APC is a gang up against minorities – Daniel Since the opposition political parties went into alliance to form the All Progressives Congress, Nigerians were made to believe that the merger was to wrestle power from PDP for the betterment of the entire nation. But a social reform activist from Adamawa state, Daniel Richard, insists during interactive session with journalists that there is more to the merger than meets the eye. According to him, the primary objective is to ensure minority tribes are shut out of the presidential villa. MIKE ODIAKOSE was there for Nigerian Pilot: Excerpts: Recently the House of Representatives passed a resolution to take over the responsibilities of the Rivers state House of Assembly over the festering crisis in the state. How do you see this development, including the visit of four governors from the North to Governor Amaechi? First and foremost, what is the core role of the Nigeria Governors Forum? Whether they are still together as a group or they are separated or that they have split, the fundamental question is what is the key role of the Nigeria Governors Forum? Why was it formed, was it formed to checkmate the President because right now it was like the Governors Forum versus the President. So was the forum formed for the purpose of checkmating the excesses of the executive arm of government or was the forum to impose their party agenda since the forum has all the governors from different political parties. We have to know whether the forum is to allow individual governors from different parties to have a central voice as to what will benefit their own people. All these things have not been highlighted so nobody knows what the key role of the Governors forum is. For you to have a forum you have to identify an objective. What is the objective of the Governors forum? Nobody in this country today can tell you clearly apart from this sovereign wealth fund which they are trying to share as usual. So, if there is an issue now between them and the President and had degenerated now to personal between the President and the Rivers state governor we still have to insist on knowing exactly what is the key objective of the Governors Forum, why is the President angry or why are the governors insisting the forum must continue. This is how we do things I this country. Somebody will just go and form an association and before you know it they have pushed it to another level. We have yellow fever here before you know it they have become federal road safety. In this country you just form something in your backyard and before you know it they have push it to the front door and to another level. I mean, civil defense now we don’t know how they were formed, road safety came we don’t know the role of all the other agencies that were involved with road safety like VIO, are they still functioning, if they are functioning are they in conjunction with the road safety? Civil defense are now carrying guns are they police, if they are not police what are they doing, are they CID? You see if we don’t take care (thank God they are fighting themselves) they will become a parallel government. They are 36, they can say they are more than the one person in the villa and they want to be calling the shots. They will say we are 36; we have the mandate of our people why should we be answerable to the President; if we take a decision the President either complies or we revolt. So, everytime something comes up like this Nigerians don’t look at it, we don’t look at the fine prints, people just go on the street and start screaming. What is Governors Forum, what are they standing for. I am from Adamawa state, my governor has never told us ‘am going to Governors Forum meeting in Abuja, these are the issues, this is the agenda’. We are allowing this thing now before we know it they become another arm of government. We don’t know their role, we don’t know why they were formed. If not for this fight the average Nigerian doesn’t know what the forum is doing. Even me, as enlightened as I am and I live in Abuja I don’t know what they are doing. We have allowed a kangaroo arrangement that is not backed by any law, it is not backed by the constitution, it is not backed by a referendum by the Nigerian people and they are running around and even fighting. And look at how Nigerians have joined the fight they have no idea how or why it was formed. Everything now is about governors’ forum, 31 people that could not even conduct ordinary election among themselves. Now you saw the fight by law makers, beating each other. Even if they alleged that the five people removed their Speaker it has happened before in Plateau state. So, sometimes we don’t analyze things, we don’t dig dip into what made these things to happen. It has happened before. The same four of five people impeached former Governor Joshua Dariye in this same country. It is just the way our system has been brought that is why anybody thinks anybody can do anything with impunity. The thing that happened in Rivers state happened in Plateau state. It is in this same dispensation from 1999 to 2013 civilian administration. Even journalists don’t do any investigation; they just keep harping on the moment, they should have brought what happened to Dariye to the fore now that this one happened. Dariye was removed for six months and we are still using the same 1999 constitution. Joshua Dariye was removed, the House of Assembly was removed, and the commissioners were removed. Today as I am talking to you nobody is talking about the six months, are they going to go back a use the six months that was part of their constitutional tenure. Now, why is it that it has happened in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe but they say this one is cohabitation- you stay together. The governor is going nowhere, the governor will remain, the House of Assembly will remain, and the commissioners will remain. What was the cause of the matter- it was the failure of the governors as the chief security officers of their states that brought about breakdown of law and order. What are the governors still doing there if they failed in their responsibility? It happened in Plateau state and we are still operating the same constitution. In Plateau state four or five people impeached the Speaker and removed the governor and nobody said anything and the same thing has now happened in Rivers state and they are shouting it is illegal- what is illegality about it. We started with illegality, anyway. I don’t get surprise at all when things like this happen in Rivers state because like I said, it has happened before in Plateau state unless you people refuse to go and dig deep. Will Joshua Dariye go to court now and say he wants to get back his six months as governor or is it because it is Joshua Dariye and his own doesn’t matter or are we operating different constitution that one set is doing this and another set is doing that. We have one constitution and if we don’t check this thing seriously we will end up in the middle of nowhere. Some people have linked Rivers crisis to politics of 2015. What is your take on this? When you talk of 2015 are we just doing only politics are we not doing anything else? We just finished election two years ago; we are doing another election in two years time, so we don’t have anything to do in this country, just politics? So, anything you do today is linked to politics? In any case where has Jonathan said he is running for 2015, where, in which newspaper. Which journalist interviewed him and he said he is running in 2015. Jonathan is president of Nigeria today, does it make sense that you are already a president and you are eyeing the next one? Jonathan is president today and I can challenge anybody, including those talking about automatic ticket, whether Jonathan is the one that discussed that he must run in 2015. Like I said before this is how we push things, this is how we are going to drag Jonathan whether he likes it or not, he must run. The way we are going now it is like we are saying he must run. This is consistence with what I was telling you, how you form a small association and force it down the throat of Nigeria people. I don’t buy that, that the crisis is about 2015. In any case Amaechi too has not mentioned that he is running for president. If the issue is that he is tagging with Sule Lamido as vice president, then I will tell you that vice president is not an office, nobody runs for vice president, nobody campaigns for vice president if that is the issue. There is no office called office of the vice president and has a ticket that you can run on. It doesn’t exist; it is not in our constitution. So I don’t know what Amaechi is running for. He has not mentioned it; I have not heard him say he is running for president. The only office you can run for is the office of the president, the office of the governor, chairmen of local government. You can’t run for vice president, deputy governor. If Amaechi is running for vice president then we have a different constitution. But how do you see the role of Wole Soyinka and that of some governors in resolving the face-off. You can see clearly that there is a connection with the so-called core North and the South West in this matter because like you ask me I cannot understand the role od Wole Soyinka, Femi Falana, Bola Tinubu and others vis-à-vis the role of Sule Lamido, Buhari, the core North governors. There is a connection. Maybe in their mind why should the South South or a minority person become president or continue to be a president. These are people that normally don’t do politics together. In 1999 we all put our heads together despite the fact that the two zones refused to agree to vote for their brother- whether it was a game they played on us. The fact of the matter is that in 1999 the same people now fighting Jonathan, the South West group, the North West group, did not vote for PDP at all. Not one vote they gave PDP. Obasanjo’s senators were all from AD, Atiku’s House of Representative member was an ANPP man, yet other Nigerians who believe in this country decided that, well it doesn’t matter, it mustn’t be us, but we should come together as a country and put these people believing they can deliver. Obasanjo and Atiku emerged without the participation of their people. These people fighting now did not participate installing their South West president and their Hausa/Fulani vice president. They didn’t but yet we allowed them and there was no rancor. So, if you now look at the genesis of what is happening today there is a clear connection between the North West and the South West people who ordinarily don’t do politics together. What is happening today is like ‘let’s not allow this man to continue, it is too long for us to stay outside government, this is not the way we planned this thing, we didn’t plan that he will be this long, we thought maybe we may even consider Ibo instead than South South’. So, God has brought Jonathan. Jonathan came at a time he was not expected, so everybody is running around now, how do we deal with this. Clearly, they way they are going it is like ‘oh, we have a situation in our hand, this man came, we don’t know where he is coming from and he is in the villa, how do we get rid of him’. Cry, cry, cry. So, they have a situation in their hand and if they have to clear it without people suspecting let’s get his own brother down there to key in into the project, nobody will suspect. You don’t even know what Amaechi is fighting for. If you ask Amaechi now what he is running for he won’t tell you because there is no office known as the office of the vice president. In political dispensation there are offices that exist that you vie for, the other ones you are picked. So why am I going to kill myself if someone is going to pick me. Are you saying Amaechi might not even be aware of the political calculations and he is been used against the larger interest of the minorities? I think what he understands is that he is a shining star, a most valuable player, MVP, now. But he doesn’t know where the goal post is. It is the story of an MVP who is playing well but doesn’t know which side to score- he should score on this side or score on the other side. Maybe at the end of the 90 minutes they say it is over and he should go. And he will ask then what do they mean he should go, I am the one that has been playing and they will ask him which side he has been playing. So, this is the story of an MVP that does not know where the goal post is. There is no clear cut objective of this face-off between the presidency and Amaechi. If Amaechi is sincere that he doesn’t want a South South president to continue the logical thing is to start the process of either encouraging the South East or even South West. So, we don’t know what the fight is all about, we don’t know the end game. Amaechi can’t be fighting if he doesn’t know the end game. He must tell us what he is running for because if he thinks he is running for vice president then he is wrong because there is no such office as the vice president. It is an elective office. Elective offices are president, governor, senate, House of Representatives, House of Assembly, local government chairman and even councilors, they run election. Amaechi is really an MVP in this matter and I agree on that but MVP to end where? We need to ask Amaechi what is the end game, what is the objective, what does he want to achieve? Is he going to play the role of a king maker or he wants to become king himself- he must have a terminal objective…If he wants to remove Jonathan what for? For us as arbiter in this matter we need to know the terminal objective. There must be an end game and it is unfortunate that some people are jumping into a matter they don’t know the end game. It is unfortunate that journalists don’t do in-depth investigation and just join the train. If Amaechi wants to remove him what for- is it for his own personal gain, is he playing the script of some people? Let’s not be confused about this- this matter must have an end game and I want you people to go and investigate what is the end game. People are getting into the matter without knowing the end game unless there is now a new political marriage between the so-called core north and the South West using a minority as a pun. The ACN is basically a South West party while the CPC is known to have wide followership in North West and these are the major moving force in the political amalgam called APC. Does it imply that the new APC is the outcome of this strange political marriage? Yes, because they have who they call a stranger in Aso Rock, somebody that is in the villa that ordinarily shouldn’t be there, someone that arrived when he was not expected. So, definitely you have to take a fire brigade approach to it. So, now that he is there we can’t pretend to be querying among each other, let’s get rid of him fast. All our political structures collapsed because of this nature of politicking, strange bed fellows, people that have no clue on who they are. They have never done this before, the South South has always been doing politics with the North, and they have now found themselves on the other side. The South West has always done their business with the Middle belt; they have now found themselves on the other side. So, it is now ‘okay, what do we do, this is a stranger, this man here has never been here, there has never been this calculation, we never had this calculation in the past. Even in the military this is not what we calculated for but now that he is here what do we do. Okay let’s have an arranged marriage even if we divorce after, let’s arrange it now’. Like I said earlier on, in 1999, stupidly other people say even if the South West and core North are not doing PDP, PDP seems to be a national platform for everybody, despite the fact that their people say they won’t participate, now that they have even put their own people in front let’s just do it anyway. If it real politics at least this should re real payback time for South South. South West and North West should say when our people were there this people supported them, this is their own turn, at least let’s do it for them. But no, which means calculatively there are certain people that have been discountenanced from going to the villa by any reason based on what is happening now. There is calculated attempt to scare anybody that does not belong to any core group who think the presidency is their exclusive preserve. That is why this fight now is raging on. Unfortunately, Amaechi has decided to leave the pack. I don’t know what they will pay him with; I don’t know what Amaechi will benefit. This is a South West and core North agenda and Wole Soyinka is from the South West, Falana is from the South West, Tinubu is from the South West. They will now find out that if they don’t get up and fight injustice to them, that a minority is ruling because to them it is injustice but this injustice was caused by God. It wasn’t anybody that brought Jonathan; we all know how he emerged as president in the first place. I didn’t put any hand inside and you didn’t put any hand inside, so it is God. This is an injustice done to them by God so they are fighting now, God what have we done that you are doing this to us, why. 
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 05:47:10 +0000
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