By Taiwo Amodu

Comrade Ini Ememobong was former Special Assistant to ex- Governor, Godswill  Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State on students matters. He later served as Special Assistant  to Governor Udom Emmanuel on Political Matters but currently the Publicity Secretary, Peoples Democratic Party, (PDP) Akwa Ibom State.

In this interview, Ememobong bares his mind on the development within his party and salient national issues.

What is your take on happenings in your party?

The party is undergoing a rebirth and every rebirth, every rejuvenation, every renaissance, you have to destroy something to rebuild. The party came in 1998, it was an assemblage of great minds, all the strong politicians who have great values came together to form the PDP. And just after forming the PDP, they launched into governance. So, there wasn’t too much time for real bonding and ironing issues out before getting into governance and you know that as far as governance is concerned, you can’t carry every PDP member along.

So, in the 16 years of PDP reign across the various presidents, governors, senators, some sections of the PDP felt that look, we are going the way we shouldn’t have gone, some would say no, we went the right way, but you didn’t follow us to go there.

This period is a period of rebirth, it’s a period where the party is sitting back to say well, having lost power at the national level, can we reinvent ourselves, can we see where we went wrong? Like Socrates would say, an  ‘unexamined life is not worth living.’ So, this is the period where the party must examine most of the things they have done before, to see the things they have done well, the ones they didn’t do well and do them differently . So, that’s where the party is, it’s a phase we must go through and I’m sure that at the end of this phase, we are going to come out stronger than we were.

Your party, from 1999 was in government till 2015, what do you think actually went wrong and do you believe it is ready to make amends  to avoid a repeat of what led to its present fate?

Well, a lot of things went wrong in 2015, from betrayal to anti-party activities to the fact that at a certain point, some persons at the hierarchy of the party were not really listening to the yearnings and feelings of the lower party people. You discovered that even those who betrayed the party, even those who went on to form the new PDP, are regretting now because PDP was the only party that could allow proper self dignity of human beings.

Today, we now have a police state, under the APC. So, even those who betrayed us, even those who played various roles that led to the situation we found ourselves today are regretting. The election was basically PDP against PDP and each time you fight against yourselves, the opponent wins. So, those people have realized that look, we could have found a better way. And for me, critical to what led to the fall of the party was the absence of a strong internal dispute resolution mechanism because anywhere there are two people, even in the homes, some children have become dispute resolution experts for their parents because where two or three people exist, there must be dispute.

Therefore, the party needs to have a strong unbiased dispute resolution process. If we had that, a lot of the things that happened would not have happened. I am happy to say that everyone who was part and parcel of that process is now more conscious than they were before. Everyone felt that time that well, whatever happened, we would win and in actual sense, a lot of people, a lot of Nigerians still think that we won that election. You know that there is a difference between winning an election and announcing an election. It happened clearly in Edo State.

But for us, we are learning our lessons from our mistakes and we are sitting up to ensure that we get it right. You can see that we were more accommodative and if this Sheriff/Makarfi thing happened then, you know what would have happened. There would have been mass exodus, we would have taken a hard line decision, but when we gathered in Port Harcourt, we said no, Sheriff is still our own, the people who are with him are still our own, give one year so that we can reconcile.

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So, we are a more responsive party, we are a more humane party today than we were before.

There is this perception that the anti- corruption crusade of the government is meant to witch hunt members of the opposition political parties. Do you agree with that school of thought?

Well, facts speak for themselves. As a lawyer, we say that the fact speaks for itself. Now, how do you answer whether it is political or not,  whether it is witch hunt or wizard hunt? When the government of Rivers State set up a judicial panel of enquiry to investigate how between 2014 and 2015, over N58billion left the coffers of Rivers State under the supervision of the former governor, Rotimi Amaechi and they presented a report, a detailed report and this was subsequently submitted to the Federal government and nothing was done.

Then why was EFCC there? How do you account for the fact that a certain justice of the Supreme Court  mentioned  the same person that he came to his residence promising money that they should influence the outcome of the elections in Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Abia and with the benefits of hindsight, you remember the kind of tension that they created over there. You remember that a week to the Supreme Court judgment, the National Chairman of APC, Odigie Oyegun sat on a press interview and said that he was very certain and sure that Akwa Ibom, Rivers would fall into their fold. We now know why they felt certain and sure. So, it is left for them. We hear stories of how N270 million was used to cut grass in Internally Displaced Persons, (IDPs’)  camp that you can’t feed the people. We hear stories where the chief of Army Staff can now own a mansion in Dubai and the Code of Conduct Tribunal would clear him and give him a clean bill of health.

We now understand that immediately you are a member of the APC, you are a saint, you are not corrupt, and you cannot be corrupt. We are expecting that even the president, under this tenure will ask that the report of his activities when he headed the Petroleum Trust fund should be reviewed, that is where it should start from. Review it and clear yourself because some contents of that report do not seem to see him in the prism of what he sees himself.

That is where we should start from. We should purge the public perception through that report of Mr. President. We should go further to look at Secretary to Government of the Federation, Chief of Staff, the people working around him. If you are trying a former Chief of Air Staff, trying Chief of Defence Staff and today, you now clear that a

man is an expert in savings and so therefore he can save from heaven to earth and own mansions in Dubai, it shows that there is something fundamentally wrong. He should check his ministers and see how sincere they were with the affairs of their ministries . Whether you see it

from a partisan angle or not, the truth is that the spectacle used to view corruption is highly tainted with bias, whether the bias is religious, whether it is ethnic, whether it is political, it’s tainted.

The APC government came on the mantra of change. Against the backdrop of what you have said, are we expecting change, are we really experiencing change?

Yes, we are experiencing change, they didn’t say positive change. They just said change. Now, things have changed. A dollar that we left at a N197 is N497 at the moment. And I’m happy that it was Sanusi, the former CBN governor who said there is a deliberate policy to maintain two prices, that they are busy creating artificial billionaires at the

expense of Nigeria. Till today, the Federal Government through the Presidency has not reacted to that. Now, what is the change? The price of rice has changed, it has changed facing up. It’s growing up and rather than work towards ensuring that we either increase local production of rice or we can ensure that foreign exchange is more available so that the pressure lessens up,