Involvement in capital constituency projects has corrupted NASS – Peter Ameh, CUPP scribe

From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja

National secretary of the Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP), Chief Peter Ameh, has said that lawmakers’ involvement in execution of capital constituency projects has exposed them to corrupt tendencies.

Speaking to Daily Sun in Abuja recently, Ameh, a former president of Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC), also x-rayed the possible power game in the forthcoming 2027 general election.

Excerpts:

The question on the lips of many peoples is, why are you so angry and bitter with this government?

I am so furious against the Tinubu-led APC administration because the government is acting with so much impunity. Sincerely, it is not about me neither is it personal, but you can see the level of impunity the government is exhibiting.

There is a total disconnect between the president and the people. He feels like, whatever people say, he doesn’t care and doesn’t matter to him. That is why he feels that if he wants to travel to France or other part of the world, he will just do it. It does not also matter if he parks a private jet in France, and how much expenditure it incurs. His own is just let it be there. There is no way you can park your private jet in any part of Europe that you don’t pay charges at least $50,000 a night.

My grouse against the president is his character and attitude towards governance. There is this arrogance of I have taken up power, I am in charge, everybody should just allow me do my thing.

Yet governance is not meant for those in power, but the people and for all of us. If we refuse to checkmate them, then we will find out too late when they run the country aground.  We can see lots of things not transparent in budget process, just as Appropriation Act no longer matters.

Fiscal responsibility, which specifies how contracts are awarded, and how public funds are spent, no longer matters too. Physical responsibility and fiscal discipline are critical to sustaining the country’s financial management system. But, all these things don’t matter to him. Look at the contract for the Lagos-Calabar coastal High Way, there was no competitive public bidding at all.

He selected the contractors, mostly his friends by himself, which is against Public Procurement Act. And for a contract worth about N15 trillion, the National Assembly will not see the Appropriation and Nigerians won’t understand how it is being paid. They tell us that it is a PPP arrangement, but government is committing funds into the project.

Constitutionally, Nigerians should know how the government is spending its part of the project financing. The same thing came up when he told Nigerians about his classmate from Chicago University, Alex. He gave him a contract to supply tractors, yet we have not seen them.

These are the things that we need to continue to speak about because a government that runs without transparency and accountability is bound to have a high level of corruption.

Is there anything this government is doing now that the Buhari-led government did not do?

I did not stop talking, whether under former President Buhari or now. This government has continued the same attitude of Buhari. The only difference is that it is getting worse. They are exhibiting the same arrogance and pomposity. So, we will continue to speak up because we act as the conscience of those in power and those outside the power that are in the clear majority.

What do you think about the claims by APC chieftains and members telling Nigerians that the country is better now than before?

Deep down, they know that it is not true. It is this table manners that people develop. I have friends in this government who evaluate things with them, and they will confide that what they say is not true. We are in a society where the uninformed continue to swallow data even at the cost of their own survival, while the informed ones do not really care about governance.

This is the challenge. That is why Nigerians have this attitude of inability to sustain pressure or pay attention to one particular subject for a long time. We just talk about government spending anyhow and move to the next topic. But, in a civilised democracy, accountability must be rendered for every issue raised.

In which area(s) can you give President Tinubu a pass mark so far?

I don’t know what to say. If only I had been able to look at the unbiased data provided, as an economist, especially the ones from NBS, maybe I would have been able to give a pass mark. But the NBS is releasing reliable data. This is the issue. There is nothing I can say for me. I wish the president would do the right thing.

Two years into his administration, he is still grappling with the fact that more people have been thrown into poverty than when he came into power. So, until they can bring down the increase in the dollars back to where it was, or below that, and bring down the cost of petroleum, particularly PMS, to where it was, then we will be able to give him credit.

But for now, he will not earn my praise because of those decisions that he took without having proper mitigating policies and framework in place or taking time to look at policy and how the policy affects the society and the downtrodden. There is a general disconnect between his policy and the people.

How will this disconnect affect APC in the 2027 presidential election?

The only way the election can go in Tinubu’s favour is if he rigs it. People are certainly not going to vote for the person who brought so much hunger to them. People are really suffering, unless they don’t want to accept the reality. I visit my community, and I know what my people are going through.

I am a much-respected person in my community. I see the level of poverty reflected on the faces of our people, especially as they cannot go to the farms again because of kidnapping. You hear government officials claiming that security has improved, yet people can’t go to their farms to feed themselves, let alone do commercial farming.

What do you think about the claims that Obi and Atiku are no match for Tinubu?

Obi has proven his mettle, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he can defeat Tinubu, even as nobody had defeated him in Lagos since 1999 until 2023. The PDP was the ruling power for 16 years. But Obi came from nowhere to do so. He had no senator, no House of Representatives member, no governor, and that popular word, ‘no structure.’

But even without structure, the people believed in his message, which resonated with the masses, with millions of people, to a point that if the governorship election had been conducted the same day as the presidential election in Lagos, Obi would have won the governorship of Lagos for his party, Labour Party.

Obi defeated Tinubu in Lagos and defeated him in the FCT, the seat of power. Yes, Tinubu wasn’t in power, but his party, APC, was.

Do you believe that the inability of Obi and Atiku to harmonise their stand will affect the 2027 presidential election?

No, it is not true. I know people who will vote for Obi but will never vote for Atiku based on principle. Obi is a very credible candidate; his integrity and reputation are the reasons people are drawn to him. He has proven that he has conquered greed; he has proven that he is content with his personal resources and his life.

The major problem with our politicians is a lack of contentment, and for that they steal and plunder the resources of the country without any conscience or regard for what happens to the people.

What is your assessment of the National Assembly so far?

Senator Akpabio and Hon. Abbas have destroyed the reputation of what is left of the National Assembly. There is nothing left again. It has been reduced to a chamber for singing ‘On your mandate, we shall stand.’ That is why nothing is left there. And it is only under their tenure that Tinubu is spending public funds without seeking approval. This is a National Assembly that sees itself as an extension of the executive, and cares less about the tenet of separation of powers. Nobody is telling them to fight or insult the President, but to challenge the anti-people policies of the President. They should challenge policies that refused to follow the established rules and regulations of our Constitution.

They should be the moral compass to bring back the President anytime he deviates from the right line. But if the National Assembly now sees itself as an extension of the Presidency by passing every budget just because they need to pad it around their own budget, then there is a problem.

We must return to the place where our National Assembly will be taken away from all these executive functions, like constituency projects, because it is not part of its core responsibility.

We must have a National Assembly that concentrates primarily on constitutional provisions and mandates given to it to make laws for good governance, development of our country and probably oversee the functions of the executive.Going into those capital-intensive projects has also corrupted the National Assembly to the point of thinking about funds and profit. That’s not what it was meant to be.

What can you tell Nigerians nursing fears that APC and presidency may muscle and destabilise opposition to win the 2027 presidential election?

The President of Malawi just lost an election. Nigeria is a very complex nation. What I have discovered is that Tinubu does not know Nigeria. Apart from getting this opportunity to bulldoze his way into power, he does not really know Nigerians.

Mallam Nasir El-rufai has claimed that Tinubu doesn’t know the complexity of Nigeria. And he doesn’t because he is not someone who has really travelled widely across the country. He is really a Lagos-Abuja-based politician.

Nigerian election is so complex that when results come from Kano or Sokoto, Tinubu doesn’t even know. Where would the President get the manpower and network to win himself back to power? It is easier to remove him now that he is so unpopular in the North.

All we need to do is to have a candidate coming with established votes on the ballot paper, not the one whose vote will come out of sentiment of my region or ethnicity. The candidate will be a person whose vote will come based on competence, merit and ability to work for the good of the people and a candidate that the party will invest in their established vote.

We all know that this description belongs to Peter Obi. If we do not do that, and make the mistake of fronting somebody that will create a southern solidarity by ignoring the South that still has four years, there will be division between the North and South, and there will certainly be solidarity. When you talk of the North, you have to also look at Middle-Belt and North-Central from a very different perspective.

Their interest is no longer the collective interest as it used to be. They also have hope and aspiration for their region to be able to get to power one day. The challenge for the next election must be between Obi and Tinubu, and I am very confident about Peter Obi.

Going into 2027, we should know that there is the possibility of 2023 scenerio happening in double fold because we now have an informed youthful voting population. Most of our population is now youth-driven and more enlightened. They are more educated, more tech-savvy, but 60 per cent of them have no jobs.

Government is not expanding opportunities for them. They are only using rhetoric and misinformation as an administrative tool. The youths are not seeing the reality, because if the government claims to have created jobs, the people will see it. If the government says it has given households billions of Naira, the people ought to see it, especially the beneficiaries.

If government continue to bring out false information, then the challenge is for people to act, in the best interest of their own country, to put somebody on board where statement match with tangible results, where people’s ability to stand and say we have gotten jobs because the only thing we have today is government employing people which ought not be in a robust economy.

Why is the leadership crisis in all the opposition parties persisting, especially your own party, LP?

Former INEC chairman, Prof. Yakubu should take all the blame because he is the one who has messed it up. After all, INEC cannot claim to be handicapped. It is not possible. It is responsible for regulating registered political parties. If a political party, LP, for instance, gets a Supreme Court judgment and INEC said that Abure is no longer the chairman, why didn’t it give directives or advice on what to do for the party to get leadership?

But INEC is happier working for the higher authorities so that the parties can remain without leadership. The only intent and purpose of those in the commission is that they are afraid and don’t want Peter Obi to be on the ballot. There is nothing else.

Anywhere Peter Obi goes, they don’t want him to be on the ballot. They are ready to sponsor people in the party primary, and that is why they use the phrase, free and fair primary. What is a free and fair primary? I have been the national chairman of a political party to know what a free and fair primary is, and I can tell you that there is none.

Did it cross your mind that Obi may not have a platform to contest the 2027 presidential election?

No, we, the Nigerians, will definitely give him a platform, whether the government likes it or not. We will put him on the ballot by force because their struggle to ensure he has no platform will not work. We can’t continue to marginalise people based on tribe and religion, instead of credible leadership qualities.

The parameter we use to judge people in this country is the reason we are still in this deep hole. Which country will have somebody like Peter Obi and still settle for less? There is none.