Abuja (Sundiata Post) – Going forward, 2023 is almost here and parties are clamoring to grab the most powerful seat at the federal level. Where do you think the pendulum will swing because the APC is out there trying to retain power and your party, PDP, is also strategizing?
Well, I think the verdict is already out. 2023 is not almost here, it is three years away; we are in 2020. The other day the President came, trying to find a lame duck way to say “I will leave some legacies”. What legacy is he going to leave?
He is just going to leave a legacy of debts, a legacy of difficulty and the most important legacy which the President has left or will leave will be a legacy of making things totally impossible for whoever takes over from him to govern and I will tell you how it goes. This government has been the only government that has gone against the laws of this country.
It has gone against Section 14 (3) of the Constitution which talks about Federal Character. It has gone against the Federal Character principles that were even brought by previous governments before us in order to weld us together in terms of unity.
Even the Federal Character Commission itself that is supposed to be the ombudsman that would check the breaches of the law by government was also compromised by this government where today both Chairman and Secretary are manned by people from the northern part of the country.
Before now, you had a Chairman from the northern part and you had the Secretary from the South and this is what I am talking about that this government is going to make it extremely impossible for whoever takes over from them to do well.
Assuming somebody takes over and he is from the South-West, will he follow what this government has already instituted, for example, by putting all security agencies, the 14 or 16 of them, under people from the South just like the Federal Government has done today by putting all under people from the North?
How is it going to function? Assuming it is somebody from the South-East, will he put everything under people from the South-East?
Will this country take it? So, what this government has done is to lay landmines that will destroy this country and when we were shouting and telling some elements that they are laying conditions to make this country rupture, they said the President needs to work with only those that he is comfortable with and now you can see the consequences of that.
Now that he has instituted nepotism as a fundamental part of the architecture of government, somebody coming after him, supposing his own people come to him and say “it’s been done before” just like they are telling us “oh PDP did it before” and so, if I become President and I decide that all my brothers from the South-East will take over everything and so, I retire everybody and put my people because it has been done before and, if you talk, I will say, “listen, Buhari did it”.
You set dangerous precedents you don’t even know. What happens in a country, how do you build a country? You build a country in a way that even things that you want to do against your natural instincts, you think of others and you think of tomorrow.
You have a holistic view of everything, but we have a very narrow-minded and provincial person who just does not care. And so, it is the implications of what these things are going to bring that we have continued to talk against and that is why we are in this conundrum today. And coming to the question of APC; APC is dead today.
APC swallowed its own Chairman and brought a Caretaker Committee and what will the Caretaker do? They will just be modeling along but when the time comes, they will now say “let’s do a convention and bring up a Chairman”, where are they going to get the Chairman that will not trigger the same things driving APC apart?
That is the first issue that APC will have to confront. The second issue that APC will have to confront is, where will the presidential candidate come from? Any which way it goes, APC is in trouble.
So, you find that when we talk about the future, we want to go from today to tomorrow and be sure that there is even a country and that is why my very good friend, Peter Obi, some people were asking him the other day, “do you want to be Igbo President?” and he said, “listen, why can we be talking about that when we have existential problems right in front of us?” Can this nation survive?
We have the Covid-19 pandemic which, combined with the drop in oil price to zero, now led the country to go into a borrowing spree to fund recurrent expenditures and so, a few days down the line, where do you think we are doing to go?
So, the debt situation calls for concern?
I do not even think that the truth about the debt situation is very open and you will notice that every time they are questioned, they flare into a rage. The question is, you are a public official and you are acting on our behalf.
We elected you into office and we raise legitimate questions and you don’t settle to even answer us in a very supercilious manner. You now say we ought not to have even asked that question. And one of the unfathomable things I heard from a minister was that even this loan you are talking about, it was signed under PDP. Can you imagine? So, if PDP signs a MoU and you come in and the thing.