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From Obinna Odogwu, Awka
A senatorial aspirant for Anambra North Senatorial District in the 2027 general election, Chief Primus Odili, has advised the leadership and members of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) not to allow ‘mercenaries’ to destroy their party.
Odili, former Chief of Staff to ex-Governor Willie Obiano, also advised Ndi Anambra to reject candidates who have no plan of working with the state government to implement Anambra Vision 2070.
How are you preparing for your party’s primary election that is a little over two weeks from now?
Nothing has really changed. I am still very optimistic that I will clinch the APGA ticket. Of all the people that are vying for the senatorial seat in Anambra North, I will consider myself as the most grounded within the party. What we are talking about now is the internal party matter; APGA primaries, not the general election. So within the party, they will look at someone who is most suited for the race. They will look at someone who is a party person. They will look at someone who is loyal to the party; someone who is consistent. They will look at someone who has integrity. So, when you look at those things, by that yardstick, you can say candidate A, how long have they been within the party. Some were barely six weeks with the party and they are the people that we know will come and go. Candidate B barely three or four years within the party, how did he emerge? How did he get into the party? He is not a member of our party. An olive branch was just extended to him. The governor, probably out of pity, gave him a job and he became an APGA member just like that. He never any day walked into his ward to say I have decided today to be an APGA member. It is not out of conviction. He became an APGA member by accident; by virtue of the fact that he was offered a job. Go to the zone and ask them, they don’t even know him. Candidate C, up until last week, is still a member of the PDP. In October, he attended the PDP convention. And most of those candidates attended PDP or APC conventions and they are known. So, when you see these kind characters come in, some will even tell our local government party chairmen that ‘we are coming in because we saw that there is no one with capacity in your party. So we come as mercenaries to help you and when we are done… the message is that we are going back to where we came from.’ When a mercenary finishes their game, what is the next thing for them to do? It is to go back to where they came from. The way we size up capacity is, if you know you have capacity, you stay wherever you are and show capacity.
For instance, Senator Ifeanyi Ubah did not become a senator from APGA extraction. As a matter of fact, he went to the Senate from the least recognised party in Anambra State. That is what I call showing capacity. At the time he went to the Senate, he was virtually fighting with all the credible rich men in Nnewi, his home town. He had one problem or the other with each and every one of them. But he was still able to win election from a party that is not known within Nnewi and his senatorial zone. That is what we call capacity. For someone to tell you that they have capacity and then they need to take over your own structure, your own system, your own people to show you capacity doesn’t really make sense at all.
As a former chief of staff to the former governor, in what way do you think your former position will earn you support from APGA members?
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The position is a position of public office which most of those candidates also have held. Some have been senators in the past; two-time senator, one time minister, the other person minister, special adviser. Each and every one of those candidates enjoyed the same portfolio having served in public offices. But as someone who served as Chief of Staff to a former governor in the recent past, I have a good relationship with the people across the entire state, not just my own senatorial zone. They measure you by your antecedents, by what you are able to do, by the way you relate to the party, by the way you carry your party along, by the way you mobilise people, and by the way you assist them when there is a need. It is not a one-off situation where they will see you, come in, look for something to benefit and if it doesn’t happen they will run away, go to another party and wait for another four years. If you remember, I ran for senate, I didn’t get the ticket; I remained in APGA. I continued to fund the party in Anambra North Senatorial Zone. I continued to put in my best to push. I mobilised for the governor during the election and made sure that those people who now joined us in APGA today to claim capacity were defeated. Where were there capacities during the last governorship election? The person that was telling you today that they have capacity, especially one of us from Ogbaru, has forgotten that she was defeated by a candidate who came from the least recognised party; and who has nothing; not a senator, not a member of the House of Reps but defeated her as a sitting senator. So, where was her capacity at that time? And now that you’ve been out of office for several years, you are claiming that you have all this capacity.
Why do you consider yourself the best person to represent Anambra North in the National Assembly?
It is because representation has a lot to do working in synergy with the sitting governor. We are disenfranchised because a lot of our people at the federal level do not work together with the governor. The governor is APGA, this senator is APC, that senator is PDP, the other senator is of another party. Different places, different people. But if you have people from the same party, they will think alike. They will key into the governor’s plans for the state because as we have here now, APGA is Anambra and Anambra is APGA. Anambra already has the vision 2070. They have a blueprint where each person can go in, look at what the people want and know how to begin to implement them. But these people from other parties have their national chairmen from Maiduguri, Kano or somewhere else. And what happens? When they finish the elections and they win, they go back to where their national chairmen belong and they begin to dictate for them. What we are talking about is rallying round a working governor; building on the solution that is already in Anambra State.
What will you do if those who did not meet the requirements of the Electoral Act pass your party’s screening exercise?
The party’s decision is supreme. I said that he who comes to equity must come with clean hands. In what we are doing today, all of us know what is right and what is wrong. We know who is supposed to contest in this race and those who are not supposed to contest. We know those that we are pushing up, that we are padding just to make them eligible. Anybody that is not eligible is not eligible. You ask yourself this question, if I am the one that was convicted but had a plea bargain; that has not been in the party; that needs a waiver; I mean all these litany of things, shall we still be talking about the same thin?. I am not saying that the party will do something rightly or wrong but I am answering your question. I am not going to do anything. Party’s decision is supreme. We are going to respect it and abide by it. But then, we will still go back to the drawing board to address things that we feel did not go right. It is the party, and their decision is supreme.
What is that unique thing that you think is lacking in Anambra North or you are bringing to that senatorial zone?
A lot of people believe that constituency project money is pocket money. It is my fund. It is not. What I believe that we should do is create a system where we should have a committee for constituency project, anchor it around the governor’s vision, anchor it around the vision of Anambra people, and when this happens and you get committee members from every local government in the areas that you are representing, they become responsible for what their constituency project should be. They become responsible for the funds that are mapped out for the constituency projects. They become responsible for everything that you are putting in place for them. It is no longer your personal decision. You don’t handle it as if it is your pocket money. You don’t handle it as if you are doing them a favour. Some people will go out there, get the constituency project funds, come back and use it to buy thousands of bags of rice and share to people. There is a difference between dealing with constituency projects and poverty alleviation. Giving somebody 10 bags of rice is not a constituency project. Sharing a tuber of yam or a carton of noodles is not a constituency project. Today we have a misconstrued ideology on what empowerment is. Someone will come into the field with 1,000 cartons of noodles and share one box each and say that it is empowerment. Come on, when do we wake up from this? This is what I am bringing that is different. And if you are able to galvanise all the people in the National Assembly and the state House of Assembly and galvanise them into a formidable force, sit down with the governor, know what his vision is, know what he wants for that constituency, know what the developmental strides are and you focus on that; use those funds that are meant for that constituency to begin to execute and deal with those issues. And in a very short period of time you see us gaining political mileage, gaining infrastructural millage. And when this begins to happen, the people at the federal level in liaison with the governor can now go in there, meander and know how to attract things for their constituency because they are working coherently with the governor. That’s what I am bringing that is different.
