Ntufam Hillary Eta is the national vice-chairman, South-south of the All Progressives Congress, (APC). In this interview with Senior Deputy Editor, TAIWO AMODU, he explains the motive behind the planned mid-term convention of the party, the unsavoury state of the economy under the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, among other issues. Excerpts:
Your party is planning its non-elective national convention shortly. This is coming rather late as against the constitutionalprovision which stipulates that such convention should be held every two years?
I think really the office to answer this question is the office of the National Publicity Secretary of the party, and the office of the National Chairman. But I am a member of the National Working Committee of the party, I am a member of the National Executive Committee of the party. So, I should at least have a snippet, I should have an overview. Conventions cost a lot of money, that’s number one. Number two, we discovered a lot of inconsistencies and lacunas in our constitution and it has been an ongoing exercise. We have done an in-house job of trying to clean the document and a Constitution Review Committee was inaugurated to give flesh to the skeletal work that we have been doing. So, if you put these together, these may be the major reason why we have not had our non-elective convention as at when due. But we are only pleading for understanding; this is a new party. So, on behalf of the party, that I am a member of the National Working Committee, I can only plead for understanding. This was not intended.
In the last few months, there have been influx of erstwhile Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftains into your party. There is apprehension among founding members of your party that these newcomers may be the ones your party will use to contest the next general elections in their states. How do you react to this?
You know that the political party is a human organisation and the principal enabling quality of politics is largely self interest. I don’t want to comment much on the reason or the logic behind defections. Every defector has a reason for doing so. And nobody has interrogated those reasons to come to an aggregate to say this is why Nigerian politicians move from one political party to the other. The APC is premised on choice, and this is perhaps the most fundamental essence of democracy. There is no design on whether those who are just coming into the party should take preeminence over those who have been in the party before now, because the moment we tamper with their rights of choice, of their right to choose, we will now have a different thing other than democracy.
The party, under the watch of Chief John Oyegun is very mindful of the place of that ingredient; the ingredient of choice. That is why we have strived with all the resources available to us, with all the energy and time that we can muster, we have strived to inculcate internal democracy in our party. Now, if nobody else gives it to Oyegun, I personally will give it to him. He has done very well in this aspect, and history will remember him for giving this to Nigeria.
We all are aware of why the other party imploded. We are all aware why people are leaving the other party. One of the reasons why people are defecting from the other party to our party is lack of internal democracy; and they say it openly. So, if you juxtapose the desire of those of us who have been in the trenches, and those who have just come, and you put it side by side and you juxtapose it with the ingredient of choice, choice must take pre-eminence for us to have democracy. So, the ball is always in court of the electorate, whether it is intra-party contest, or it is an inter-party contest; the choice is always, and must be in the court of the electorate.
So, if, let me use a big fish like Senator Ken Nnamani (who has just joined the party) decides to contest an election, if the people in his community will see him as best placed to defend and appropriate their interest in wherever they think he should go and you now say because the other person has spent more time in the party than Ken Nnamani, you will be doing injustice to the people because they know who will serve them best. The moment you remove the people, and their aspiration from the equation, then you have something other than democracy. Now, we have two situations at hand: those who were with us before we won the epochal presidential election, and those who joined us after we had won. These are the two major tendencies in the party. As nation builders, we have a nation to build.
One of the responsibilities of the Constitution Review Committee is to look at membership requirement. Could this be a way of allaying the fears of old members?
No, membership requirement is beyond the contest between those that have been around before the national election and those who came after. It is in the core of the political party that you must define membership. It is in the hand of the ordinary members of the party who will be at the convention to agree or not to agree with whatever the constitution review committee will bring up. There are people who are protectionists, people who will say those who have been in the party ought to be protected, with the provision that you spend a number of months or thereabouts and you don’t want to put yourself forward for a contest.
Those of us who believe that we have an onerous responsibility to build this nation believe that the best principle must be held onto and get the best materials to run this country. Whichever tendency prevails is also to the goodness of choice, because I am a complete believer of choice. The right to choose. The right of choice. Whatever the people of the party agree is what we will succumb to.
It is almost two years since your party came to power, the country is now in recession and things keep going down. The main opposition party and many Nigerians are saying your party lacks the capacity to pull the country out of its present economic doldrums? How do you react to this?
One of my greatest grieves is the absence of interrogation even by the sound Nigerians. I say this because if we were to interrogate discerning Nigerian youth via-a-vis our recent past and where we are today as a country and compare with other countries who are in the same situation as we have found ourselves; the question would have been not what can you do? What we would have been asking ourselves today would have been what would have been, had the bazaar continued? Today in Venezuela, you cannot buy a single thing from their shops and you know how many million barrels of oil they export. So, what we would have been asking ourselves is that what would have been thesituation in Nigeria had Buhari not taken over? Nobody has done that interrogation simply because we hate history.
That is the reason the elite would sit down and conspire against the Nigerian people, go to our secondary schools, and divest from educational process the reading and the knowledge of History, because it is when you have the knowledge of History that you can interrogate your today, and make your tomorrow devoid of the mistakes you may have made in the past. That is a frontal attack by the parasitic, imbecilic elite that have superintended over the affairs of Nigeria for the past two decades.
Now, ask yourself this question -how come every time you delve into the history of Nigeria, people begin to question you, that one is past, let us focus on today. How is that possible? That is it.
One of the reasons why we are in this economic quagmire that we find ourselves is that we never prepare. We were never prepared for the rainy day. Obasanjo left over $45 billion in our foreign reserves after paying our debts, and $22 billion in the Excess Crude Account, when he left office in 2007. Between when Obasanjo left office in 2007, and 2015, Nigeria earned more money than under Obasanjo. And you now add that to what Obasanjo left behind. The question you should ask yourself is when we took over, what did they leave behind? What they put on ground, was it commensurate with the humongous amount of money that Nigeria earned?
Of course, the result will be in the negative. Consequently, it therefore means that Nigeria was not prepared for the rainy day.
Unfortunately too, Nigeria is not in control of the price of oil. So, you now have a situation where in a household, you were earning N150,000, and you could barely meet the need of your household. And recession now sets in, which is not under your control. That income reduces, from N150,000 to about N50,000. There will be dislocation in the home. It is as simple as that.
But there is also this argument that President Buhari didn’t really prepare himself for leadership. The argument is that he should have been abreast of the enormity of the challenges of the nation before offering himself to fix them. What is your take?
Those who brandish such inanity are involved in very unpatriotic conspiracy theory. I won’t sit down here to tell you that mistakes have not been made, but I will proceed to say that it is because Buhari is who Buhari is, that is why we have a similitude of stability. This country would have been a failed country had we continued in the bazaar that we found ourselves. I am not saying that everything that he has done is correct and right. I am not one of those who say it is the market forces that will regulate the economy. I am one of those who believe we should sit down and have a paradigm to advance the course of our country, not as part of the global world but as Nigeria.
We have situations and problems that are peculiar to Nigeria and we must device solutions that are peculiar to us to tackle those challenges. I am not also saying corruption is not going on in this country, Iwill be foolish to say that. But I am also saying that President Buhari isn’t encouraging corrupt practices, he’s not the centre of corruption, unlike the past president. And that is the instrument that has enabled Nigeria to at least stabilise.
But is there an economic team in place?
The economic team, for me is not on top of its job. I will be the first to admit that. Let me give you an example. I was a young man in this country and I saw with my eyes manufacturing concerns like battery manufacturing plants, I saw tyre manufacturing plants, I saw privately-owned steel rolling mills, I saw plastic manufacturing plants all over the place. But what is happening today?
If the economic team cannot generate way to protect those interests of Nigerians, then we have not started. There is no country that has developed without some protectionist policies. Today, no matter what you say about Trump, he is for America, and the Nigerian government should be for Nigeria. So, we must have economic policies that are targeted at revitalising and rebuilding our manufacturing industry. We cannot have a situation where all manner of things are imported into this country from China. We have become a dumping site for anybody who has inferior goods to sell.
and then