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By Daniel Kanu
Dr Emmanuel Agbo is the former national deputy secretary and member, National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
The grassroots mobiliser and politician of note was known to be an outstanding and dazzling legislator in the Benue State House of Assembly.
In this exclusive chat with Sunday Sun, he warned on the danger ahead if the February 25 presidential election is toyed with. He said that Prof Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC has lost credibility to conduct any other election, insisting that Nigeria is nose-diving.
He also spoke on other national issues, including the Supreme Court pronouncement on naira re-design, and abuse of power. Excerpt:
The presidential election has been conducted, but not without huge controversies. What is your take on the aftermath so far?
Well, here we are again with nothing leant. We cannot continue to walk in circles this way. We are not insulated from what is happening and I have never pretended in the past under any circumstance to lend my voice to critical national issues and I don’t think I will shy away now. The fact remains that this country belongs to all of us. Some of us have been blessed, we have had the privileges of getting educated when it was almost at zero cost to our parents and what we were served as meals in those days is what are on the tables of kings and princess today. The greatest irony of life is our inability to replicate that for our children. We disastrously took the nation from the peak of glory to the depth of shame. In all of this we pride ourselves as leaders. Leadership is not measured by the illicit accrual of all that belongs to the masses to oneself and that is what we have done that our nation and the entire citizenry to the greatest misery the world never known, when we were described as the poverty capital of the world. Nigeria took over India, Afghanistan and all those bedeviled nation’s of the world, and we thought it was a joke, but today we know better. The privilege is that every elected officials of state, everybody, who come across money in excess of 10, 20 million sends all their people outside this great country. The disaster inherent in that is not to be felt or seen now, but in the next 20 years. The greatest form of brain drain is happening now to our nation under our watch, triggered by our insensitivity and senselessness. Is this what any man wants anybody to pride himself about? Is this what in any way and manner any sensible, right thinking man will close his mouth or turn a blind eye to? What am I going to gain by keeping quiet and watch evil triumph? I have done 60-plus already on earth, so why should I keep mute when I see that things are going bad? What is going to stop me from telling the truth for the purpose of the young ones and the children God has given to me, and every child in this country is my child. If I dare not rise up for them today the disaster will be so unbearable that even your own biological children may not be able to withstand it when it comes. The greatest of all the disaster took place on the 25th of February, the day of the presidential election. It is unfortunate that somebody from by clime, a professor (Prof Mahmood Yakubu) accepted, colluded and presided over that disaster, over that darkness in this country. How we get out of it stories of the next few days have to tell. I told you in our last interview, I think, early 2022, that there is this saying that when you get to the precipice you thread cautiously so that you don’t trip off. But very unfortunately, we have some reckless managers in power that don’t know where we are at the moment, at what point we are at the precipice, whether we are at the tipping point, or whether we have already tipped and are nose-diving. We must be careful and thread vigilantly or we will destroy this country.
Now that the governorship and House of Assembly elections are postponed for a week (March 18), do you have confidence that the outcome will be transparent, free and fair?
Let me start by saying this: no state is an entity of its own. By- laws of any state has universal application in this country and so the truth is that if you have the best of elections in the state, but your national election is a disaster, you have done nothing. The laws, the governance, the pronouncements that have not only internal application across all borders of the state and international application is the ones that are consequent upon our togetherness as a people and as a nation through our National Assembly and through the Executives in terms of the Executive Orders of the president. So, you cannot tell me that you shot the head, literarily pumped bullets into the head and you come down and say, now, you want to literarily make the limb to be strong, does it make sense? Without the head does any limb stand? And unless you are telling me that those characters that are in INEC are no longer the ones in-charge; is INEC not still being presided over by Prof Mahmood Yakubu? So, what are we expecting from the elections? I can make bold to tell you that even the election results of some states are already written. So, talking about faith in whatever that is going to happen on the 18th, what faith do I need to have in that process? Look at the inconsistencies and the havoc, the untold hardship attendant to the Nigeria monetary policy. We are arrogating power to ourselves where it does not exist. The framers of the constitution knew that we have component units or parts of this country. They did not add the word “Mr. President and Governors”. The Supreme Court went to say consultation has not been done enough as a reason. Is the Supreme Court now drafting new laws for us or is this what is in the constitution that they are interpreting? Where is it said that today the constitution asked that the apex court should begin to give date as to when Naira note should take effect? That is clearly the judiciary usurping executive powers. As things stand, I doubt, if the nation is not heading for total and absolute anarchy on the basis of people coming out to now refuse to accept pronouncements of the judiciary.
Let’s get clearer what you are saying. Are you saying that the Supreme Court is right or wrong in its pronouncement?
As far as the Supreme Court interpretation was opposed to the appropriate agencies to do the needful not to take the responsibilities of that agency in declaring from when to when what is legal and illegal tender in this country. That is overstepping their bounds.
But it is said that when Supreme Court makes a pronouncement, it becomes automatically binding?
I don’t think that it is in all cases that the court of the land has jurisdiction. We must know our bounds. I am not saying that in itself the pronouncement is wrong, but I say don’t overstep your bounds in the execution of your constitutional mandate. We are in a democracy, and you must not usurp another institution’s responsibility. The Supreme Court overstepped its bounds. This is by and large a policy that sufficient preparations were not made for it, abinitio CBN would have projected the maximum currency that is supposed to be replaced. The preparation of the Central Bank and its own timing and inability to produce enough is all part of the faulted processes that in anyway does not allow for a unit or another organ of government that is not invested with that responsibility to go and usurp those powers. That is all I am saying.
Looking at the pronouncement made on the presidential election so far, your party (PDP) was placed second after the APC, but the Labour Party (LP) is insisting they came first. How do we resolve some of these controversies and discrepancies?
Power for anybody who is in authority is supposed to be on the basis of the legitimacy he draws from the mandate given by the people. Asiwaju Tinubu (President-elect) does not have the mandate of Nigerians. And because he does not have the mandate of Nigerians, he does not have the legitimacy to preside over Nigeria and for as long as he presides or sits as president in this country; it is absolute and total illegality arising from an illegitimate process. The consequences are going to be there. Whoever is claiming to be the winner, if my word is anything to take home, be the person Atiku Abubakar or Peter Obi, with the court asking that their primary source of valid information to prove their case being altered by the acceptance of the court granting INEC to go re-configure the BVAS, they have nothing to present to the courts to prove their case. For the courts the law is clear and for you to now say go and bring certified true copies, who is certifying those true copies? Is it not INEC? INEC is supposed to be the one to certify true copies and give to you that this was the result, and so they are going to certify copies that only tally with whatever they have done, unfortunately the results that they have posted since this thing started, the contradictions that are there are so enormous that they themselves are looking for how to take them down. And they have justified taking it down using the courts. Where are the evidences that these parties are going to copy or take, to seek redress from the courts? In recent time, the pronouncement of the courts leaves nothing to be desired. And I see Nigerians wanting to take their country, if they cannot take it through peaceful process, they can take it through any other means because if you make peaceful agitation of the public impossible, if you refrain them from it, then they will be left with no other way, but to do the needful, which most likely is violent means to take what belongs to them. And so, as far as this country today is concerned, all nationals are pushed to the wall. Young idiots who are just feeding fat from these people (those in power) and then shouting and making noise, hopeless hooligans that if you sound them out you see that they are empty, total emptiness, forget the names or positions they are enjoying.
With all the electoral contradictions and unhealthy developments so far, what do you see as the solution?
For me, without mincing words, Prof Mahmood and his cohorts have called for absolute and total anarchy in this country. It looks like we have not learnt any single lesson from the EndSARS protest. We are moving this country in the direction of total breakdown of law and order, if there is no reversal of the electoral theft that was done to the people of this country whatever they get out of it they should take the blame. I, with my background, I am knowledgeable enough to know that every action begets an equal and opposite reaction and so whatever reaction they get out of the consequences of their action they will have to live with it. And they should blame themselves for it.
