What did Senator Ngige go to Okija shrine to Find

Former

Anambra State governor, now a senator representing Anambra Central, Dr Chris Ngige, recently at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, spoke to some journalists including Politics Editor, Daniel Kanu, on some issues concerning his controversial tenure, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s moves against him and the dreaded Okija shrine among others:

Your election as Anambra State governor in 2003 was controversial. What were the hurdles you crossed before getting into office?

First, I replaced the then incumbent governor, Chinwoke Mbadinuju, who my party, People Democratic Party (PDP), had adjudged not to have done well and, therefore, decided that in order not to lose the state, they had to get a replacement. I was a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party at the time and the party took a decision to draft me to fly its flag. I wanted to go to the Senate and I had already won my primary nomination for the Senate. It was from then the hiccup started. Then when I went into the election, I had problems with some party members; Mbadinugu’s supporters did not vote for me. They moved into the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and they opposed me in the general elections. And because he did not perform very well, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), a new party then in the East, became very strong in Anambra State with the late Ikemba Nnewi, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, as the arrowhead and the people were also involved emotionally. But when I came out, the equation changed and the people of the state were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. We had the election, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) pronounced me winner and I was sworn in. Right from when I was sworn in, there were problems with those who assisted me to get my nomination in the PDP and who were the engine house of my campaign organisation. By that, I mean the Ubas and from there, one thing led to the other. They wanted the deputy governor to take over from me. Perhaps, based on ignorance, they didn’t do that legally. They used unorthodox means not known to law by forcibly removing me and taking a letter to the House of Assembly that I had resigned, whereas that was not the situation. You can see that I went through a rough road and when I tried to assert myself, the then Federal Government supported those people because they were “friends of the Presidency.” And in order to actualise the mandate given to me by our people, I had to fight back. I had to resist and fight all through the rough terrain, to make sure I delivered democracy dividends to my people. I had to pay salaries and allowances that were owed and I had to pay them off as a government. I needed to also construct roads for the people because when I came, there were no roads. That was the situation but more challenging was the fact that the government owed workers, pensioners, contractors, and various financial houses a whopping N35billion before I came. I had to do a gradual settling of these debts by paying gradually and, of course, I returned the people’s confidence in government. I started paying salaries as and when due, I paid pension; I paid the 142 per cent rise in pension. As a matter of fact, after Rivers State, mine was the only government in Nigeria that paid it, followed by Lagos State. While on the seat, I had to contend with insurgency and rough tackles from my erstwhile supporters and we had to fight it out. It was a clear choice for me to make. It was either I aligned with people of Anambra State or give them whatever they (erstwhile supporters) wanted from the state treasury. They wanted N3billion every year and of course, I didn’t have it and I knew I was in for trouble. I decided to slug it out with them. At that period, I received calls from friends, family members and even some governors that nobody fights the Federal Government and wins, not to talk of the one led by President Olusegun Obasanjo, an Army General but I told them I was not afraid of death.

Who wrote your purported letter of resignation to the House of Assembly on July 10, 2003?

I don’t know who did it. But you know, in this country, such things are very easy to do. What gave out that letter was the way it was written. It was not with the current letterhead of my office. When I came into office, I changed the letterhead but that particular letter was written with the old letterhead paper. Of course, my signature, in these days of forgery, people can get near your signature. They got near my signature but it wasn’t quite my signature. It didn’t bother me to investigate it but I got a copy of the letter after the coup or illegal removal failed. I tried to send it for forensic analysis while I was in government but it was overtaken by the fact that I left government much earlier, following the Court of Appeal decision on March 15, that upheld the tribunal’s verdict that Peter Obi was the elected governor.

Your election victory was nullified in 2005 by a tribunal led by Justice Nabaruma. You appealed to the Court of Appeal and lost. Do you still agree that you did not win the election fairly?

(Cuts in) It wasn’t nullified. I don’t agree with the court verdict. The court judgment was political; it was politically given. The tribunal in its final judgment said I obtained some illicit, dirty votes; if you want to call it rigged votes, they counted those votes and subtracted them from my total votes declared by the INEC. With that declaration, they said I had 260 something thousand votes as legal votes. Then they said Obi also had illegal and rigged votes; they went on to count his illegal votes and his valid votes and then subtracted his illegal votes from the legal votes. They said his valid votes were 300 and something thousand and declared him winner. I am not a judge, but I know that in law, especially law of equity, he who comes to equity, must do so with clean hands. If you have rigged to get some votes and, according to them, my party, PDP, and myself rigged; APGA and Obi also rigged, therefore, he (Obi) did not come to equity with clean hands to petition. The logical thing and the highest penalty that should have been meted out to me was the cancellation of the results and a rerun but they pronounced him winner. We appealed based on this and not even that alone, there was at a time a subsisting Supreme Court judgment in the case of Onoh vs. Nwobodo said it was not the job of courts to count votes. It is not their job. Therefore, if there is substantial compliance by a winner, you leave him as winner. If there is no substantial compliance by the winner, you nullify the election but you don’t start counting votes. They went ahead and ignored that Supreme Court’s pronouncement. The Supreme Court is the highest authority in terms of judicial pronouncements. That was when the nullification of governors’ elections started and the Court of Appeal, instead of upholding our grounds, was also intimidated by then President Obasanjo. We had it on good authority that some members of that panel were intimidated and they had to accede to Justice Nabaruma’s judgment. Even Justice Nabaruma’s panel was unduly influenced by Obasanjo. A top crime czar of the regime came from Abuja to Awka and held a meeting with Nabaruma and co before the judgment. I had not talked about it, but for the first time last month, I did. Why I did that was because Governor Obi is almost finishing his tenure and I don’t want him to gloat and say he is an angel. No! That judgment is there. He also had tainted votes. If I had said it earlier than now, people would have said Ngige is behaving like the woman in the Bible who was quarrelling over a baby with another woman. They came to King Solomon and one said: “Divide the baby that is alive into two and give me half and give the other one half.” I am not that kind of person. I kept off from making any allusion to that judgment till now. I am saying it now loud and clear that that judgment was flawed, it is not right. That judgment became an albatross because after Ngige and Obi, all the courts in Nigeria started counting votes and removing governors. I was the first governor to be removed by the courts, not through impeachment in the history of Nigeria. That induced a lot of instability in the system. Some corrupt judges have now taken over and they are counting votes for everybody. That is what has infected and killed the judiciary today. After elections are conducted by INEC in the fields, you go back to the courts for another round of fresh elections.

It was widely believed that the conflict between you and your godfathers forced you out of the PDP. Can you still recollect what transpired then?

I told you that the powers that be had the backing of the presidency. At one point, they put together a panel called Oyinlola panel and said it was a reconciliation committee. The then President, Olusegun Obasanjo, forced Chief Audu Ogbeh out. Ogbeh was then the national chairman of the party but he said that as the chairman, he would not stand by and let a governor of his party be persecuted for nothing. Ogbeh stood his grounds and when the persecution was getting too much, he wrote a letter to Obasanjo and told him that he could not fold his arms and allow a situation where there was an attempt to assassinate a sitting governor, who is a PDP member. Obasanjo replied him and he (Ogbeh) said Obasanjo said I did not win the election. As a matter of fact, one of my friends, an ex-governor called me and said I will lose the case in the election courts because Obasanjo had made everybody believe that I didn’t win the election. First, the bias came from the ex-President and second, from my party. Third, President Obasanjo told the nation that I came to his house to confess that I didn’t win the election. That is a very big lie; I never did that but he said it to blackmail me and so the judges found their hands tied and to compound matters, he used the power of coercion to beat them into line. So, when Ogbeh refused to join in the persecution, he went and brought in Ahmadu Ali to replace him as national chairman. When Ali came, he did what they called re-registration of members of the PDP and before that, they instituted what they called a reconciliation committee in Anambra and one of the first major jobs was that they asked Sam Egwu, who was in charge of that reconciliation committee, to write that I should be suspended as one of the solutions to the problem. Of course, Sam Egwu, as a South-East governor refused to do so. He surrendered the chairmanship of that committee; they reconstituted it and put Gov. Oyinlola there as chairman. You had the troika Generals of General Olusegun Obasanjo, Oyinlola and Ahmadu Ali, and the next thing they said was that in the interest of peace in the party, they had suspended me from the party. I was a sitting governor and they also suspended Chris Ubah. Chris Ubah had no status in the party, he was just a member at the ward level of the party. But they brought his matter to the national level and suspended the two of us. They refused to register me again and eventually expelled me. I accepted the expulsion and started functioning. Even with that, they asked INEC to declare the seat of the governor of Anambra State vacant. They said that, in conformity with Section 131 or so of the Constitution, that I had no party. But good counsel prevailed and the then chairman of INEC, the late Dr. Abel Guobadia, refused to do that and they had problems with him for refusing to do their bidding. As a result, they allowed him to do only one term. The old man didn’t mind, he did his term and went away. That was what transpired till I and other progressive governors like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Segun Osoba, Niyi Adebayo, Tom Ikimi, Audu Ogbeh, Lucky Igbinedion, George Akume, DSP Alamieyesiagha, etc. got together and formed the Action Congress (AC) with, of course, Atiku Abubakar, who was also the next in line to be persecuted. There were some governors on the sidelines supporting Obasanjo at the time, like the then chairman of the Governors Forum and they said I shouldn’t have reneged on an agreement I went into with the people. But they forgot that an agreement that was false and forged ab-initio is no agreement and is not binding at all. We are still meeting in the political war front and will continue to have unfinished battle. We must always meet somewhere.

You were widely criticised for being at the dreaded Okija shrine. Were you in search of political power at all cost?

I have not been desperate for power. I have given you the history of my journey. Perhaps, I did not add that if you go and look at my track record, I was a federal civil servant and I was trained as a medical doctor. First of all, a good medical doctor is a very patient person. He must be patient to take your history as you walk in as a patient. The doctor should obtain 90 per cent of his diagnosis from history taking; conservatively call it 70 per cent, then the others through physical examination and then tests. I am a well-trained doctor, I was trained when medicine was well taught and I am patient. I worked in the Ministry of Health. I practised in the clinic for 15 years before moving into administration. I did administration for five years before I left the service. I am not a hustler for power and more importantly, I started from the primaries of my party. I was a foundation member of the PDP, I was nominated to be a minister by Dr. Alex Ekwueme but Obasanjo refused because they fought a bitter primary in Jos and I was in Ekwueme’s camp. So I was blacklisted. I was the assistant national secretary of the party before I came back to contest the primaries for Senate in 2002/2003. Then, I was begged by Chief Audu Ogbeh and others in the NWC. Even the Ubas came to beg me as a last resort. Before then, members of Better Anambra Movement led by Ben Akabueze, Ben Okoye and Ausbeth Ajagu from Lagos had screened people and rated me first from their interview and CV evaluation. That they were my benefactors was because it was when they were begging me that I caved in to run. I gave conditions for going to run and the major condition was that I should be able to run the place unfettered and give good governance to my people in Anambra State. They were the people who breached the agreement by asking me to sign money for them; by asking me to allow them to appoint all the commissioners, special assistants, aide de camp, chief security officer and personal assistant. We had no such agreement. They breached that agreement, so I said okay, if you breach the agreement, then there is no agreement anymore. On the way, they noticed some resentment from me that showed that I was no longer happy with the journey. They said they needed loyalty. So, one of them suggested it (Okija) and they now formed themselves into a cabal. One night they said, “If you don’t go with us to Okija shrine, we will shoot (you).” It’s only a living general that can tell the history of a war. If I was shot dead, the story could have been distorted. I have to be alive to be telling you this story. I asked them, “What should I do?” They said: “Let us go to Okija shrine and I said okay, let’s go.” I took my Bible with me and followed them. When we got there, I noticed they didn’t have guns; then I said I wasn’t going in. One of them said he could swear for me, I said go ahead, so he did it for me. But I did not believe in what they were doing because I am a staunch Catholic. I am a knight of the Catholic Church; so I never listened to what they were saying. They were just fooling themselves.

Anambra governorship election is about seven months from today and you have not declared. Why or is it that you are not interested?

Well, I am at the final stage of consultation and do not also forget that I am one of the promoters of the new party, All Progressives Congress (APC). I am also a member of the merger committee. It is also important that I factor in the issue of the vehicle that I will use if I decide to run. I will make my decision open very soon.

How would you react to the comment that ACN is a South West (Yoruba) Party and cannot win election in Anambra State?

Well, nothing can be farther from the truth rather than this assertion. Some people are just using such as propaganda but the Igbo are wiser than that.

From your experience as governor and now a senator, which of the two responsibilities do you find more challenging?

Both of them are different arms of the government and as chief executive in the executive branch, you are the summation of all government departments, you co-ordinate them, you are head of policy and plans, you are head of research and you are head of executive of that particular branch of government. To some extent, you are quite busy but being in the legislature is another kettle of fish. You make laws and this making of laws entails the making of new laws and the amendment of existing ones that you deem not to be making government function the way it should. We also do appropriation, which is part of law making. For me, the legislative aspect of the business is more demanding