Our Honeymoon For APC Will Be Over By Dec 31 – Metuh

Olisa Metuh, national publicity secretary of the PDP speaks about his party, the ruling APC, President Buhari’s government and sundry political matters. He spoke to Tony Egbulefu

What positive impacts do you feel the PDP has made, playing opposition politics in the past six months?

As a leading opposition party, we have been able to show decency and maturity in playing opposition. We have been able to show that you can disagree with government, disagree with their policies and programmes, without being abusive or insulting. What we have offered Nigerians for the first time is a credible opposition in terms of offering alternatives and options to the policies and programmes of the government in a decent, civil and matured manner. Most especially, we have been able to highlight the deficiencies in the policies of government, upon some of which they have effected changes immediately. The robust nature of our arguements and the points there in have made the government to change its modus-operandi in certain areas. Since our de-marketing statement, it is on record that President Buhari has stopped de marketing Nigerians as corrupt people and a broke nation in all his subsequent trips abroad. He rather now started looking inwards to see what potentials Nigeria has to offer to the world, which is what we want him to do. We have let them understand that even while you fight corruption, you must respect the rule of law, you must understand that the accused is innocent until the contrary is proved. What we have not been able to achieve is getting them to respect the judiciary as an independent arm of government. The way the security agencies have been hounding the judiciary and brow-beating them to giving judgement against PDP, we have not been able to effect a change in that. They still have the siege mentality of people who want to dominate the landscape, and brook no opposition.

How does the PDP feel with all these revelations of mismanagement and corruption by officials of the last PDP government?

They remain allegations until proven in a court of law. We have heard the government’s side, we have heard the prosecution; we have not heard the defence. I don’t think the NSA (National Security Adviser) has come out to say where he got the monies from. It is improper to condemn someone in the public without a trial. Our comment will come after the trial. For now, all we are hearing are the allegations by the government, the trial by the media, the condemnations, we have not heard the defence. When we hear the defence of those being tried, we will be able to take a position-did they abuse their powers; did they engage in an unlawful and illegal activities- because as a political party, we cannot condone what is improper because the monies involved are not the monies of the APC or that of President Buhari, they are the commonwealth of Nigerians and we as a responsible political party, cannot condone the frittering away of our monies.

The very first day Senator Ike Ekweremade presided over the Senate, APC legislators staged a walk out. Did this give your party a cause for concern?

No, it didn’t because that exhibition of irresponsibility and rascality by the APC has been corrected, by these same people amongst them. It was a complete exhibition of rascality by the APC, not to respect the Senate rules, and not to respect the independence of the legislature, in terms of knowing that this is not about party politics-this is an independent arm. They have a deputy president of the Senate, they need to obey him; but we are happy that they have come to their senses.

Virtually all the states the PDP won the governorship has seen intense legal dispute and even in the National Assembly your legislators have had their elections nullified more than those of the APC and the other parties. What does this speak of?

When we found out what was happening, we made a statement to inform Nigerians that the president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Bulkachuwa is on assignment to ensure that they took away our states, especially in the South-south. We named five states-Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Delta, Taraba, Abia. Out of them, the Appeal Court has given judgement as we speak- Akwa Ibom, they have reversed it, Rivers, they have reversed it, Taraba, they are going to give judgement; Delta, they have hijacked and changed the panel and brought it to Abuja, Abia, we are still waiting for their judgement. We indicated that and informed Nigerians that this is what the president of the Court of Appeal is doing. We have heard several reasons why she embarked upon cleansing of the PDP. We hear that this government is dealing with the judiciary in such a way that they will confront you with your files or certain things you have done before, and you must conform and do what they want you to do. We learnt it is the DSS that is carrying it out. As a responsible party, we alerted the nation. What we expected was for the judiciary to look into it, but what we received then was a statement from the office of the chief justice of Nigeria, warning political parties to be careful of what they say. But we knew the events will unfold, and we have been proved right in our assertion. We did not raise a false alarm, we have been proven correct. So it is an agenda of this government, it is an agenda of the DSS, it is the agenda of the presidency that the PDP should be brow-beaten, and hounded out of existence. They do not believe that there should be an opposition in the body polity.

The Ekweremadu Committee has submitted its report on why the PDP fared badly in the general election, and recommended remedial measures and ways going forward. What has been the level of implementation?

The implementation has started. It is slow, but it has started. The e-registration has been approved, and it is being done in Edo as a pilot programme, and they are about to conclude on the companies that we will use nationally. We have started the conferences. We have done the national conference and we have directed that states and zones should start theirs. On the issue of where the next president we come from, the party has complied immediately. The NWC has proposed and the NEC has accepted and directed, and approved that the next president of Nigeria should come from the North. These are part of the recommendations; other recommendations are not for public consumption.

Even with the reconciliation and stabilisation processes set in motion at the national level, which are trickling down to the state chapters of the party, there’s still mass defection of your members to the APC. The recent Jigawa and Benue defections are cases in point…

It is expected that since we have lost power, those of them who are fickle minded; those of them who are greedy, would abandon the PDP and jump over to the APC. For those people, we have no apologies- they are not needed because they are the cause of the problems. Those people jumping from here to there are the ones that caused our problem in the first case. We prefer to remain with those who are committed, loyal and dedicated to the ideals of our party.

Some Nigerians say they have seen positive changes in the areas of the fight against corruption, reduction in the cost of governance, and power supply since the APC took over. Do you dispute this?

Let me explain to you why the rate of power supply is less now than it was before the dry season. When we were campaigning, the former president made it known to Nigerians that we have added a lot of infrastructure to the power sector and that it was expected that there would be improvement in the power supply. As a matter of fact, there was improvement in power supply from the end of April, up to early August, but then we warned the APC to stop magnifying it because there will still be a significant drop during the dry season. So, while we witnessed the gains of our investment in the power sector, we still knew that there will be a marginal drop during the dry season, that’s one. On the issue of corruption, I think what has increased is the mob lynching of the accused and trial by the media- there is no single conviction. So when there is no single conviction, why will you be mouthing that you have done well in anti-corruption? What is happening is persecution. What is happening is playing politics with corruption. A responsible government would engage in investigation and prosecution before they start publicising their gains in anti-corruption.What has reduced in the cost of governance if I may ask you.

For a start, the number of ministers has been reduced as well as presidential aides?

From 42 ministers, we now have 37, so because we don’t have five ministers, we now have a reduction in the cost of running government? While you look at it as reduction, we look at it as denial to certain interests of the chance of representation. Some of these people (new ministers) came from abroad, some of them came from outside the states they are representing. PDP used to stablise interests by having one appointment of minister per state, to look at states that were denied the chance of having their indigenous ministers, and then you compensate them by having another minister. We have not seen any reduction in the cost of governance. Retinue of aides is subjective, you never knew the number of aides then, and you have not known now, but this government is very good in propaganda, changing the mindset of Nigerians and their perception. We have not seen any change in cost of governance. Look at the budget of the National Assembly; look at the budget they are giving to ministries, look at the overhead of ministries in budget. Why don’t you look at recurrent expenditure, has it reduced? Look at this budget and the last budget and tell me what has reduced. What we see is the denial of Nigerians, what is due to Nigerians. We had a situation, where in the past, infrastructural development programmes are done, but for seven months in our country, for the first time in the history of our country, we have not had any infrastructural development for seven months. The only contract has been awarded within these seven months is the construction of a helicopter landing pad in Daura. From May 29 till now, tell me any contract that has been awarded. So what have they done within these seven months. It is not as if the monies are being saved and you can say there is an increase in our foreign reserve. So what has happened to all the monies that have come to the federal government since then?

Why was it possible for voters in the North to literally unite against the PDP in the general election to the effect that there was no single state in the region that your presidential candidate won?

We made our mistakes and lost the election. We keep it within ourselves. Corrections are being made. It won’t happen to us again. We will never have any situation in any election, that any zone, any religion, any tribe will unite against our party again. It happened in the North and among the Muslim community, but it was exaggerated result. The results did not reflect the true situation on ground. We believe that the votes were inflated for the opposition and deflated for the PDP in some states in the North. One example is Kano, where you had 1.9 million voters, and there was no single void vote. It is not possible and it is not that they have high literacy ratio.

Your party described President Buhari’s 2016 Budget of Change as fraudulent. What are the specifics in this your claim?

It is good to be deep. Nigerians should be deeper than they are. On the issue of recruitment of teachers, who pays the teachers, the federal government or the states? We have teachers who are owed salaries and you want to recruit five hundred thousand new teachers. Are you going to be responsible for their payment or are you sending them to the states for their payment? Who recruits, who pays? In the capital expenditure, there is no way you can exhaust N1.8 trillion in one year on roads or infrastructural projects. You cannot. So what this government would do is to scatter a lot of projects and award some contracts, and next year they would come back to say they need to complete those projects, that they need another N2.5 trillion, because every road project is meant to be completed within 24 or 36 months, sometimes four years, so that they keep on borrowing. In other climes, you borrow to execute infrastructural projects, how can you borrow to execute welfare programmes? When you told Nigerians that you were going to pay N5000, you never told them you were going to borrow money to do that, what you said was that there was a lot of corruption going on, that if you plug the holes, you are going to finance it, now we are borrowing money to finance it. It is not justifiable. The budget is not implementable. The budget is unrealistic. Time will prove us right or wrong. We give you eight months and you will see. We have never been wrong when we sit down as a party and make a forecast.

With the benefit of hindsight, in which areas of governance do you think the PDP government would have done things differently?

As a politician, I will be parochial. I think the PDP government would have invested more in building political structures. They should have provided a better source of funding for the PDP as a political party. They should have ensured that we completed our headquarters, through help from friends of the government. The PDP government did not do well in not building structures that would help sustain us a political party. We did not invest in the media for instance. We have no influence in any medium in this country, it is very wrong for a party that was in power for 16 years. But being nationalistic, I think the PDP should have been better prepared for the management of public perception. If the programmes of the PDP were better explained to the people, they would have better understood them.

Do you think for instance your government managed the war against Boko Haram well enough?

There was no way you could have managed it excellently, especially as it was something that was thrown at you for the first time. We were never used to it. When we campaigned in 2011, we never promised Nigerians that we were going to manage a war against insurgency, because we have never seen that in our country. So by 2011, 2012, it was thrown at us and the management was a bit of trial and error at first, but towards the end of the tenure, the administration become experienced in handing it, and we really brought it to the lowest ebb. I will not make any comment on this government’s war against corruption, because we still maintain that we will not politicise the war against corruption, but that will be until December 31. We will make our views known on the security challenges we are having from 2016. We have given this government enough honey moon on security issues. The honeymoon will be over by the end of the year.

What is the party’s idea of the type of leaders that will have to take over as substantive BoT Chairman, and national chairman of the party?

We want younger people that would be more responsible, committed and dedicated to the ideals of our party. Young people should come and learn from our leaders, when they are still around and when they are still alive.