Senator Anietie Okon, pioneer National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has insinuated that the North probably created the current insurgency in the country to stop President Goodluck Jonathan from re-contesting in 2015. He also criticised the controversial creation of more polling units by the Indepen­dent National Electoral Commission (INEC), insisting: “It is overwhelm­ingly in favour of the North.”
Okon, a former senator from Akwa Ibom State and member of the Nation­al Conference, spoke with a group of journalists recently. Excerpts:
You were a delegate to the just con­cluded National Confab whose report President Goodluck Jonathan prom­ised to send to the National Assembly and the National Council of States. But there is no provision for a refer­endum in the constitution, as people have requested, how do we implement those resolutions?
l don’t see any problem with the implemen­tation of that conference report. The National Assembly is not a lifeless body. It has the vestments of the wishes, the expectations and hopes of the Nigerian people. There are antecedents, which are with us today. The doctrine of necessity, which is the contraption of the National Assembly to take the country out of the constitutional cul-de-sac is a clear and indisputable example.
You can see from the rate of public opinion, the desires of the people, that there are issues that must be resolved by the referendum. The president, at the beginning of the National Conference, made it clear that the National Assembly would be called upon to create the necessary legislation for the holding of a referendum in areas that have become absolutely necessary for public based decision. l don’t think there is any impediments to that. Referendum has always been an instrument for managing some fundamental political decisions. l believe that in the recommenda­tions and amendments of the conference, there are sufficient grounds for amending the constitution, there are critical issues that will definitely fall within the purview of the National Assembly. And for it to have a stamp of the national mandate, it must necessarily go for open records.
The National Assembly is not in a posi­tion to accept or reject the conclusions and amendments that have reached by the National Conference. It is that they must now give the constitutional baptism which lies entirely within their responsibility. They are not ex­pected to come and vet, reject or accept any of those amendments. Those amendments were authored by a properly set up gathering of Nigerians of all walks of life.
Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, said Jonathan should find a way to handle the report of that conference. Many interpret this to be indirectly saying the NASS will have nothing to do with that report. Do you also understand it as such?
I don’t think that interpretation is correct. What the Deputy Senate President means is that the executive must fully deliver on the conclusions of the conference. They must sieve through it and those of them that have to be dealt with by way of laws, should come by the normal channels of executive bills. That’s what l read from what Ekweremdu said.
Mr President is not going to carry the raw materials of that conference report to the National Assembly. It must be put in a form that conforms to the normal structure of issues being placed before the National Assembly. The executive is expected to bring to the National Assembly, all the bills that have been indicated by the resolutions and amendments by the National Conference.
The Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), has endorsed Jonathan to re-contest in 2015. Do you agree?
Yes, l am fully in support of Prof Rufai Alkali (Jonathan’s Political Adviser). It falls within his purview to rein in on these desperate support groups for the President and ensure that he maintains and sustains the credibility of the President’s bid for re-election whenever he decides to come to contest. They don’t want the enthusiasm especially the boisterousness that is clearly evident in the approach of TAN to push the campaigns to clearly ridiculous rather than sublime laws.
The various groups must be brought into some form of discipline in the utterances both vocal and print, emanating from these groups. They are free to carry out mobilisations with as much boisterousness as they can. But it is important that they do not push the real sub­stance of the President’s achievements beyond the sublime.
There must be a machinery and code of conduct that ensures that utterances stay on the message. And the type of message that will be crafted for the president will be the one that will state the facts as they are, so as to sustain the credibility of the campaign. It is enough to paint the utopian, when we have not reached there. We are going there. Not that we have arrived there. That is the type of message that should be delivered. That is the humility that will be the selling point for us.
You played a major role during Jona­than’s his 2011 campaign; will you still be involved this time?
One appreciates the energy that TAN is showing. We cannot fail to look at the main structure that will carry the president and that is the party (PDP) itself. The party is the infrastructure that must be tuned ready for the elections. It is the machinery that is there on ground effectively, and covers the entire coun­try. And nothing can supplant the party.
It is okay to have the Political Action Com­mittee (PAC) of the various Jonathan support groups to carry on, but we have a responsibil­ity, for those who believe in the President, to re-energize our base. The party is the main base from the cells to the wards, to the local government chapters and their various arms.
What the PACs are doing now is to create the consciousness, create a build-up for the challenge. You cannot derogate the role of the PACs. I believe that the action of the Presi­dent’s political adviser setting up the PACs is in recognition of the limitations of PACs in spite of the energy and the boisterousness of the various support groups. Welcome as they, the danger of their refusing the important and critical over zealousness, is to allow over laded presentation of the critical achievements of Mr. President to be delivered in a way that lack velocity.
How has the government paralyzed or made the anti-corruption agencies like ICPC and EFCC ineffective?
Corruption could be described as endemic, but it didn’t start now. What is happening is that it had built up. But corruption had been there. And the anti-corruption agencies cannot say it is finding that is crippling their eforts. There have been over 25 cases (involving) par­ticularly against former political office holders and so on. We must raise questions about the preparedness of these anti-corruption agencies and their capacities and level of competence of handling obvious cases of corruption. I dare them to come out and say that Mr. President debarred them from taking anybody to court.
If you find that they are able to go after smaller fries and obtain convictions, then what is the force that has withheld their hands in pursuing the celebrated cases in which major public officers are involved? If the origins of cases of corruption are essentially what l read from the newspapers and have carried out investigations and found out that those were not guilty, they should tell the world that the facts they found were in clear contradiction to what had been published.
It is not enough to just come out and begin an investigation on the basis of what has been thrown up or the rumours and petitions. I believe that is the main gauge of the extent of corruption in the country. The agencies should be seen to be doing their work or discharging their responsibilities rather than allowing the public to speculate about why there have been no progress or what may have informed the lack of progress in the prosecution of such cases.
Some northern elders say the President should not contest in 2015 mainly because he has been unable to contain insurgency. Do you agree?
If they say that, my corollary is that there should be no elections in 2015. Simple! If they posit that the President should not contest because of the impaired security in some parts of the country, it then means that they have a case to answer. If they say the president must not contest because of those problems, then it means that the North created that problem of insurgency and insecurity in the country so that they can blame it on Jonathan.
But clearly, he is not blameable for those conditions or situation. Is it because of where Jonathan comes from? Is it because he is not a northerner? If you bring a northerner as Presi­dent in this circumstance and the insurgency suddenly disappears, it means then that we will start our own insurgency because it will be clear that they were complicit in the main intrigues that sprung this insurrection.
Are you insinuating that the North probably created this insecurity to frustrate the re-election bid of the Jonathan in 2015?
Oh yes! If their major recommendation as a panacea for the insurgency to stop, is that Mr. President should step down and completely disavow his constitutional right to stand for election next year, then they can extend the President tenure in office by canvassing that we should not do an election. That is the in­terpretative extension that we can give to their position that Jonathan should not re-contest because of the insurgency.
APC wants government to pros­ecute former Chief of Army Staff, General Azubike Ihejirika, and former Borno State, Senator Ali Modu Sherrif, named by Australian negotiator, Ste­ven Davis, as sponsors of Boko Haram sect at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Your reaction
The allegations by Davis sound to me completely zany. Was Davis, by mentioning the former Army Chief, suggesting that the Federal Government was sponsoring insur­gency against itself? As far as l am concerned, that allegation was a poorly scripted dispatch, because the former chief of army was directed by the President in line with his duty, to quell the insurgency.
l don’t think that the President, from what l know about him, will accept the loss of lives through the insurgency activities, just for the purpose of retaining power, over who? Davis’s story was simply a poorly scripted distraction.
If Davis was hired by government, he should have exercised discipline and respon­sibility in making his security report available to the government that hired him, instead of staying at a safe distance to concoct his heresy. For whatever purpose, his story falls below the line of admissible logic.
Don’t forget, that this same President made an open statement that nobody… even his own desire to seek office… cannot be equated to the loss of a single life. No office is high enough for sacrifice with the lives of innocent people. No president, especially the type of president we have in this country today, will initiate any move that takes such a callous and heinous step as murdering thousands of persons and displacing a whole lot of others, just to stay in power.
INEC recently created new polling units nationwide ahead of the 2015 general elections. About 70 percent were allocated to the North. How do react to this?
It is a clear script written by the leadership of INEC to be used as a trump card to subvert whatever the Nigerian electorates decide at the poll in 2015. INEC, in doing that, created a bank of votes that it intends to use to pander to the desires of the leaders of the North especially in the presidential election. And that arrangement by INEC will not fly. It is so completely skewed against the South.
There is clearly a flight from sanity some­where in INEC. How they intend to push that through eventually, will remain one of the wonders of our time. INEC’s action is clearly in breach of the democratic tendencies and occurrences anywhere in the world. And you notice that a lot of the new polling units are in places where we have unrefutted reports that the population there have emptied, either into the Cameroon or into other parts of the country.

2015: Boko Haram created to stop Jonathan –Sen Okon