2015: INEC’s secret agenda against the South will fail — Aniete Okon

‘How National Assembly should handle National Conference report’ By Henry Umoru Aniete Okon, a second republic senator from Akwa Ibom State, is pioneer National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Okon was also a member of the just concluded National Conference. In this Interview, he takes a swipe at the controversial creation of more polling units by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which overwhelmingly favours the North. He tongue lashes the Chairman of the electoral body, Prof. Attahiru Jega, accusing him of nursing an agenda. He also speaks on the 2015 polls and President Jonathan, the North, the 2014 National Conference, insurgency, campaign support groups among other national issues. Excerpts: Aniete-Okon1INEC recently created new polling units ahead of the 2015 general elections. About seventy percent of it was allocated to the North. How do you react to this? As far as l am concerned, it is a clear script written by the leadership of INEC to be used as a trump card to subvert whatever the Nigerian electorate may decide at the polls in 2015. INEC, in doing that, created a bank of votes that it intends to use to pander to the desires of the leaders of the North especially in the presidential election. And that arrangement will not fly. It is so completely skewed against the South. There is clearly a flight from sanity somewhere in INEC. How they intend to push that through eventually, will remain one of the wonders of our recent time. INEC’s action is clearly in breach of the democratic tendencies and occurrences any where in the world. And you will notice that a lot of the new polling units are in places where we have unrefuted reports that the population there has emptied, either into the Cameroun or other parts of the country. So INEC has created those controversial polling units as a veritable tool to rig elections in keeping with whatever script that has been handed down. The question is: What was the basis to arrive at the skewed and vaunted 85 percent and not 60 or 50 percent proportional distribution? If as INEC claims that some states were having excess polling units and therefore do not deserve more polling units, what was the justification in allocating additional 121 polling units on the basis of equality of states? Let INEC convince the public that these new polling units are not for the North. INEC has decided to use the Finger Identification System of Registered Voters which is a more unreliable data when it decided to create units. What were they trying to disguise? What were they trying to cover up? The disproportionate allocation to a section of the country belies the reality of the current situation on ground in those areas. The question remains, with this proposal, are the people in INEC preparing polling units for ghosts or for real humans? You have polling units in places where clearly people have ceased to live normally. These are areas of interrogation that must be put before INEC. It means that there must be some existing collusion. We noticed that when they conducted election in Yobe, there was no question of disturbance. So there are so many interrogatories. INEC has really descended into the trenches for the battle in the 2015 elections. The same INEC that said recently that there is no possibility of holding elections in all parts of the country is now readily saying that the elections should hold every where. And l posit that if the security situation allows for the elections to be held, then the entire leadership of INEC and the insurgents including certain leaders in the North, are complicit in the intrigues that informed this insurrection. We are waiting to see how all these will play out. INEC’s new position is an act of subversion of the security of the country. You were a delegate to the just concluded National Conference which President Goodluck Jonathan recently received the report of its resolutions. The president has promised to send that report to both the National Assembly and the Council of State. But since there is no provision for a referendum in the Constitution as people have requested, how do we go about implementing those resolutions? l don’t see any problem with the implementation of that conference report. And the National Assembly is not a lifeless body. It carries the vestments of the wishes, the expectations and hopes of the Nigerian people. And it is a institution capable of rising to the yearnings of the people of this country. And there are antecedents which are with us today. The Doctrine of Necessity, which was an inspired construction of the National Assembly to lift the country out of the constitutional cul-sac which the unfortunate demise of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua forced the country into, is a clear and indisputable example. You can see from the swing of public opinion, the desires of the people across the length and breath of this country, that there are germane issues that must be resolved through a referendum. The president, at the inauguration of the National Conference, made it clear that the National Assembly will be called upon to create the necessary legislation for the holding of a referendum in such areas that have become absolutely necessary for public-based decisions involving directly the populace. l don’t therefore see any impediment to a resort to that process. Referendum has always been an instrument, a tool for managing fundamental political decisions. l believe that in the recommendations and amendments of the conference, there are sufficient and incontrovertible grounds for amending the Constitution. There are critical issues that will definitely fall within the purview of the National Assembly. And for such issues to achieve the national mandate, they must necessarily be subjected to established procedures. I think there is a healthy presumption that the National Assembly will rise to the challenge and call of duty to help ensure a more wholesome and healthier nation. The question is not whether the National Assembly is in a position to accept or reject the conclusions and amendments that have been thrown up by the National Conference. It is that they must now give the constitutional baptism which lies entirely within their province to turn those recommendations and amendments into laws and sections of the Constitution for the well-being of the Nigerian citizenry. These amendments, you will recall, have been authored by a gathering of Nigerians of all works of life and generations. The Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has said that President Jonathan should find a way to handle the report of that conference. Many people interpreted it to mean that he indirectly told the president that the National Assembly will have nothing to do with that conference report. Do you understand it that way? I do not accept that interpretation as conveying the intendments and spirit of the words as allegedly uttered by the Deputy Senate President. For me and also for a lot of people, what the Deputy Senate President meant must be seen as a call that the executive must fully deliver on the conclusions of the conference. And in doing that, they should diligently sieve through the report, sorting out those of them that have to be transmitted into laws to be channelled through their laid down processes and presented as executive bills. That’s my reading of what Ekweremadu said. Mr President is certainly not going to carry the report of the conference like rough and uncut diamonds to the National Assembly. The report must be in a form that conforms to the normal structure of issues being placed before the National Assembly. And that is that the executive is expected to bring to the National Assembly, all the bills that have been indicated by the resolutions and amendments by the National Conference. The pro-Jonathan coalition group, known as the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), has severally endorsed President Goodluck Jonathan through its on-going nationwide rallies, to re-contest in 2015 on the grounds that the president has performed well so far. Do you agree with them? I agree with the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) and other support groups like Jonathan Support Group (JSG) peopled by the likes of Prof Jerry Gana and Senator Ibrahim Mantu. The Political Adviser, Prof Rufai Alkali, recently set up a committee headed by General Adamu Ibrahim with a view to harnessing the various support groups ahead of 2015. What is your take? I endorse the initiative and direction of Prof Alkali. It falls within his turf to coordinate these disparate groups for the president and to ensure that they sustain the credibility of the president’s bid whenever he decides to come to contest. We don’t want the enthusiasm especially the boisterousness that is evident in the style of TAN to push the campaigns beyond sublime levels. The decision of the Political Adviser is appropriate and timely. The various groups must be brought into some limits of discipline in their utterances both vocal and print. It is important that they stay on message. People like you played a major role at the critical moment in the political marketing of President Jonathan during his presidential campaign in 2011. Are you going to be involved in the same project this time, considering the fact that leading players like you in that campaign project lost out in terms of patronage and rewards for your efforts? I don’t know what you mean by patronage. For me and those who worked with me, our primary motivation was the challenge of ensuring that a new order prevails. And that the ideology of equality of persons and equal opportunity also prevails. And we’ve been vindicated by a lot revolutionary and landmark developments in the political growth of the country. Such landmark developments as the National Conference that has institutionalized the equality of persons through revolutionary provisions like the rotation principle that trickles down through the federal, state and local government structures and which has guaranteed the rights of every Nigerian to aspire to elective positions. The opposition All Progressive Congress (APC) has given indication that it is looking forward to fielding a presidential candidate it considered as credible like General Muhammadu Buhari. For your party PDP, is it President Goodluck Jonathan or somebody else? We are settled about who the PDP presidential candidate is. It is President Goodluck Jonathan. But it does not mean that there won’t be pretenders to the ticket of the party at the convention. The fact remains that the president has met the mark. Those other presidential aspirations in the party will not be worth a passing glance. The might pass for nuisance value. In the realms of democracy, nobody seriously will seek to challenge the incumbent who is usually the leader of the party. He enjoys the right of first refusal. The party must out of a sense of duty and mission, offer the incumbent president the ticket and he has the option to accept or refuse the ticket. That is why in our party the PDP, it is a given that Mr President will run for a second term. It is within his constitutional right to do so, and he will also run on his record. I want to say here without fear of challenge, that the president has done well. There have been clear initiatives in areas that appear to have been foreclosed or forbidden. The president is addressing the challenge of infrastructure and in spite of the threats of insurgency, he is tackling that sector. Some northern elders have come out to threaten that President Jonathan should not contest the 2015 presidential election mainly on the basis that he has not been able to contain insurgency violence in the land. Do you have a different view? My collorary to threat, is that there should be no elections in 2015. Simple! If they posit that the president should not contest because of the impaired security in some parts of the country, then if we follow their ridiculous position, it then means that they have a case to answer. If they insist that the withdrawal or surrender by Mr President of his legitimate position is the panacea to the roiling insurrection in certain parts of the country, they have no logic. If they say the president must not contest because of those problems, then it means that the North created that problem of insurgency and insecurity in the country so that they can blame it on President Jonathan. But clearly, he is not to be blamed for those conditions or situation. A proper logical approach would have been for them to call for a the postponement of any election until the issue of insecurity is sorted out and finally dealt with. Are you insinuating that the North probably created this insecurity situation to scuttle the re-election of President Jonathan in 2015? Oh yes! If their major recommendation as a panacea for the insurgency to stop is that Mr President should step down and completely disavow his constitutional right to stand for election next year, then they can extend the president’s tenure in office by canvassing that we should not do an election. That is the interpretative extension that we can give to their position that Jonathan should not re-contest because of the insurgency. When people talk about the achievements of Jonathan’s government, they regret that corruption is alleged to be so pervasive in his era. The international community said this much, citing the present ineffectiveness of the existing anti-corruption agencies like the ICPC and EFCC as a compounding factor. Is there no point there? How has the government paralyzed or made the anti-corruption agencies ineffective? The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Chairman, Ibrahim Lamode, recently told the Senate Committee probing the performance of those agencies that the Commission had no more than N2 million in its accounts to carry out its statutory functions. Why won’t the government fund such important agency it had set up? Corruption can be described as endemic, but it didn’t start now. What is happening is that it had built up. But corruption had been there. And the anti-corruption agencies can not say that it is the government that is crippling their efforts. There have been over twenty-five cases of the EFCC particularly against high profile political office holders and so on. We must raise questions about the preparedness of these anti-corruption agencies and their capacities and level of competence in handling obvious cases of corruption. I dare them to come out and say that Mr President barred them from taking anybody to court. An Australian government negotiator with the Boko Haram, Steven Davis, has blamed the escalation of this insurgency on a former Army Chief of Staff, General Azubike Ihejirika, and a former governor of Borno State, Senator Ali Modu Sherrif, as the sponsors. Based on this revelation, the leadership of the APC called on government to prosecute the sponsors of the insurgents at the international criminal court (ICC). Are you in agreement? The allegations by the Australian, Steven Davis, sounds to me completely zany. Was Davis, by mentioning the former Army Chief, suggesting that the Federal Government was sponsoring insurgency against itself. As far as l am concerned, that allegation was a poorly scripted despatch, because the former Chief of the Army Staff was directed by the president in line with his duty, to quell the insurgency. So l don’t think that the president, from what l know about him, will accept the loss of lives through the insurgency activities, just for the purpose of retaining power over who? Mr Davis story was simply a poorly scripted distraction, and there are no pillars of logic to base that type of position. - See more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/09/2015-inecs-secret-agenda-south-will-fail-aniete-okon/#sthash.8LRnCvN8.dpuf