Oji Nyiminote Ngofa was Nigeria’s Ambassador to the Netherlands; a former Deputy National Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), a former Eleme Local Government chairman and is the candidate for Rivers South East Senatorial District in 2023. In this interview by SAM NWAOKO, Ngofa speaks on a number of issues concerning the APC and related issues.
You are, again, going into election for the Rivers South East senatorial seat flying the flag of APC. How prepared are you and your party for the election?
I don’t know if I’m the proper person to answer this question because I may appear immodest. Before joining politics, I was in the private sector; I worked in my own community before I was transferred for a spell to Kaduna and Lagos. Then I came back and joined politics. So, I’m a village man in every ramification. Let’s keep the exposure – national and global – aside. I have the intention of writing my autobiography and I will title it “The grassroots ambassador” because what propelled me is community niche. As they say, the rest is history. So, we know ourselves. We are prepared. APC is prepared and that is why they are scared. Imagine with all the razzmatazz and showboating of Nyeson Wike’s and his puffy-chest, why will he come to the level of taking APC that does not exist (in their own estimation) to court if they are not scared? Why will he bother? Now what they are doing is that they buy people to defect. They give money to people to switch loyalty and defect to their party. Isn’t that shameful? You leave your people struggling with you all these years and you come to APC to pay their members heavily to get them to defect. What does that tell you? Is that not enough sign of what is coming?
So, we know ourselves. We know who we are dealing with. We know that we are dealing with a coward who is not properly schooled in the art of governance. We are happy that the national level of his party is beginning to see who he really is by the crisis he has created. All he does is throw money around and there is a limit to what money alone can do. That is the disaster we face in that individual.
At home in Nigeria, your party APC has taken steps and steps have been taken against it. One instance is the court judgement against Governor Gboyega Oyetola of Osun State. You are all in this together one way or the other. As a former Deputy National Secretary of the APC, how do you view all of these?
We have to distinguish some things. What I understand has affected the Osun State governor is the fact that his primaries was conducted by Alhaji Buni which the court did not recognise as the substantive chairman of the party. It is different from our own primaries that were conducted by a legitimate, duly elected national executive council. So, I think they are all purely within the legalese of the party at that level and they would be sorted out at that level.
In 2019, you won the election to represent Rivers South East in the Senate but some squabbles in your party denied you and indeed Nigeria that mandate and opportunity. What steps has the Rivers APC taken to prevent a recurrence of this in 2023?
Some people, when they try something and it works, they’d think that that is the way to go again. There’s something called ‘paradox of power’ and I think that’s the problem the Nyesom Wike administration in Rivers State is facing. They think that the way they acquired power, regardless of how crude or illegal or violent, is the way you manage power. It is not the same. You don’t necessarily manage power the way you acquire it. So, I do not think that those things that happened then will happen again. Recall that then, a member of our party who felt shortchanged in the process went to court and collaborated with the sitting government to deny the party enlistment on the ballot. Now, it is totally different. All of those issues have been taken care of.
However, another political party, PDP, has taken APC to court. Now, it is not somebody from within anymore but an interloper who is not a member of our party and has no business with our party, who, to us, has no locus standi, has gone to court to challenge the way we conducted our congresses, not primaries. They are challenging the congresses conducted by the APC, claiming that INEC did not witness our congresses in some of the places. They are challenging our primaries claiming that the congresses that elected our executive was faulty and so, we should be disqualified from elections. So, when we are disqualified, the “almighty PDP, the only party that exists in Rivers State” wants to be the only one running elections in the state.
As funny as that is, it speaks to a lot of issues around Rivers State that people out there don’t know. For instance, it is a pointer to the fact that a lot of things in Rivers State by the Governor Wike administration is stage-managed. Nothing is real. What Wike wants is when that happens – just as it happened the last time when we were not on the ballot – they will declare that APC does not exist in Rivers State, that APC is dead. So, for a party that has gone through all of the difficulties and challenges that we’ve been through since 2015 – it was an armada of a sitting government executing and enforcing federal might on the people. The killings and of 2015 is well-documented. It was a clear case of state-sponsored violence. Even on the day the then presidential candidate of the APC, Muhammadu Buhari, was visiting, people were killed for political reasons. Nobody cared. So, that is their source of strength, which makes them declare that Rivers State is a PDP state. Then, fast forward to 2019. Somebody from within the party who feels an overarching sense of entitlement collaborated with the sitting government and they did all that they did to remove us from the ballot. And the small mind there thinks that can work again? So, their own party has taken us to court in the grounds I have just articulated. We want to see how that will happen. He can bring his father as the judge, we don’t care. For the information of Nigerians, we have asked the judge in the matter to recuse himself but he has blatantly refused. We have reasons to make that demand. We have a letter from the Administrative Judge of the Federal High Court asking us to present our demands orally in the courts. Every attempt to do that, he has rebuffed it. Even records of proceedings that we requested for did not reflect all of these. So we have gone to appeal. In spite of subsisting notice of appeal, he is still bent on going ahead with the case. Why? We think it is unbelievably audacious. That is how PDP is ‘the party in Rivers and no other party’. Rivers PDP is scared stiff because of what the people on the streets are saying.
With all that you have explained, is it that PDP is scared or the APC is cowed?
It is easy for journalists to get to the root of these issues if handled dispassionately. The truth of the matter is that Wike’s government is a colossal failure in Rivers State. It is a colossal failure in every ramification. It is not about the optics that people see. You’ve seen bridges. They just elevate the road and it has not solved any traffic. Take for instance, Rumola, GRA Junction, Tombia Extension, and Mummy B – look at how wasteful Wike’s government is: You’re commissioning bridge, Rumola Day 1; GRA Junction Day 2. All these places are not more than 200 – 300 meters apart and you inaugurate them on live television. Mind you, these projects are mostly asphalt overlay, they are not new roads and you spend all the days of the week commissioning things that are not up to 1km apart. What sort of wastefulness is that in a state that has not made any investment in education? Why has he not commissioned anything in education? Nothing has been done in agriculture. Nothing in health, the only health facility he has commissioned is the one Rotimi Amaechi built. The schools he has made satellite campuses are the schools Amaechi built as secondary schools. What sort of waste is that? If the people outside Rivers State can be bamboozled through live television, the people of Rivers State are not. That is why they are scared. Who cannot award contracts for building bridges? Anybody can do that. That’s not governance. Here, we are so partisan that it is even difficult to define what good governance is, its definition depends on where you are feeding from. But there are basic principles globally enunciated as tenets of good governance: it must have transparency, it must be accountable, it must be participatory, it must encourage rule of law and building of bureaucracy. As intangible as some of them sound, these are the factors that you can assess a government on and all of these are absent, every one of them.
So, you think you party APC can upstage PDP in Rivers?
Of course. That is where we are heading to. Why not? Why are they scared? If they think they have the overwhelming support of Rivers people and they can win elections, why go to court? We are not the ones in court, they took us to court over our own party’s congress. How did our own congress affect PDP? It is funny the situation we are in Rivers State. I’m a vociferous critic of Wike’s government because I know him; he was the chief of staff when I was a council chairman and I know he does not possess the requisite quality to govern a state like this and I am not surprised at all. This government is an affliction on Rivers people. The people of Rivers State know that that has been my position and this has never changed.
When you served as Nigeria’s Envoy to The Hague, you became the first Nigerian envoy to that country to President Muhammadu Buhari in 2018. What were some of the issues that the privilege afforded you the opportunity to bring to the president’s notice as it concerns the people of the country?
I was privileged to serve in The Hague when a Nigerian, Professor Chile Eboe-Osuji, was the President of International Criminal Court. At the time, there had been a lot of disenchantment with African groups and members of ICC over the overwhelming focus on only African issues in ICC. Most of the convictions, and most of those who had been dragged to the ICC are African leaders or the so-called collaborators with African leaders who are accused of committing various crimes against humanity as encapsulated in the Rome Statute of the ICC. We met and tabled the need for us to disperse that mindset that ICC is not skewed against African leaders. 2018 was the 20th anniversary of the Rome Charter and that was at the background of that event and we agreed that it was best we had our own president start that event and touch on the relevance of the ICC to African countries. That discussion gave impetus to the visit of President Buhari.
On the margins of that visit, we planned some other events to strengthen our economic ties with the Netherlands considering the fact that Netherlands is important to Nigeria’s economic having opened bilateral relations with Netherlands since 1969, a few year after our Independence. Of course the country is instrumental to our trade and economy because of the role it plays in hydrocarbon exploration in Nigeria. We thought that it would be time to use that visit to further enhance the status of our relationship. That’s what I did including organising a round table of all the CEOs including those already operating in Nigeria and those intending to invest in Nigeria and it brought a whole lot of investment. There was a follow up visit by the president of Netherlands, Mark Rutte, his first time in Nigeria and this further cemented the relationship. During his visit we signed a MoU deepening our bilateral relationship where we set up a mechanism to actually determine areas where we need help, especially in leveraging on their own development as the second highest producer of food in the works after USA.
So, with the president’s focus on agriculture, we thought we can leverage on their knowhow in that area. That paid off because we wrote to practically all the governors through the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) and some governors accepted and, like Niger State, Kaduna, Lagos had investment and through that, a seed was sown through the little contributions we made while in the Netherlands. It is also worthy of note that Netherlands is one of the few missions that covers both bilateral and multilateral responsibilities. Apart from the ICC, Nigeria is a signatory to a lot of the international organisations that are domiciled in Netherlands. Outside ICC, we also have ICJ there, the judicial arm of the United Nations; we also have Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) and the one we are very active in, OPCW – Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons- where I served as the African Coordinator and also served as the chairman of its Open-Ended Working Group on Terrorism.
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