…says for resurgence, party must return to founding principles
Chief Olabode George is a retired Naval Officer and a former military governor of Ondo State.He is also a politician and a founding member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), where he rose to become the party’s Deputy National Chairman (South). He recently held an interactive session with the media to express his views on a wide range of issues.
What lesson do you think INEC should take away from the recent presidential election in Ghana?
Ghanaians have always acted differently from us. Yes, like Nigeria, they also have many tribes but the population of the entire country can’t be anything more than what we have in Lagos. One thing that we must remember is that their first leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was dedicated to the development and the progress of that country. He was very selfless. He stood firm in his belief that education must be for all the people without any form of exception or discrimination. The people of Ghana have had the same kind of experiences similar to ours now. Don’t forget at some time, they rushed down to Nigeria to look for pittance by doing menial jobs. It was the government of General (Muhammadu) Buhari who asked them to leave the country. This experience woke them up to the realisation of making their country work for them. It (the deportations) challenged them to sort their country out. Check out the caliber of people in their electoral body. They have consistently managed their electoral process very well because that is the centre piece of any democratic success. As long as the people who are expected to be midwives, the process that throws up the people that will manage the country are not the right quality of people, what do you expect? Look at how election results are being manipulated now in Nigeria. The experience of Ghana should be a wake-up call on all Nigerians. One of the observers, former Vice President (Namadi) Sambo, told me that the electioneering was issue based, unlike what we have here which is centred on tribe and religion.
How do we make our democratic processes and systems work for us to guarantee free, fair and credible elections?
We have the right equipment; we have trained the personnel to be deployed for election. It was unfortunate that INEC gave an excuse that there was a glitch in the system and they said they were going to abandon electronic collation and revert to the old manual collation. I was shocked when INEC said there was a glitch in the system. Being my area of specialisation, I am a weapon system engineer and I understand why a glitch must not happen in any system. Imagine someone saying there is a glitch when missiles are flying towards you from all directions. The question we ought to have asked them was whether a system would be designed without having an alternative route in case of any glitch? In fact, the designer of the software, Amazons, debunked their claims, saying nothing like that happened and that they were monitoring the system from their end. They said the server was switched off. We need to go back to the basics by reintroducing civics into our schools curriculum.
How do we address the problems such that election outcomes are not subverted?
That is where I am going. The last time, we went and we voted and the votes were counted in our presence at the polling units from where we were to transfer the result to, rather than the old ways where some people after conclusion of polls will carry it manually to collation centre. If it had been 200 votes here for the PDP and 300 for the APC, depending on the strength of any of the parties, figure nine would be added to the front of the score recorded for either of the parties at the collation centre. Now, you have a system, where everyone would be there and the result counted and transferred straight to the server without any form of human interference. This is basically what I am saying but if they connive and pretend that this thing didn’t get there, some people would go to another corner and issue another result which would be admitted for collation. People found to be doing this ought to go to jail. Anyone saddled with the responsibility of conducting our election will sit up if he knows that the judiciary would deal with his criminal conduct, they won’t be manipulating election results. Dealing with issues like this should start somewhere and I know that it is possible.
Currently the National Assembly is amending the Electoral Law. If you want to give any form of counsel, what are you going to tell the lawmakers in terms of how to make the law work properly?
Firstly, there are rules, there should be no glitches if you have a system put in place. I don’t know the kind of system that you will put in place that would only have to be routed through just one channel. The electronic system must not fail on the day of election. If it does, those involved must be criminalised. Two, personnel must be well trained by picking, maybe two each from the six geo-political zones to be trained in the procedure. There must not be just one man sitting there but many people. Those to be saddled with this task must be independent. Three, there must be whistleblowers who will expose any form of infraction against the system. The claims of these whistle blowers must also be well investigated by the government. Anyone found liable should be sent to prison. These are some of the things that must be put in place to support the electoral procedures.
What about the recruitment of personnel for the election, how independent should they be?
Recruitment of the personnel has to be independently handled.
What’s your position on these ceaseless calls for restructuring of the country by some segments of the society?
Let me tell you, the Constitution that we are currently using to run the country is absolute trash. This is because only one man sitting at the top determines all that goes on in the country. He decides all that happens within the country. Things like this don’t happen anywhere else except here in Nigeria. When the British left the country, they left a federal arrangement; it was a time that the various regions had embassies in various countries of the world. We had a Prime Minister who was there, not as Head of State but as Head of Government. He wasn’t controlling everybody, but what do you have now? What we are operating now is a military Constitution. There is one boss at the helm just like a military commander. In the military, once your boss gives a command, you must fall in line. Such an arrangement is not democratic in any way. We have been talking about the 2014 Political Reform Conference. The report is there, go and look at it. We need to reduce the power at the centre. Let’s stop deceiving ourselves; the constitution of the country is also a major problem to the development of Nigeria.
You have always described the PDP as an Iroko but in recent times, your party had been going through some form of turbulence prompting many to think that it might actually go into extinction. What gives you the assurance that the party will survive the current crisis plaguing it?
There is no organisation anywhere in the world that doesn’t have its ups and downs but I insist that our party is an Iroko that the party just didn’t emerge from nowhere. The experiences make the party formidable. The late Papa Alex Ekweme deemed it fit to invite some of the country’s brilliant politicians who had distinct ideologies. They were not in the same party and they didn’t have the same ideological leaning. He called the late Chief Bola Ige from the South West; in fact, it was the late Chief Ige that wrote the constitution of the PDP. Did you ever imagine that Baba Ekweme and Chief Jim Nwobodo would be in the same party? It was almost impossible.
Ekweme went North, he invited Papa Adamu Ciroma, he brought in the late Chief Solomon Lar, the late Alhaji Abubakar Rimi from Kano. Don’t forget that the late Rimi belonged to a populist, socialist party. He brought Jubril Aminu too. All of them came together to fashion out a way forward. It was discovered that the problem with our democracy has always been the problems of the majority always winning and the minority always losing. In the end, the majority will decide and the minority will always be the onlookers. They came up with the concept of six geo-political zone structures and they identified six topmost positions in the land. The positions were those of the President, Vice President, Senate President, Speaker, SGF and the party chairman. In the end, no zone, whether you are a majority or minority tribe will go home empty handed. You know what that created? It created a sense of belonging, national dynamism.
Where did the party get it wrong?
Suddenly, human manipulation sets in; people’s personal ambition now becomes greater than the corporate, collective ambition of the party. We have been telling them that what has been handed over to us is not what they are doing. The trampling on the party’s constitution when former National Chairman of the party, Senator Iyorchia Ayu and the chairman of the national convention, Senator David Mark came from the same zone. Is that in any way national? Is that the concept of the party with relation to equity and spread? They begged and begged and begged but we told them since Muhammadu Buhari, a Northerner was leaving, power should move to the South. The excuse they gave was that the man who did the zoning arrangement didn’t do that of elective offices. They called for a review but when we got to the meeting, they told us that there was nothing like zoning and that zoning was absolute nonsense.
I read the Constitution to them and that provision is still there till date. They agreed with me and said we should meet the day after and when that meeting took place, they were just pleading that we go along with them. We took their pleadings as family members. Like I said, Ayu was the national chairman, Mark, the chairman of the national convention and there was no need for us to start firing. Atiku landed the ticket but before then, Ayu assured that should the presidential candidate come from the North, he would step down as national chairman. I went to him begging him not to destroy the party but he told me that he would have to serve out his term.