Chairman of Board, Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, and former President of Aka Ikenga, Sylvan Ebigwei, in this interview with Assistant Politics Editor, DANIEL KANU, speaks on critical matters arising from the recent general elections, including what the South East gained and challenges before the president-elect, Mohammadu Buhari. Excerpts.
You had fears about the 2015 general elections which has now come and gone. What is your impression about the exercise?
Well, the truth is that the results obtained were not different from what we predicted. Having witnessed elections and lots of electioneering and having also contested elections both at the House of Assembly and Senate platforms, I knew after my critical observation of the way things were going that nobody was really campaigning for President Goodluck Jonathan. He should have won this election, had it been that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members exhibited some sense of decorum with greater sense of hard work and better strategy. What was on the ground was just people making noise on television, using mostly the electronic media, not realising that over 70 per cent of Nigerians have no access to power. All the noise made was hogwash. There was no thorough neighbour-to-neighbour reach-out in its real sense. The All Progressives Congress (APC) went underground and was doing door-to-door campaign to people with less noise on the electronic media. The negative vituperations poured on the opposition party especially on the President-elect, Mohammadu Buhari, had its negative effect on the PDP. What PDP needed to do was to showcase what Jonathan did, and they are many if you ask me; but it was busy with hate campaigns. Buhari and his APC had mere promissory note, but they turned the situation to their advantage to attract public sympathy to the Buhari campaign.
Prior to the election, many good-spirited Nigerians formed one group or another to support Jonathan, and I believe they were more than 15,000 groups. They believed in Jonathan, but those groups were not empowered; they were starved of relevant logistics to do the job. Those groups were encapsulated into what was known as GSG (Goodluck Support Group). They were invited to Abuja and promised everything to facilitate them do their mobilisation jobs, but when they got back to their various locations, nothing again was heard of it from the main leaders of the GSG. The groups should have been embraced properly, but they were ignored and sidelined by those controlling it from Abuja and even the PDP in the states. The various support groups became dis-spirited. The result was what we witnessed at the poll: failure of Jonathan because a lot of people sabotaged him. Most of the people that coordinated things from Abuja were just looking for what they would grab, not the services they could offer, even those at the states. Many members of the support groups were even embarrassed, to the extent that they joined hands with the opposition and voted against Jonathan. I felt bad with the entire handling of the Jonathan campaign. There is no doubt that Jonathan fixed a lot of things in this country.
The Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) is a group that was campaigning through the electronic media, and surfaced mainly where the president goes for campaigns; but it was not doing door-to-door campaign. TAN, instead of being an exclusive body, should have worked with the various support groups of Jonathan and coordinated very well, but it did not. It simply messed up the entire campaign with poor coordination. PDP was playing politics of exclusion. It believed that mentioning the word PDP was enough to win election, but it was disappointed. I called certain people that were well-placed in the party and campaign organisation that nobody was campaigning for Mr. President or for the PDP, but they refused to act. PDP as a party did not identify critical areas with large population, so as to put more efforts and logistics in those areas. In every election, you have hard areas; places that will be hard for you to win but where you must work harder to galvanise the masses. There is also the soft areas that you can penetrate more easily. There are so many areas PDP would have won, but they neglected those areas and no serious campaign was done in those areas. Most people that collected money saw it as their own national cake, pocketed the money and did nothing. Of course the result was the failure of Jonathan.
Where does the present political configuration leave your people, Ndigbo?
It depends on your mindset; if you think that Ndigbo have lost out, I can boldly say that we did not lose. When you view it from what we set to achieve, I as the then president-general of Aka Ikenga, the Igbo intellectual think-tank, and the late Ralph Uwechue, then president of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, you will know that we gained from something you cannot measure. We needed to establish the brotherhood that existed among the ethnic nationalities in the old Eastern Region. After the civil war, many non-core Ndigbo developed some hatred for the core Igbo because of the experiences of the war. Sadly too, other ethnic nationalities that formed the geographical entity of the old Eastern Region equally developed deep hatred against the core Ndigbo. So we in Aka Ikenga reasoned that supporting Jonathan will help stamp out or dilute the degree of hatred and distrust that had been created since after the civil war.
We ensure that the fight of an Ijaw man, if it becomes the fight of an Igbo man, the Ijaw man will tend to have change of heart towards the Igbo man. The fight of Efik man, Ogoja man, Ikwerre man, Anioma man etc., if such fights become the fight of Ndigbo, it will pay off in the long run because the trust will be re-established and all the erroneous impressions will change. These were our mindset in giving support to Jonathan. So what I did was to market this idea to the larger Igbo group via Ohanaeze, and they bought into it. Prior to this decision, there was a newspaper publication that some Abuja-based Ndigbo have already met some Northerners in Kaduna and decided that they would support the Northerners, while Ndigbo would be given the vice presidential slot. I attended one of such meetings in Abuja and I bared my mind that this is not good enough, because Ndigbo may not agree to play that second fiddle. After that, I moved from Abuja to Ugwashi-Uku to meet with the then president of Ohanaeze, the late Uwechue. I told him the decision of Aka Ikenga and our mindset on the general election, who to support and who not to support. I told him exactly our decision to back Jonathan. Ohanaeze latter put up a paid advert on the issue.
That publication drew a lot of flaks and sparks from many Igbo people. While that was going on, we in Aka Ikenga fired with a supporting publication. Though we did it on half a page, some good-spirited Ndigbo, after reading what Aka Ikenga stated, gave support, even paid for that to be re-published. So, I can say that started the avalanche of Ndigbo into Jonathan’s camp. Those who were sitting on the fence started summersaulting into Jonathan’s camp.
What Ndigbo gained from voting Jonathan was much. A lot of wounds have been healed due to support for Jonathan. For me, that is a great achievement.
Ndigbo has lost nothing. Instead, we have gained friendship, we have gained our brothers back. Other ethnic nationalities that made up the old Eastern Region that have been thinking negatively of Ndigbo now know that Ndigbo can always fight for them as brothers.
Do you see the APC having the capacity to fulfil its campaign promises?
Political promises are as old as democracy. People, in order to gain power, whether in PDP or APC, make promises. But when you get in there, you discover that it is not a bed of roses. We do not expect APC to carry out all the promises they made. They are not magicians. They are the same Nigerians. Don’t forget that APC is an extension of PDP. It is people from the PDP that ran to APC. It is the same mindset. So, they cannot do anything different from what they have done in PDP. Take, for example, Tam David-West is already crying that petroleum will be sold at N40 per litre. It is not possible in this country. So, prompting Buhari to start thinking that way, we are laying some mine field for him, which is not good. Let the new government start. Let them look at what is on the table. From there, they can plan their strategy to govern this country.
Some people are already prompting Buhari on speed rail. He has to look at the country, look at what it takes. Are we going to have such speed rail when there are people trading along the rail lines?
There is no discipline. First and foremost, the incoming administration, instead of telling us what they cannot do, let them start from what they can do. Take for example, what can you do in a country that every year they budget money and more than 80 per cent of the budget goes for recurrent where people are paid for doing nothing. Then you have less than 20 perbcent for capital vote, which is not even implemented up to 50 per cent. How can such a country develop? We have to re-order our priorities. For example, why can’t the National Assembly be reduced to part time activities, to tone down the do-or-die politics we are having in this country? As far as political office is a means to an end, there will be no end to political crisis in this country.
Do you see Buhari’s presidency tackling corruption?
Corruption is hydra-headed in this country today. So, for Buhari to say he is going to tackle it, he has to go extra mile to step on toes. Stepping on toes, first and foremost, he has to start from the top, the presidency itself. He has to visit crime with punishment. Somebody is in tribunal facing a criminal offence of corruption. That same individual is being honoured and given even higher leadership positions. What will the person at the side think? Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Minister of finance
What is your take on capital punishment for corruption?
Capital punishment is counter-productive because you may end up killing people who never committed any crime. Give them long term imprisonment and deny their families the enjoyment of the product of that corruption, by seizing their assets and confiscating their money, so that people will know it is not business-as-usual.
The whole structure of emolument of various workers must be looked into. In Nigeria, people are paid for doing nothing. There are so many unnecessary agencies. You drive along the road, you see people in various uniforms. You don’t know who is who anymore. And some of them carry arms. What is their duty? They congregate in one place; around one vehicle. And at the end of the day, they are paid. What is their contribution to national development? So many unnecessary agencies in this country that you either merge or scrap entirely and save the money for national development. We should allow industries to work, develop the energy sector and jobs will be created.
Some people saw Jonathan’s concession of defeat as heroic. Do you see it that way?
President Jonathan will go down in history as one of the best leaders that has ever led this country. One, he set in motion a programme that removed him from office. That is, adopting a clean election, sanitising the electoral process. No African leader can ever do that. Though it is not yet uhuru, he has set it in motion, and if the incoming administration takes that mantle, Nigeria will become better. That shows extreme patriotism. People like us, our admiration for him has multiplied hundred-fold.
Now, conceding defeat has never been heard of in this part of the world. A sitting president to concede defeat when the last vote has not been counted shows statesmanship. It shows patriotic effort because he knew that resisting doing anything otherwise would set the country ablaze. And he has said it that the blood of an average Nigerian is more precious than his political ambition. The way and manner he took it again shows that he is even grateful to Nigerians for allowing him to become president. It’s beyond his life expectation that one day he would become the president of this nation. To him, he is a fulfilled man. He doesn’t need to be a Methuselah in power to achieve that happiness. Historically, he is now going to be a reference point for all politicians, both in Africa and the rest of the world.