election. In other words, they were slated to be used as swig zones for Jonathan; hence anything normal should not be allowed.
That was why in that election, it was only in the South East and South South that card-readers were not allowed to function on the day of election. We were anticipating that card-readers may fail in one unit. As a political leader, I was there in a meeting when (INEC Chairman ,Attahiru) Jega assured us that they had 180,000 card-readers and that 120,000 would be deployed to the 120,000 polling units that we had; and if anyone had problem on the day of election, there was a back-up plan to deploy another one within an hour.
At the time he was making that bogus promise, he never realised that the whole card-readers were going to fail. So on March 28, it was as if a bomb was dropped and people couldn’t understand what was happening. Elections couldn’t hold till after 2pm, when manual accreditation was permitted by the chairman himself. So you could see that it was not a question of Electoral Act, but that of sabotage.
Certain individuals were actually caught getting involved in this electoral manipulation. What do you think should be done to them?
The law is there. Those who were arrested were many in the South East especially, and before you know it, these things would be forgotten. INEC should move to arraign these people and prosecute them for electoral banditry. A lot of people were arrested in Abia State. Some INEC officials were also caught taking away card-readers from the custody of INEC to go and upload fictitious figures. They addressed press conferences, made noise, but we have not heard about anybody being arraigned.
One thing is very important; like I also advised the president, he should investigate the failure of elections in the South East, South South and some other states in the North. There are some places elections failed too. There was no election in Zamfara. They just wrote results there. He must investigate what happened to the election in the South East and South South. If he doesn’t institute an inquest or inquiry into that, then we will be allowing that to repeat.
All the senior INEC officials, all the Resident Electoral Commissioners who worked in the South East and South South are due for retirement. They collaborated in the massive fraud openly because they were taking adhoc staff from PDP candidates and posting them in elections which they were contesting. If you allow me to bring adhoc staff for my election, then I have defeated my opponents. They did it deliberately.
So it is important that all those Resident Electoral Commissioners in the South East and South South should be summarily dismissed from office because what they did is sabotage to democracy, sabotage to integrity and sabotage to due process. These are real things I am talking about. He doesn’t need to gloss over that.
