Why Tinubu must reconcile, unite Nigerians — Uroghide

Forum 1 year ago

Why Tinubu must reconcile, unite Nigerians — Uroghide

Senator Matthew Urhoghide, a two-term lawmaker currently representing Edo South in the Senate on the platform of the Peoples Democratic, PDP in this interview spoke among others on how governors are constituting a problem to Nigeria’s democracy, the tasks before President-Elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, how internal squabbles harmed PDP at the polls and how non-return of most serving members will affect the 10th National Assembly.

What is your assessment of the last general elections?

To be very honest, I was not expecting a perfect election. When I say perfect, I mean a flawless election. The reason is that these are human actions. And there is no human being that is an embodiment of accomplishment. That is why the law says substantial compliance to the law, laid down rules or INEC guidelines.

I will say that to a very large extent the results that came out were a true reflection of the wish of Nigerians. The outing of some parties, particularly the Labour Party, surprised the country and I don’t think that anybody will say that the election was manipulated by the Labour Party.

The Labour Party was a child of circumstance and nobody knew that they could pull the kind of support they had during this election. I want to say that what happened was the true expression of the people’s wish through the ballot box.

You, like many other senators will not be going back, what will be missing in the next Senate?

Parliament all over the world or the National Assembly is a place driven by knowledge, it is a repository of knowledge, and you get better in the business of lawmaking and other legislative activities the more you stay there. That is why they tell you that the number of times you come in ranks you. That is what they call ‘ranking.’

The National Assembly is what makes the difference between military and civilian rule. So, if you take people out of the National Assembly and you keep feeding in new members, what happens to institutional memory? What happened yesterday will be lost. The way we did it yesterday will be lost. Nobody will ensure continuity.

Nobody will develop what we did yesterday. Nobody can say we did it like this yesterday and this is the result we got, let’s do it differently today. It is a huge loss. Since I got to the Senate about eight years ago, put conservatively, I have been trained up to 20 times outside the shores of this country. What happens to the experience?

Virtually all of us, from the states where there is rivalry, envy and jealousy are not coming back. Go and check all the states that senators are not coming back, if you check the states, starting from South-South. In River State, apart from Senator Barry Impigi, no other senator is coming back. The one we call the repository of knowledge, Senator George Sekibo, is not coming back.

The same thing happened in Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Delta, Edo and in Ondo states. The leader of the party is the one who stopped them from coming back. They know the advantages of having a ranking senator return to the Senate. So, the rivalry, jealousy and ignorance they have displayed have robbed us of all these things.

Today, less than 20 percent of senators are coming back from the 109. It is a huge loss to this country. The governors, out of their own will or selfishness, think that going to the National Assembly is their exclusive reserve; they don’t even know that those in the executive arm of government don’t know what happens in the National Assembly. Some of them had attempted going there but when they got there they found out that it’s not a joke.

As the Chairman Public Account, I know what I have put in, there is no governor that can do that. No former governor can do that. Why? They cannot domesticate themselves by sitting down to put those things together. They can’t. Some of them in my committee don’t come. They hardly come.

Your party, the PDP is in crisis. What is your take on this?

I don’t know what they want to achieve. But, like I said before, all these internal crises are nothing but a recipe for failure whether at the state or national level.

At the national level, the crisis that resulted in our failure to win the presidential election was avoidable. All the people that left were part of PDP, including Peter Obi, Rabiu Kwankwaso. The five governors that frustrated the efforts of the party, although many of them got burnt, those that wanted to go to the National Assembly did not win, their states lost woefully.

Those governors made their point that they wanted Dr Iyorchia Ayu to step down, but he was claiming that there is no such provision in the constitution. That they cannot force him out, the party was torn apart and it paid dearly for it. The National Working Committee is trying to reconcile after their loss. All these things are what we should have done before now, to avoid sharing our votes with other candidates that contested in other platforms.

The problem that PDP has now is who will lead it, who will have the moral right to lead PDP? Is it these governors that will say, come, now that we have scattered the party, let us rebuild it?

What can you say of the PDP in Edo? Who is going to bring PDP together in Edo?

You won’t get that support that we had. I was Publicity Secretary of PDP in Edo because I had to condescend so that we can rebuild the party. And we rebuilt and used it and I became a senator twice through it. The governor that is there today used PDP to get to power and after they came in, they disrupted it.

When Uche Secondus was the Chairman of PDP and we had that problem with Ali Modu-Sheriff, we had an agreement with the chairman and they were deducting 200,000 naira from our salaries every month. That was what they were using to prosecute the case and run the secretariat. That is why Secondus said we will compensate you for what you did, and that is how we came back.

He said, unless you don’t want to go back, but if you want to go back, we will give you the ticket. That was how we were protected, if not the governors would have ruined everybody. Maybe, if we had the state governor then, I wouldn’t have gone back the second time to the Senate.

What of the third term, did he allow it?

He would tell you, ‘I didn’t touch it.’ Come and swear. If you didn’t tell people not to vote for me, you gave them instruction. The good thing is that they themselves are down. They are down. Is it not a thing of shame that PDP has no senator in Edo? We had three at a time. It tells you the quality of party leadership in Edo.

So are you saying the governors are part of the problem in Nigeria?

You are correct! They are the problem. I am not mincing words, they control the President, they want to control the National Assembly, they control their state assembly, and they control their local government administration. That is what they want. I believe they don’t understand their role in democracy. If there are any parameters to judge what they have done in the states, very few governors will pass. The man that you are building roads or bridges for, how have you developed him so that he can fend for himself and his family?

You must develop the man in totality. Not that we are paying salary. I beg your pardon! Is paying a salary an achievement?

To know the quality of development in the states, let’s go to the State House of Assembly to know how accountable they are.

The National Assembly can still talk to the President but how many members of the state assembly can raise their voices on the governors? The governors are the problem in this country and I say it with a lot of emphasis. They are going beyond their boundaries. They overburden themselves with a lot of things. They want to tell the president who to appoint, they want to tell the president who should succeed him, does the president tell you who should succeed you?

How will you rate the performance of the outgoing Senate?

The quality of governance is determined by the executive because even when we make laws that will affect and give the common man a sense of belonging it is still at the mercy of the executive. It is the executive that will implement it. When Oba Erediawa transited in 2016, I came to the National Assembly and moved a motion that the Benin Airport should be named after Oba Erediauwa.

Not just for the sake of naming it, I read his profile on the floor of the Senate. He retired as a super permanent secretary. He started his career in Eastern Nigeria to Western Nigeria, even to the famous Aburi Conference. Oba Erediauwa was the Secretary when Nigeria was seeking for peace, during the Civil War. I said ‘the Oba’s palace is on the same road as the Benin Airport, name it after him.’ It was passed by the National Assembly but till today, nothing has happened about it.

We don’t have any element of compulsion. The 2015 Audit Account I submitted where over 5 trillion naira is to be refunded by Nigerians, what have they done about it? We asked them to refund the money to the government. What they did was that the Secretary to the Government of the Federation wrote a letter to the agencies, that the Senate has investigated you and found you guilty. Please, explain. Can you imagine that?

What do you expect the incoming government to do to bring Nigerians back together as one?

There is no doubt that Nigerians have never been as divided as we are today. But those who have always thrown up the ethnic and religious cards are those who want to work on our sensibilities. They bring out everything that is touchy about us into the game of seeking power.

So, the incoming president must know that he has a lot of work to do in terms of integration and to work on the people’s sensibilities to erase that mindset or psyche.

What is your relationship with Governor Godwin Obaseki and are you contesting the 2024 governorship election as being rumoured?

I supported Governor Godwin Obaseki’s second term, to the dislike of my compatriots, who were in PDP with me. I saw him as the shortest means for PDP to come to power in Edo and the reason I supported him was that, that was the greatest wish of late Chief Tony Anenih, before he passed on, that whatever it takes us get PDP to government house, let us do it. That was why I did it.

Coming to the issue of 2024, I want to say that I don’t see anything wrong with me contesting the 2024 Edo State Governorship Election. Just like some people were looking forward to me being Senator, so that I can do what I have been doing. Some people are saying, we never know senators can build roads and schools.