EXECUTIVE PLATFORM: Akpabio's 10th Senate Represents Symbiotic Relationship Among Three Arms of government, says Obun, APC Chieftain
EXECUTIVE PLATFORM
Akpabio's 10th Senate Represents Symbiotic Relationship Among Three Arms of government, says Obun, APC Chieftain
Hon. Cletus Obun, the chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is a reporter's delight. He answers questions in an off-hand manner that shows total grasp of national issues. The vintage Obun, former member of Cross River State House of Assembly, former chairman of defunct ACN and former vice-chairman, APC central senatorial district in Cross River, told THE BEAGLE NEWS team of Judex OKORO, Hannah ARIKPO and Ekanem ASUQUO, in an exclusive interview, that the President of the 10th Senate, Godswill Akpabio, is emblematic of that symbiotic relationship between the three arms of government. According to him, Akpabio has taken the senate to the next level and should be commended rather than being vilified.
The Boki born politician, described as Cross River William Shakespeare, also advocated autonomy of local government, calling on Nigerians to embrace the new national anthem because in brotherhood we stand.
Excerpts...
The Fourth Republic has witnessed 25 years of uninterrupted democracy. How can you assess our democracy so far?
Indeed, Nigerians should be commended for enduring, tolerating and navigating the rough terrain. Democracy is characterised by political movements and maneuvers and we are able to stabilise thus far. We have been able to move on in spite of International and Pan Africa call for our home grown democracy. But there still much work to do for improvement. And when we talk about stabilising democracy, we talk about turnover within the legislative arm of governance because need a turnover that can encourage institutional memory, a great and giant pillar in the development of democracy.That is not to say that redundant, unproductive and renegade legislators should be returned for the sake of returning to the parliament but that the quality legislation can be identified in the state. For example, Lagos state elected a man for four terms consecutively. Cumulatively, giving him sixteen years in parliament such a person has become a Parliamentary museum and you need to encourage that across board from the councilors, state houses of assembly to the national assembly.
If you remember, when Bill Clinton was president at forty six, the Senator, who did the inquisition on the Lewinsky affair, was already in the Senate for forty two years, meaning that Clinton was four years old when the man won his first election and was still in the senate when Bill Clinton became president. That tells you that no President of America can come in and misconduct himself in a manner that will jeopardize national interest or threaten the security and integrity of the American nation.We can afford to do that here. We have seen a few of the Senators and house of assembly members but they are so few and far apart that they are not creating the necessary impact that will put us in that state.
At the state level, the election of state parliamentarian has become a near laughing stock, as most parliamentarians are mere products and proteges or scions of their masters. So, getting into parliament at the state level, especially in the local government level which is almost none existent, is something that has to be looked into. The state assemblies have become a Parliament of fowls as enunciated by Jonathan Swift in the 27th Century, the satirist, who wrote Gulliver's Travels, in the famous essay titled A parliament of Fowls. You will agree that state parliaments have become a mere appendages of government houses in the states. This is a danger to democracy. And unknown to many, the quality of the state assembly is the quality of the governor you are going to have because once there is no alternate view you will be having a one way traffic in which the governors become an Emperor that does no wrong. So, you see no evil and say no evil. When that happens, it is the people, governance and democracy that suffers because the hallmark of democracy is plurality of opinion and views.We should begin to move away from the dividends of democracy in terms of cash distribution, second hand cars, no projects, paying of school fees and maternity bills and buying wrappers for women during festivities. That is not the function of a parliamentarian. The people must also have to shift their opinion of what they know about parliamentarian. The function of a parliamentarian is not in any way to engage in distribution of palliatives.
President Bola Tinubu recently accused the governors of emasculating the local government system. What is your reaction?
I have been an advocate of liberating local government. I was in the Cross River State House of Assembly and I headed a local government committee. So, I know that once the local governments are liberated, the rural urban migration syndrome will vanish because the hair dresser, the cyclist union, the vulganizers, the mechanics will have no business running to Calabar or other metropolitan capitals. We grew up with a functional local government system. I remember that under the Babangida military administration in 1987, local governments were given direct funds for road construction. Imagine that the money that comes to states are shared straight to local governments, do you know what that means? Tell me what they you are doing in the states that you are not doing in the local government? Is it a bore hole, is it solar lights, national grids, hospitals, health centers? All of these amenities are located in the local government. So, all you need is a coordinator or supervisory agencies, which is like a minister.That was the intention in the constitution when they were given direct allocation from the federation account.
Defection after every election has become the political trend. What could be done to checkmate such cross carpeting?
Well, we are an evolving a democracy that is not home grown totally. This is a variant of getting a domestication of our own kind of democracy. If we are taking a model from the United states of America, I don't know how many times a democrat has said he is no longer democrat because he does not like the candidate of his party. The worst case is that he will stay among the democrats and vote against them, they do that even in parliament. It does not require moving to the other party. In Nigeria, if you do that and they say suspend him, expel him, and yet you go to the constitution and it says there is freedom of association. In every association, there are rules even among robbers, there are rules.
The David Mark led National Assembly attempted to bring the issue of defection to a total stop by making provision that when you leave the party that sponsored you in an election, you should leave your seat. But see how the Nigerian ingenuity is displayed by doing everything to circumvent it. All you need as a person, who wants to defect is to generate a little crisis in your party, carry a puppet and say he is an alternate chairman because there is a caveat that you can only defect if your party has division, the division is not even defined. Now, it is presumed that there is only one party each in Nigeria with the headquarters in Abuja and branches at states. So, if there is division for example in Oyo state, it does not allow the legislator to go until the headquarters of the party in Abuja has two, three national officers that is the only time division is properly defined. So that is where we are, for me therefore the issue of defection has been settled by law, it’s a matter of principle and I believe we are going to get there.
The 10th National Assembly is one year on June 13. How can you access the President Godswill Akpabio-led national assembly?
It excites me to discuss the Tenth National Assembly under the leadership of Godswill Akpabio. With Akpabio, as the President of the Senate and Chairman of the National Assembly at all times, you can see the level of synergy going on. When Nigerians talk about rubber stamp and laid-back national assembly, they talk out of sheer arrogance because they don't you know the workings of parliament. The parliament is not an opponent to the executive, it is a complimentary part of governance just like the judiciary and that is the reason why the three arms of government are mutually inclusive and not exclusive.
Akpabio is emblematic of that symbiotic relationship between the three arms of government. That is not surprising because he is a lawyer and belongs also to the temple of justice from the bar. He has been a governor and minister. Therefore, he has been in the executive arm of government and today he leads the Nigerian tenth senate, that prepared him. In other words, he has the pedigree to do what he is doing. From the beginning, I predicted that he was going to be an uncommon Senate President not in the derogatory manner where people tend to look at it, as if it’s a joke. How else would you have explained a man who under twelve months has gone from the most hated to the most loved even those who love him tend to hate that they love him because they do so unconsciously.
He has an infectious character which all Nigerians know. Today, if you want to talk in South-South Nigeria, he remains the symbol of how development should be uncommon projects are still in Akwa Ibom and remain unshaken for years after he left office as governor. He is still the bench mark, the biblical snake that when you look up, there is hope and indeed governance can be functional in Nigeria. Is it the stadium named after him not by himself but by his successor? Is it the library, banquet hall with an underground runway? Is it the three senatorial districts connected by dual carriage ways and airport? There is nothing you are going to talk about development in the next hundred years in the state that he is not a symbol. Every person coming into governance today in Akwa Ibom and the South-South structure will be looking at how Akpabio did it. Transmit that ten years after into the national assembly and you find him on one year getting the national economy in line with the quick passage of laws which no body has faulted.
You can see Akpabio parliamentary diplomacy globally and putting Nigeria back on the map with dignity. We are very certain the president is pleased with the kind of steps he is taking. So, for me, this one year is a pointer of the kind of National Assembly we are going to have. The initial rumpus that came as a result of the election is normal and traditional in parliaments across the world.
You can see clearly that parliaments differ. Nigeria is a signatory to so many international parliamentary unions. There is the ECOWAS parliament, African Parliamentary Union, International Parliamentary Union. Having been elected into that International Parliamentary Union, you now find that Nigeria is better reputed to do a lot of things. This is demonstrated in the volume of traffic into the National Assembly from the Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese, to the English, Scottish and the French to the Americans. Their envoys are trooping to the National Assembly because they have seen in Senator Godswill Akpabio the leader of the Tenth Senate, a person they have confidence in and put the international relations back on track.
Some people are accusing the Senate president of favouring people from the south, especially in the composition of the Senate committees?
No, I think the national assembly is too robust for that; he cannot even afford to because there are standing rules on how to do that. Those who are saying so is a public display of ignorance. We must keep this country in a position where we can stabilise ourselves to avoid internal rumbles, crisis, banditry, secessionist movements or insurgency. We must deal with this and allow the system to stabilise. It must not be about politics. The rules are good as far as they don't conflict with the constitution, which is to say you must follow those rules. Once you don't, one person will get up because there are caucuses. There are northern caucus and southern caucus; there are zonal as well as state caucuses and these levels are to check these excesses. So, those who just want to look for faults in the Akpabio Senate Presidency are looking for pin in a sack of sands and they should be ready to search till eternity. The man is infallible because infallibility is a preserve of the gods but an Akpabio is quick to apologise. Remember the case of Sabo who accused him of being the mastermind of his removal from the Senate he apologised by his mother. He is as emotional and compassionate as that.
How do you look at the new national anthem which was signed into law recently. Some say it’s a British Anthem?
Why are you reading a British Bible to know God? Why are you using the English dictionary, is Michael West a Nigerian? Why are you wearing shirt instead tying wrappers? We would have used the talking drum to sound there is danger or meetings because our information dissemination was a town crier system, the drums, the gong, each of them symbolise a different form of communication. Why are we troubling ourselves with phones, it means that we are still colonized. So, let's do away with the phones until we start producing ourselves. When a bad man brings a good thing, do you reject it because of the person that brought it? take the message and leave the messenger. What message is embedded in those two items. First of all, the motive of changing the anthem was the concessional revolt of not having anything to do with colonialism, that was the only basis for it, it was not the wordings. When you sing it now, you can see the emotion it evokes, the pan Nigerian in you, "...though tribe and tongue may differ in brotherhood we stand." All of Africa is about brotherhood in a generic form which also involved sisterhood.
This anthem came at a time, where our division is at an escalating proportion, almost uncontrollable during the last election, degenerating into ethnic and religious war. The tension has been there in the last sixteen years. So, this anthem takes us back to the reality that we must go back to our history and get back to our curriculum especially ethno-linguistic considerations. We must get into ethno-linguistic studies.
The Ogoni people have key words, like the Efiks in Cross River, the Kions in Creek Town, Odukpani, Calabar Municipality is Ejagham, this Ejagham also stretches to Atabong that has been ceded to Cameroon. Bakassi is the corrupted form of Mbakassi, which in Ejagham means the road has ended. Now this Ejagham stretches to Oju Local government area in Benue state. Part of the Alagoi people of Nasarawa state speak a slang of Yakurr, palm, red wine, beer the generic form of it is beer bator in Okimono, hear the Ugep people call it Uto, same word, the Alagoi people call it. For you to know how close you are to somebody, number one is numeration, all Africa languages, from count one to ten the numeration is the same.
Similarly, three in Efik, three in Ejagham, three in Boki, and the Bete group of villages, three in Tiv land is the same. Hand ubok in Efik, Ubo in Ejagham, Obudu bette the same. The Jarawawa people that lie between Bauchi and Plateau speak a little of what you call Obanliku Bussi language. So, why are we now putting ourselves in a position where tribes and tongues become an issue. In the reintroduced anthem, we are in one brotherhood though tribes and tongues may differ because somewhere in our past we belong to one humanity. So, when the White man come to introduce his own witchcraft to us and it becomes so small because the forces of nature are more here, they have de-natured the environment so much that they can no longer communicate with the cosmos. African cosmology completely differs from the European cosmology. Therefore our context in dealing with humanity is completely different. Humanity abhors the spilling of blood, you pay blood for blood, God did not spare you on that and that is why there is a death sentence and when some governors fear signing the death sentence of people who kill, maimed and murder you are releasing them to commit more crimes so you become a murderer by callous irresponsibility and become implicated. You are not being a nice man, as a Christian you are disobeying God, when you cooperate with evil you are disobeying God and it's evil. Africa is too united to be divided. The new anthem for me is a reminder that this country will remain indivisible, indissoluble, firm, united and chart a course for the black man and the black race in all eternity.
