Vice Chairman and acting Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party in Abia State, Abraham Amah, talks to DANIEL AYANTOYE about the aborted airport project, among other issues
In a recent statement, you disowned the comment of the former speakers of the state House of Assembly on the performance of the state Governor, Alex Otti. Does it mean that they did not speak the mind of your political party, the PDP?
In that statement, we made it very clear that as members of the Association of Former Speakers, have the right to pay a visit to the state governor. It’s part of their fundamental rights. There is no law against that. And for those of them who are members of the PDP, there is no law also in the party against that. So, they have the right to go to where they have gone. Whatever they had said, they also said on behalf of themselves and not on behalf of the party. Another very important thing to note is that the membership of that association cuts across several political parties in the state.
But is it not anti-party for PDP members in the group to visit and commend the governor in such a way that could portray an endorsement of the Labour Party government in the state?
The truth about it is that some politicians put their interests first before anything else. The major purpose of that visit was to engage the governor for him to consider the need to pay them a kind of pension every month as former members of the state House of Assembly because there was a subsisting law before, which took care of the interests of the former governors but did not take care of the interests of former speakers.
Also, because judiciary leaders get something when they leave office, they (former speakers) go to canvass for that. But unknown to them, the governor was already planning to abrogate the law that favours the former governors through the act of the State Assembly. When you lobby as a politician, you tell the person you are lobbying something that will make him happy, to be able to grant you what you want. That was exactly the card they played.
Unfortunately for them, the card was not able to attract anything. The situation is just that the public was not looking at it from the angle that they were former members of the State House of Assembly who visited the governor but from the angle of the PDP and that is the narrative most media houses were promoting.
How will you describe the request they presented to the governor? Is it justifiable or not?
There is no basis for me to say it’s justifiable or not. As I said, no law allows for such expenditure, as far as the state is concerned. What they should have done was to take that lobby to the state House of Assembly, and not to the governor. They should have lobbied the Speaker of the state House of Assembly and members and then sponsored a bill. That is the appropriate thing for them to have done. When they sponsor that bill and it is passed through first, second, and third reading, and then move it to the governor for assent, it is at about that time they can visit the governor to tender the request.
Does that mean they goofed in their tactics despite being former lawmakers?
Of course, they did.
The former lawmakers praised the governor’s performance in the state while endorsing his administration. Do you agree with their appraisal?
Unfortunately, he is less than one year but in the next couple of weeks, he will be one year in office. The only way to talk about performance is to look at what he has been able to receive from the Federation Account, what he has been able to generate through the internally generated revenue vis-à-vis the expenditure, and then we match this expenditure with what is visible on the ground. If we follow this format, I can assure you that many Abia people, today, think that the governor has not done well.
The governor (Otti) spends a lot of money on media and propaganda, and to a very large extent, he is enjoying the dividends of that propaganda, but such dividends can only last for a while. Let me just run down what was captured from the websites of the state government. In less than one year, the governor has spent N11.4bn to run the Governor’s Office, and as we speak, the governor operates from his private home. The fundamental question here is why a governor spends N11.4bn to run a Governor’s Office in his home. What is it that you are running in that home? I think we are in the 11th month; so, you are spending a little bit about over N1bn every month to run the Governor’s Office from your home. The governor has also spent N32.3bn on roads. The truth is that Abia people are asking, where are the roads?
Don’t you think that a government that can provide information about its expenditures and its income on its websites is transparent and can also be described as a performer?
That website was put in place by the former administration as a requirement of the World Bank for all the states in Nigeria. That is why they cannot shut it down. The first time their publications on that website were captured by the media, that website was shut down. But when there was a lot of pressure from the World Bank, It had to come up again. The website enables the World Bank to monitor the activities of the state government because of what they are doing in the various states across the country. So, it is not as if the state government put up the site on purpose. All the state governments have these websites for the purpose I mentioned.
There have been several reports of people applauding the performance of the governor, saying he is performing well in this state. Why is this so?
Let me analyse one of those major performance indicators they boast of. During a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, recently, the governor told the world that he met 10 years of unpaid pension arrears and that he had cleared these arrears. Everybody clapped for him. If you search on Google, you will also find out that several mainstream media have also reported on the clearance of 10 years of pension arrears in Abia State, whereas what was paid as pension arrears in Abia State was pension for nine months and not 10 years as he claimed.
The problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to verify these things. There is also a video that is trending about him building a seaport in Abia State. That is what an average Igbo man wants to hear. Most of these claims, with the support of artificial intelligence, we have people who can package them together and when they watch it, they believe that something like that is going whereas there is no stone laying or foundation or inauguration of any building or any seaport anywhere in the state.
Even as we speak, there is no document presented to the federal authorities saddled with the responsibility of approving a seaport much less of anybody building anything. We have this type of misinformation circulating everywhere. The people have bought into this information. They believe that these things are true. They don’t know that they are not true. So, today, the pensioners in Abia State are saying, ‘You cannot do this to us.’
Reach out to the pensioners and ask them, ‘How many months’ pension has been paid?’ If you look at the money they allocated for pension, in these documents, you’ll find out that it’s around N1bn. You will agree with me that the amount cannot be pension for 10 years. It’s under one-year pension arrears. He creates this narrative and pushes them.
How is this possible that?
When we talk about marketing, the banks in Nigeria, particularly the new-generation banks, came with innovation in marketing. The kind of innovation we have never seen before. When you talk about advertisements and those who pay the biggest money for advertisements, for radio and television, it’s Nigerian banks. So, he (Otti) brought that kind of innovation of marketing to governance.
Recently, the governor revealed that the previous government under PDP’s Okezie Ikpeazu spent billions of naira on a non-existing airport which was discovered through an audit report. How did this happen?
To conduct an audit requires by law that the auditor, as a matter of necessity, or compulsion, must engage the person or institution to be audited. That is, those who operate the business he is auditing, and ask them questions. That was why, when President Bola Tinubu’s administration appointed an auditor to do a forensic audit for the Central Bank of Nigeria, they had to go to where Emefele was detained, brought him out, and asked questions. You cannot do an audit without asking. So, you cannot conduct an audit without asking questions to the auditee.
Secondly, you accused a company of receiving N10bn, according to your report, but today, that same construction company remains your number one construction company. If you want to conduct an investigation, the first suspect is a person who received the money into his accounts because to receive the money into your accounts, you must deliver the services for which that money was meant.
So, was the money paid for the airport, and where is the airport?
The documents are available everywhere. Those who served in the government and others made those documents available. What happened was that when that N10bn loan was approved for the airports, members of Abia State Council of Chiefs; that is the traditional rulers, approached the governor and told him that from Aba to Port Harcourt was a maximum of one one-hour drive, from Umuahia to Uyo was one hour, from Umuahia to Owerri Airport was 45 minutes, and that we were like a state surrounded by three major airports and that what we needed at that moment was the construction of more roads because we had a lot of bad roads.
Based on that, the governor approached the House of Assembly and told them to do the necessary approval for that money which had been paid to the construction company that was already handling several road projects in Abia State to capture same for further jobs about road construction. The good thing is that the construction company is not a ghost, and the governor is still using them for projects to date. The governor does not mention the company, but the former governor, Ikpeazu.
I had expected the construction company as a responsible organised firm to issue a statement and tell the world about what they know and what they do not know about the N10bn, because as far as the law is concerned and as far as the best of investigators are concerned, the only body that can implicate the former government is the construction company, and the only way they can do that is to prove that they transmitted some of those monies back to Ikpeazu, and that will not make them free.
To the best of your knowledge, was the money channelled to road projects in the state, or was transmitted back to the state government?
It was used for the construction of roads in the states, and as we have said and I speak again today, there is no statement from the company itself.
Some have perceived the visit of the lawmakers to Governor Otti as an attempt to defect to the Labour Party. Is your party not concerned about this development?
I joined politics in the ‘90s as a young man; I contested my first election under the (United Nigeria Congress Party) UNCP on December 6, 1997. I won that election into the state House of Assembly. It has been the tradition of Nigerian politicians to defect, and each time a person defects, it creates room for other people to join. As I speak to you, prominent individuals are reaching out to the party that they want to join the PDP.
Many of those defecting are doing that for personal interest. They know better why they are doing what they are doing. As far as we are concerned, they have not also violated any known law, and our party is open to people. So, for us, it is a season of shedding leaves, and some of these leaves, I can assure you that many of those leaves will turn out to become manure for the same tree they fell from. So, do not be surprised that many of the people who are leaving the party (the PDP) today will still come back to the party to work for the party tomorrow. We have seen that happen on several occasions.
It was said that the division in your party led to the loss of the 2023 presidential election. Do you think there will be any difference in 2027?
Well, 2027 is still pregnant. I don’t want to dwell on that because I am a human being, a Christian, and an Elder in the Church. A lot of people will even die before that time. Sometimes when men talk, they don’t remember that people die. That I am alive now is all by the grace of God. So, I don’t know what will happen in the next minute or seconds from now. A lot of things will still happen between 2023 and 2027. So, don’t let us talk about that. What is on the ground now is that the party is preparing for the congress.
Of course, one thing that is always certain is that political parties adopt strategies ahead of the elections. Do you see the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, working for the PDP in 2027?
This is not the first time that a President appointed a member of another political party and we have seen it happen several in the history of this country. It happened in the First Republic. It also happened in the Second Republic during (Shehu) Shagari’s administration where some members of the Nigerian Peoples Party were given appointments by the then government. In the Third Republic, we saw it happen when Obasanjo himself did the same and they said the action was under the framework of Government of National Unity.