National Vice Chairman (South East) of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Emma Eneukwu, in this interview with Assistant Editor (North), CHUKS EHIRIM, speaks on the strength of the party in South East, alleging that PDP governors in the zone are APC campaign tool for 2015.
APC National Vice Chairman (South East)
Occupying the position of National Vice Chairman (South East) is like you are the chairman of the party in all the states that make up the South East zone. And in that context, you are expected to engineer the party to victory in those states. Whatever the national chairman of the party represents in the party nationally is what you represent in the party in the zone.
Therefore, you have a very big assignment of turning the tide of the party, making sure that the party wins elections in the South East. So, that is a big shoe and I am doing my best to make sure that a very good story is told of the APC in the South East come 2015.
APC and image problem in South East
Initially, during that Anambra State governorship election, we thought we had come of age where issues would be discussed. We thought that political parties would come to tell the people how they would flood the state with dividends of democracy. And we brought out a man whose antecedents were well known in Anambra, Dr. Chris Ngige. We were optimistic that he was going to win the election based on what he did when he was governor.
But when his opponents saw that they couldn’t find any way to fault the man and they couldn’t find anything to label or blackmail the party with, they then resorted to the cheap and baseless propaganda that APC is not an Igbo party; APC is Hausa and Yoruba party. Of course, you know these are sentiments. At the end of the day, they said the All Progressives Grand alliance (APGA) is Igbo party. I was always asking myself, if APGA were to be an Igbo party, how come that we have five states in the South East and APGA is not controlling any of these states, except Anambra? If it were to be Igbo party, it could have been controlling all the states in the South East.
In Enugu State, there is nothing like APGA. In Ebonyi State also, there is nothing like APGA. But that sentiment came up because Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (the late APGA leader) was from Anambra, and because of the key role he played in the Nigerian Civil War, they were using it to say that APGA was an Igbo party. The truth has manifested now. It is obvious now that there is nothing like APGA being an Igbo party. Those parroting this view are political jobbers who are taking Ndigbo for a ride and using Igbo to make sure that they actualise their individual, selfish ambitions in politics.
All these gimmicks and political intrigues of the recent past have finally been exposed. For instance, the former Governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, it is clear to everybody now, has gone to the PDP.
So if APGA were to be an Igbo party, why would Obi dump ‘our APGA’, which is the image and party that Igbo are known for? Why would he dump the party that the Igbo are being identified with for the PDP, to be called a house boy to the President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan? At least, I know that the PDP he is joining cannot be said to be an Igbo party. In the same vein, most of their legislators in the House of Representatives from Anambra have all joined the PDP, which is indicative of the fact that there is nothing like APGA being a party for Igbo.
Also in Imo State, if APGA were to be an Igbo party, Governor Rochas Okorocha, who is very deeply interested in and very much concerned about anything that has to do with the Igbo man, would not have left APGA for APC. His leaving APGA to join APC, just like others leaving APGA to join PDP, shows clearly that APGA represents no Igbo interest. So it was just a ploy that they used to blackmail Ngige, who was the only giant, politically, in that Anambra governorship election on November 16, 2013. They couldn’t find any other thing to use against him, except to say that he was contesting election on a platform that was not an Igbo party. Secondly, this idea of saying that the APC is a Muslim party, Hausa party or Yoruba party does not hold water.
What is APC?
APC is a political party that came as a result of the merging of political opposition parties which were looking for a strategy to contain and whittle down the menace of the PDP which, obviously, has become a huge threat to this hard-won democracy in Nigeria. These opposition parties, after brainstorming for a long time, found out that there is strength in coming together. And these political parties came together, and in that coming together, the Igbo, the Yoruba and the Hausa were there. It is the only party in Nigeria today where all the ethnic nationalities in the country are fully represented at its formation.
When the owners of the ruling party knew and understood that APC was going to be a serious headache for them, they went into their laboratory to research on what they would use to blackmail it. They came out with such fake claims that APC is a Muslim party or Hausa party or even a Yoruba party.
I was watching the television the other day and I heard former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, saying that APC is the political arm of Boko Haram.
There are things you don’t play politics with. Such lousy talks coming from such a person is terrible. At times you begin to wonder if such a person’s head should not be subjected to proper medical examination. How could any sane mind in this country classify APC as the political arm of Boko Haram? Boko Haram has persistently unleashed mayhem on APC-controlled states in the North East. Majority of the casualties of Boko Haram attacks are from APC states.
Go to Borno State, for instance; every developmental project that the present governor has put in place for his people has been destroyed by the Boko Haram. In the same vein, Yobe is an APC state. Everything that they have put on the ground there, from the time of Bukar Abba Ibrahim, till today, is being ravaged and destroyed by Boko Haram.
So if Boko Haram were to be the military arm of APC, as was claimed by Fani-Kayode, why then will they be destroying our own states?
The simple thing there is that if the Boko Haram were to be attached to any political party, it will rightly be attached to the PDP because they have used it to cause confusion and mass destruction in APC states. And they have used it to put state of emergency in these APC states, to the extent that they are even tinkering with the funny idea of not holding elections in those states in 2015 because of the menace of insurgency and Boko Haram. But I can tell you that if our people can look clearly, beyond the propaganda of the PDP and some of its attack dogs like Fani-Kayode, they will find out the real patrons and owners of Boko Haram.
So, APC is a party that has come to save Nigeria from the total dehumanisation, destruction, corruption and impunity of the PDP that this country has suffered in the last 15 years. Because they know that this party has come and is resolute to uproot them in their plan of ruling the country for 60 years, as they had boasted in the past, they have to label the party. And because they control the federal government-owned electronic media, they are using these to their advantage, in addition to our common wealth that they are stashing away, which they are using to work against the people of this country and against the APC and other political parties that are not with them.
Wooing South East electorate
Our strategies are simple. Politics is all about giving the people the dividends of democracy, changing the lots of the people for good. Politics is like a competitive market. When you bring your own ware to the market, the other person will bring his own to the market, people will look at both wares and buy whichever is better for them. That is what democracy is all about. In the zone that we are talking about, look at Abia, for instance, there is a failed government in the state. The man has not performed. Ebonyi is another state controlled by the PDP. You see what the man there has done? He has left Ebonyi worse than he met it. That is another place that he has campaigned for APC.
The only place where they are making a little impact is Enugu, where the governor is concentrating on constructing and building roads because of the percentage he is collecting from the Arab Contractors he brought into the state.
