What APC needs to do to survive 2019 Bermuda Triangle —Obahiagbon

A former Chief of Staff to the Edo State Governor and onetime member of the House of Representatives, Honourable Patrick Obahiagbon, in this interview by SAHEED SALAWU, bares his mind on some national issues, including the rash of discoveries by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) of staggering sums of money stashed in odd places in some parts of the country.

What have you been doing since you left government and what is next for you?

I left government as Chief of Staff to the Edo State Governor in November last year and I have been finding time to have a well deserved rest and reading the whole kit and caboodle of didactic literature ranging from philosophy, religion and political science to mysticism, hermeticism and the Kabbalah. I have a lot to catch up on regarding the arcane subjects of hermeticism and particularly the Kabbalah.

As for what is next for me, I am still a legal practitioner but politically speaking, I remain a robot in the laps of the great geometrician of the universe.

How do you view recent discoveries of huge sums of money by the EFCC in odd places?

The recent discoveries of gargantuan and oodles of filthy lucre by the EFCC in grotesque or bizarre places can be looked at with bifurcated lenses.

For me, it speaks odious and opprobrious volumes for how far enmeshed our political class has nosedived in worshipping and luxuriating at the narcissistic shrine of mammon. We still have a preponderance of political carpetbaggers and scavenging philistines loitering the supposedly sacred precincts of political power. It also demonstrates, for me, the fact that President Buhari’s pertinacious efforts at cleansing the Augean stables is succeeding and that is the ratiocination why rogue politicians are no longer finding the banks safe enough as a receptacle for their despicable fruits of political robinhoodism.

What is the way out for Nigeria in the light of its economic, moral and political problems?

Happily, we have been apprised with information that Mr President and the Federal Government are already steering the ship of state away from eschewable economic cataracts and icebergs. Malversation and defalcation of public funds have been our fundamental national malaise. I advise Mr President not to shift grounds in his resolve and determination to extirpate corruption from our body polity. Everybody must be held accountable and liable on the altar of the fight against political prebendalism and economic adventurism and we must not permit the herculean fight to be blighted, besmirched and tatterdemalionized by visceral power mongers and revanchist frankensteins.

You are a friend of the media but on Monday, a reporter was expelled from the Presidential Villa for writing negative reports on Buhari. How would you react to the development?

My palate is titilated and titivated by the fact that there has been a speedy resolution of the newspaper reporter that was sent skedaddling from the Villa. I find the response of Mr Femi Adesina and Malam Garba Sheu quite an anodyne. The security clearance by Malam Lawal Daura, DG SSS, that Mr Lekan be called back to his journalistic perch at the Villa was also a welcome paregoric.

My advice for the media and non-journalists using the social media is that they must always say and write it as it is, no matter whose ox is gored and always be guided by the spirit of pro bono publico but in doing this, facts must be established and not garnished. Let me also call attention to Professor Olatunji Dare’s (master satirist and fecund thinker) several admonitions that journalists should always endeavour to follow through with stories that touch on our national solar plexus from a terminus ad quo to a terminus adquem.

How do you view the crisis in the PDP and how can the APC avoid crisis as elections draw near?

As a democrat, I would wish that the PDP is unmanacled of crisis so that it can play its historical role as a viable, credible, unflappable and strong opposition of the government in power. It is regrettable that the PDP is daily consumed in the smouldering cauldron of its centrifugal fault lines. A Supreme Court victory for Sheriff is the fastest way of sending that party to perdition and political seppuku even though victory either way is one of a tweedledum and tweedledee. The APC needs to quickly and urgently transmute from its incohate state of distinct legacy parties into a seamless synchronised homogeneous whole if it must fly safely above the 2019 political Bermuda triangle.