• Atiku, Obi lack finance, sacrificial spirit to challenge Tinubu in 2027

From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja

Former National Organising Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Emma Ibediro, a lawyer, has paid the price, over the years, climbing the political ladder after serving in both capacities as elective and appointive positions.

Speaking to Sunday Sun on several issues bordering the state of the nation, especially the chances of President Bola Tinubu’s re-election, he argued that frontline contestants like Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar will not pose any serious challenge to him.

He equally dismissed the insinuations that President Tinubu is deliberately inflicting pains on Nigerians, just as he dismissed the speculations that his party, the APC, is the unseen hand fuelling crises in the opposition political parties in the country.

How true is the claim by critics of your governor, Hope Uzodimma, that he has not done enough in your state, Imo?

How can anybody talk about not seeing anything on the ground in Imo? Anybody claiming that in Imo may probably be people who must be blind. Our governor, Hope Uzodimma, whether you like his face or not, has done a lot of things in Imo, in terms of infrastructure.

Remember, I was both the local government chairman and a Commissioner in Imo and can tell you how Imo used to be. There was a time you could hardly travel from Owerri to Okigwe in three hours. It is a distance of less than 70 kilometres.

But, today, you move from Owerri to Okigwe in less than 30 minutes. I don’t know when you went to Imo, there is a place they used to call Ekemele, a distance of less than one kilometre, but it takes motorists three hours to cross that place. The problem with that road has been solved today.

Owerri to Mbaise to Umuahia has been dualised. Owerri to Orlu has also been dualised. Orlu to Akokwa to Uruala has equally been dualised courtesy of Governor Hope Uzodimma.

Today, Imo is on the brink of having 24 hours power supply from the Orashi Power Station that the governor is building. So, what indices do you want to use to measure the performance of a performing governor than the excellent achievements he has recorded in infrastructure?

If he is doing well, why are people rating the governor of Abia higher than your governor?

That is what I told you before, any day Governor Otti joins the APC, his rating on social media will drop, because of the same sentiments I am talking about in the South East. Our people have a way of running down their leaders, because probably they don’t like the party they belong to.

But it will not change anything because those people doing those things on social media are not voters. They are not registered voters. I am telling you with experience.

In summary, Governor Hope has done very well, and as you know, he just hosted Imo Economic Summit in Owerri. Naysayers will tag it a jamboree, but what he is doing is showcasing Imo to the world. Imo has the largest gas deposit in West Africa. People don’t know about that.

Governor Hope is not the first governor of Imo State. Those things have been there since. Imo has the largest palm plantation in West Africa, the Ada Palm. Those things have been there, but nobody has told the world about them.

If you don’t say, here I am, nobody will see you. So, what he is doing is telling the world that Imo has the potential for greatness, and he wants them to come and tap into it.

Recently, apart from improving the ease of doing business in the state, he has also digitalized land administration in Imo, just like we have in the FCT Abuja. It is no longer the era of carrying papers up and down now, everything you want to know about land you can now easily search for and get it.

You get your C of O right on time. Today, most of the roads inside Owerri are receiving attention as I speak with you. I don’t know whether you were in Imo when the President commissioned flyovers sometime. If you were not, you should ask people who are willing to talk well and not people who are biased, and who don’t like his face, and therefore nothing will come out of him.

As a chieftain of the APC, how do you defend the impression by Nigerians that the country has been worse off for 10 years under the APC?

I will tell you again that you cannot make an omelette without breaking an egg. If you must take a step towards a particular thing, you have to make some sacrifices. I am sure this is the sacrifice Nigerians are going through today. But it is not going to be a forever thing.

It will change. I am very definite that it will change. I have followed Asiwaju’s politics for quite some time, and I know he is not a man who would deliberately want to punish Nigerians. There must be something he is working on. He wants to get it right once and for all.

Again, you know what they say about corruption. When you fight corruption, corruption will fight back. There are a lot of people in this country who, in the past, were very rich, who want to use their power to fight and make sure that those changes, those reforms, do not work.

You will not take that away from them. Politics is a game of fighting, but I know that the man Tinubu is grounded in the game. He knows how to go about it and how to play it.

How much of impact will APC make in the South East because the zone has not accepted the party?

It is wrong to assume that the South East zone has not integrated into the APC. Today, we have three state governors in the APC. We have Imo, Ebonyi, and Enugu states as APC. In terms of strength and power blocks, we have 75 per cent today. APC is also collaborating with APGA in Anambra State.

How about the impossibility of an average Igbo person accepting the APC?

I don’t know those you referred to as average Igbo persons. But obviously, we can’t continue with this sentiment. We are too sentimental about one thing or the other. Sentiment does not put food on the table. It doesn’t create reality. Yet that is the illusion we have been living with, and the earlier we begin to see politics the way it is, and not sentiments, the better for us.

It will not work. When you talk about an average Igbo, I am also among the average Igbo person who likes the Igbo people as much as I can because I happen to come from there and they are my people. I am first an Igbo man before a Nigerian. But one thing I must emphasize is that sentiments don’t move things in politics.

We have to face political reality as it is. Ahead of the next elections, INEC has just conducted registration of voters, but have we seen the statistics which confirmed that the South East is the least, with 208,000 voters. So, how can the zone with such figures cast more votes than North West, with over 700,000 registered voters?

So what happened to all those young generation, all those people who are sentimentally crying about marginalisation while the voters’ registration exercise was going on? What happened to them? We cannot win an election by dominating and voting on social media.

If you are talking about new voters, and we have less than 15 per cent of them in the entire country, is that not a reflection of the percentage of the old voters too? Where are the Igbos going to get these votes from? I am not saying someone from the South East can’t win, but that person must work with people from other parts of the country.

In fact, what I pray for Nigeria today is for elections to be determined on the capacity of the individual one day, because if you have that kind of situation, somebody from the North West can also vote for somebody from the South East.

What is your take on your party APC turning Nigeria into a one party state?

This is not the first time people have congregated towards a party in power. It is a normal thing in politics, so the APC is not deliberately turning Nigeria into a one-party state.

There was a time in this country when the PDP had almost 29 governors, and then nobody accused the PDP of turning Nigeria into a one-party state. If the same thing is happening now, if people are attracted to APC, probably because of the person of Mr President, I don’t think we can stop anybody from making such a decision.

Moreover, politicians are conscious of their platforms. If you belong to a party, you are not sure how probably your ticket will be determined. I don’t think anybody will want to remain there and then maybe sink with the sinking ship. PDP is having very critical issues and irresolvable problems today. The Labour Party appears to be having the same issue.

APC is the only party that has today remained organized. Probably because APC is in power, there is control and command structure, and they have respect for the person of the President and Commander in Chief. So, everybody is behaving well. And naturally, people flow from areas of confusion to where there is peace. I don’t think there is any deliberate effort to turn Nigeria into a one-party state.

How can Nigerians believe you with the unseen hands of the APC destroying the opposition parties?

Have you seen the APC flag flying in Wadatta Plaza? How will you accuse the APC of ownership of the unseen hands? We assume a lot in this country. Where were the unseen hands you are talking about?

If a party like the PDP decides to wash their dirty linens in public by scattering themselves, how do you blame the APC? I did not see any APC hands in the crisis rocking all the opposition parties in Nigeria. There is no member of the APC who is responsible for the crises rocking all those parties.

Can you confirm the insinuations that part of the plots of the APC is to make the 2027 presidential election a stroll in the park?

I am talking as a member of APC and as a person who has served at the highest committee organ of the party as a former National Organizing Secretary, but I am presently not the spokesman of the APC. There are questions you will ask me that I may not have a ready answer to give.

However, I don’t think anybody will want to deliberately undermine any other political party. Politics is a game of popularity and numbers. APC has governors in a lot of states. People gravitate towards power. So, you cannot blame anybody if you destroy your own house.

Do you mean that there was no subtle coercion?

Why do you want to introduce subtle coercion into it? Coercion should be open and should not be subtle. Nobody has told anybody not to run. So if they support the man because he is a capable hand, why should people begin to suggest that they were pressed down because he has power or whatever? I don’t think so.

Judging by the way APC is going now, do you see any strong challenger contesting against President Tinubu in 2027?

If the president is doing well, why should I anticipate such a strong challenger? If those who will challenge him agree with what he is doing, what is the point? Must we fight before we can produce a president? You ask if it is good for the system, and I want to ask you what is bad about it.

If the people who believe in your capacity decide to support you instead of fighting you, what is bad about it? What is not democratic about it? They willingly say, okay, we want to support you. So, why is it not democratic? When you talk about flaws in democracy, it is when you stop a man who wants to run against you.

From the power intrigue, what are your fears for 2027, particularly the re-election of President Tinubu?

I have not actually thought about it because he has done well. Tinubu has done well as a president. A lot of things went wrong. Yes, people are hungry, but there are so many reasons to believe that Nigerians have been living falsely for a very long time.

We have been living on borrowed time for a very long time. This is the first time reality is dawning on us that Nigeria became broke even before Tinubu assumed office.

And take yourself as an example; if you have been borrowing money from people to give a false impression to your family that things are okay, by the time your lenders begin to ask for the refund of their money, it will become obvious to your family that you have been living a fake life.

You will certainly feel the heat when you start paying back. Nigeria, for a very long time now, has been living on false hope. We couldn’t have continued on fuel subsidy all this while, and now that we have stopped fuel subsidy, the sub-regionals and even the national government are getting more funding.

No matter how you look at it, even the governors of states that are not controlled by the APC are having more funds and doing better, especially in the provision of infrastructure. There are certain things most states are doing now that they were not able to do previously. Before, some of the states found it very difficult to even pay salaries.

I remember about 20 years back when I was a local government chairman; there were local governments referred as zero allocation, because at the end of the month, by the time certain deductions were made, they didn’t have anything as a chairman to work with.

But I don’t think that is the case today. If you look at the publications from FAAC, there are some local governments that are getting up to N400 million, N500 million in a month.

It never happened before, because when I was there as chairman, the highest allocation I got was N9 million. But things have changed, and people, even though it is not reflecting in terms of human living, take a long time.

For instance, people don’t have a lot of disposable income now, because we were buying fuel at N90 or N100 before. So, they have disposable incomes, but before now, we were living on false latitude. But now the reality is here for us to see the correct price of fuel.

For the past two years, I don’t think we have noticed any queue in any filing station. It has been a case of driving in and buying as much as you can afford. People are beginning to live in reality; people decide where they go now.

People make phone calls now to be sure of where they are going before they start their car. But, in the past, because fuel was readily available, people flung their vehicles around, went to things and places that they were not invited to, and most times it didn’t bother them.

But now, we are beginning to feel that we have to live, not according to our size, but according to the size of our clothes.

Your confidence shows that you have no fear…?

No, I don’t have any fear. The election will come and go, and Tinubu will win. I don’t see any serious challenge. Come to think of it, will the people going to challenge Tinubu come from heaven? Are they not the same people we know in Nigeria? We have worked with some of them, and we know their capacities.

Why are you dismissing Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar as if they are no longer forces?

It is not a matter of whether they are forces or not. They are forces on their own, but are they prepared to make sacrifices that will enable them to pull resources together to fight a man like Tinubu? Every one of them wants the number one seat.

So, how do you think they are going to agree to play down their own personal ambitions to agree to support one person? It took a coalition of people and parties to form the APC to wrest power from Goodluck Jonathan. Can these same people we are talking about be able to suppress their individual ambitions to do that? The answer is no.

Remember when the APC was formed, this incumbent President Tinubu had every capacity to run for president, but he said no and supported the late Buhari to go first. How many of these people are prepared to front another to go first and wait for another turn? I don’t see it happening.

What do you think about the speculated northern hostility against Tinubu?

I am not aware of any northern hostility against President Tinubu’s re-election, and I don’t believe you when you say that it’s all over everywhere. Maybe as an investigative journalist, you should know. But, as for me, I don’t know. Since I am no longer in office as an APC national officer, there is information that cannot come to me. As I talk with you, I don’t know about it.

With what you are seeing now, do you think that the North will freely vote for Tinubu?

Only recently, the northern governors had a meeting in Kaduna where all of them endorsed Tinubu’s reforms. They may not come out openly to say we endorse you for president, but they have endorsed his reforms. So what do you think is going on? They may not openly say things.

So, I don’t see Tinubu having a problem in the north. I can tell you that he has more friends in the North, perhaps more than in other parts of the country. I can assure you, because he is a man who has built bridges over the years.

What about the fight against insecurity still consuming him?

Well, the fight against insecurity cannot consume him because he has declared an emergency on security, and I can tell you that something will happen very soon. Tinubu is not the type you cow out of the office. He is not that kind of person because he is audacious. Don’t assume that he will go the way of other people who will run away after harassing them. He is not that kind of person.

What is the lesson to learn from your former governor, Rochas Okorocha, who has gone into oblivion?

I will not agree with your assertion that former Governor Rochas has been confined to an inconsequential political level. The fact is that we believe in this country that a politician must continue to be in an official capacity throughout. It is not so.

It is also not true that being in the limelight is what they want. Former Governor Rochas just finished serving his tenure as a Senator. So, is he not entitled to have a few years’ rest if that is what he wants? Why do people think he has been confined to somewhere?

Let me ask you, do you think that it is possible to confine a governor who served two tenures as a governor and finished serving in the Senate? It is not possible.

But many felt that Governor Hope is not carrying him along. And why is it so difficult for Imo stakeholders to reconcile them?

The problem with us is that we assume people are quarrelling. That is what I don’t like. What evidence do they have to show that Rochas and Governor Hope are not working together? There is no evidence to make such a conclusion.