2023 Presidency: Peter Obi’s Movement Unstoppable -Victor Ogene, – ex-Rep, LP stalwart

Victor Afam Ogene, a journalist, represented Ogbaru Federal Constituency of Anambra State in the House of Representatives and was a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC before he defected to the Labour Party. He spoke to Akani Alaka about his defection and what he knows about the presidential candidate of the party, Peter Obi.  

You were elected on th

e platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to represent Ogbaru Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives. You later defected to the APC and now, you are a member of the Labour Party. Why did you dump APC?

When the president after his election spoke after 95 per cent and five per cent, we thought then he was only expressing his frustrations with the lack of support of the people of the South-east for the APC. But as time went on, instead of this mindset changing, it rather became something like an unofficial state policy to alienate the people of the South-east from the power calculus.

How would you explain a situation where one of the major tripods on which this country stood will in present-day 2022 not have a single member in the almost 17-member security council? How would you explain the various appointments that have been made under this government to the exclusion of the South-east? Perhaps, for some people, that would be tokenism. But the last straw is that as a country, we have a power rotation convention – even written into the constitution of some political parties.

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Now, power has resided in the North for eight years and it is the turn of the South. And when you come to the South, the South-west has held power under this Fourth Republic for eight years through General Olusegun Obasanjo. The South-west too is currently occupying the vice-presidential seat.

The South-south has held power as president through Goodluck Ebele Jonathan for five years plus. So, natural justice and fairness should dictate that if the power will return to the South, it should be to the South-east. But those who called the shots thought otherwise and once again, excluded the South-east from the power equation. Even before the coming of Peter Obi into the Labour Party, I authored an article sometime in April where I said it was time for my leaders in the South-east to get together and fashion a different political pathway for the region. And having said that, at that point, everybody who knows me knows that my mind, body and soul were no longer with the All Progressives Congress.

But how viable is Labour Party as a platform? Because the people are saying the party lacks structures, and cannot win an election at the national level?

When you talk about viability, every political party starts as a collection of a few minds and from there, it begins to grow, wins converts and then, spreads across the country. The Labour Party is not a new platform. It has what people called structures. For a political party to get registered in Nigeria, you have to have physical offices across the country.

So, that’s already there. So, what people may be alluding to is the fact that it has not won national elections before. But so do APC too – APC got into power only in 2015. Labour Party has held sway in Ondo State before, in addition to having people elected on its platform into the National Assembly. So, when people say it’s not viable, I wonder on what premises they are making that sort of judgment.

The driving force in Labour Party is the presidential candidate, Peter Obi. Why do you think he is gathering so much momentum?

You know revolutions begin in a certain way. Take, for instance, the Cuban revolution – though that was an armed revolt which lasted for about six years between 1953 and 1959. We also saw the Arab Spring which began on September 17, 2010, I think, where a grocery seller sets himself ablaze in protest against corruption and economic stagnation in Tunisia. In that instance, it took only 10 days for then President Ben Ali’s old reign to come to an end. He fled the country and his reign collapsed.

Now, with the coming of Peter Obi, we are not talking about an armed insurrection, a revolt that will lead to a violent overthrow of the government but a movement for people’s emancipation. And you can see that the people are owning up to that movement. Peter Obi does not just represent the presidential candidacy of the Labour Party, he has become the symbol of frustrations of the Nigerian youths, the Nigerian people against a system that has refused to reform itself.

Everybody who feels oppressed, who is not part of the current rent system in which our political leaders are adept, and everybody who is frustrated with the system is joining Obi at personal discomfort to ensure that the people take back their country. His slogan is for us to take back our country. It is not as if the people who are ruling are aliens. But they have treated the larger society as articles for trade. How would you explain a situation where in an election year, students are not in school for six months plus and the leaders are relaxed?

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There are fuel queues everywhere, petrol prices keep rising and each time they do it, they tell us that subsidy has been removed and then, they talked about the huge sums that are being paid for the subsidy. And this same president told us before his election that subsidy was a scam and there was nothing like subsidy. Is he now part of the scam? This same government told us that they would crush insecurity on which basis a whole lot of Nigerians, including myself supported his coming.

But we have not only seen Boko Haram we have also seen banditry, kidnapping, and all sorts of insecurity elevated to a high pedestal. As it is, Nigeria is on red alert. You can neither travel conveniently by air because of the huge cost involved with the aviation fuel selling at about how much, diesel that manufacturers use, selling at about N900. You can’t even travel by road because of the danger of being kidnapped.

Even trekking is now a problem in Nigeria because you don’t know who is coming behind. So, on land, in the air and at sea, Nigerians are not safe. Insecurity stalks the land. The people are frustrated and, if we are sincere to ourselves, a lot of Nigerians will tell you that PDP and APC are same of the same. There is nothing that has changed. People move from PDP to APC and vice versa depending on how their political fortunes are affected. So, you should not be surprised that the Peter Obi candidacy has turned into a movement. The condition precedent to that is set out by the PDP when it was in power and amplified by APC currently in office.

But Obi was also a member of PDP before he decamped to Labour Party…

In the two examples of the revolutions that I gave you – in the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro was a Cuban, and he remained a Cuban, but when he got fed up with the system, he ignited a revolution. In the Arab Spring, the people who took part were also part of that country – they are either at the receiving end or also participated. Somebody has said what it takes for evil to thrive is when good men do nothing.

So, if they have been there in their country and somebody has ruled for 23 years and not a whimper of protest, they are also accessories to the fact that that person held the country by the jugular. So, Peter Obi being a member of PDP and thinking that the PDP will do things right and they did not, as a normal human being, who desires a change, what you should do is look for another platform to try to bring about that change. I don’t see anything wrong with that. It would have been worse for him to remain and become a part and parcel of the continuing injustice that was being festered in the PDP.

What about the fears that though Peter Obi may not win, but will help the APC to remain in power by taking away votes from the areas considered to be the strongholds of the main opposition PDP?

I laugh at that because Atiku Abubakar of PDP is of Northern extraction. Are we saying he is not going to get votes there? Are you saying Kwankwaso of NNPP is not going to get votes in the North? Are we saying that even in the South-west, it is going to be a clean sweep for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of APC? Even, if it is a clean sweep for Asiwaju Tinubu in the South-west, his votes will also be reduced in the North by the likes of Kwankwaso and Atiku.

So, it is a fair game. Let’s everybody go and contest. And I think the worried people, saying that the Labour Party does not have structures are now talking of ‘reducing votes.’ Are we saying that parents whose children are at home do not reside in the North and the West and will go ahead to campaign for people who have kept their children at home? Are we saying that workers, who ideally should belong to the Labour Party will not vote for their party for a better deal? So, nobody is taking away anybody’s votes. They are all in the fields canvassing votes. The campaign has not started. At the time campaign will start, they better go and sell their manifestos and let’s see what the APC and the PDP will put forward to the Nigerian people.

There is this complaint that supporters of Peter Obi are too aggressive in trying to sell their candidate, especially on social media…

Well, a simple content analysis of the flow of discussion on social media will show you that supporters of the Labour Party are not the aggressors. They rather react to aggression inspired especially by the APC. When you say somebody,  instead of ‘Obi-dient, is now ‘Obituary’ who will take that? And when they come out to react, you term them as being violent. But the man who initiated the violent language, calling a whole group of people as ‘Obituary’, wishing them dead, what has been done to him? It is only a tree that you would tell that you are going to cut it and it will remain rooted, according to a popular proverb in my side of the country. Any human being that you threatened would at least make a move, if for nothing, in self-defence.

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You cannot describe young, energetic focused people as zombies because they believe in a certain cause and you think they would not answer back. Check all through the social media and see whether any supporter of Peter Obi has initiated vile language on any of the other candidates. It has always been the other way round. And when they defend themselves people complain. Let’s face it, a lot of these parties have been known to engineer this kind of discourse. We also see the hands of fifth columnists in some of these things.

And I am in the media and we know. And why should Peter Obi be held responsible for the personal response of a supporter? How are you even sure that that person is even a supporter? Did he display his membership card? We know that these are some of the gimmicks that they are using. But we are happy that the youths are focused, they know what they want, and the candidacy of Peter Obi has excited them – you could see voters’ registration such that even if it is still extended to this day, you will see more people still coming out to be registered because they want to have a say in how their country is governed.

You were a member of the House of Representatives under APGA when Peter Obi was governor and you know about him. How would you describe him and do you think he can deliver on his promise of transforming the country if he is elected president in 2023?

My father used to tell me that if a man promised you a shirt, you should first look at the one he is putting on. If the one he is putting on is torn all over, then, you should wonder what kind of shirt he is going to give you. I have had the privilege and good fortune of associating with Mr Peter Obi as the governor of Anambra State. And you know what Anambra was before Mr Peter Obi came into the scene. Anambra elections were almost like the rumble in Zaire. People were afraid to get into the political scene.

But Peter Obi came and brought civility, letting the people know that their money can work for them. Yes, his predecessor, Chris Ngige tried in making some strides because, of course, he fell out with his then-godfather, so instead of servicing them, there was money for him to do a few good works, especially in road construction. But Peter Obi came and adopted Anambra Integrated Development Strategy which was christened ANIDS and worked simultaneously on all sectors, using the then MDGs goals. So, under Obi, for eight years, you could see calm, and order in Anambra, you could see progress, infrastructural development, care of the elderly, good roads – name it. Anambra became a model for good governance such that one publication gave him Governor of the Decade. Every journalist that has come in contact with him knows Obi that the slogan of the Labour Party, ‘we no dey give shishi’ didn’t begin today.

He was not frivolous with the government’s resources. He had been a wealthy billionaire by all standards before he became governor. Yes, he could do things for you on the sides. But in terms of bending the rules in government, Obi didn’t do that. He encouraged excellence. Every school in Anambra got at least a bus. He encouraged local production. He was the one who kickstarted Innoson Motors by getting it to give a computer to every school, give laptops to every school. But eight years after Peter, we all know where Anambra is.

Anambra was always in the news for the wrong reasons, except of course, with the coming of Prof Charles Soludo who is also trying to restore order to the Peter Obi days. So, Obi is not the kind of leader who was frivolous. I did not remember going for any night party or any party at all in the government house while he was governor. For him, it was all about public service, and empathy for the elderly and the young. Every secondary school head boy or girl had Peter Obi’s number and could reach him. That’s what we’re talking about -accessibility. So. If the teachers were even doing something wrong, the head boy or head girl could get across to the number one citizen of the state. And this is what we want to replicate at the federal level, using Mr Peter Obi as the president of Nigeria from May 29 2023.

You are also trying to return to the House of Representatives to represent the Ogbaru Constituency of Anambra State on the platform of the Labour Party. How confident are you that you will win the election?

Up until a few months back, I was of the APC and when a movement starts, like the Peter Obi movement, some like minds started talking to me. I didn’t just jump into the fray. You also needed those human structures that people are talking about on social media. Unknown to them, Peter has some of those structures- people who have gone through an election, won, lost in Labour Party today.

So, in the search for structures- because Peter Obi cannot just be president and not have members in the House of Representatives or the Senate or even state assemblies. So, in the build-up to that movement, a lot of us were naturally attracted by one, the Peter Obi persona and two, the desire to make a change. And Ogbaru cannot be left out of the equation. And my leaders in Ogbaru started to talk to me to come and run. And for me who have been out of power for eight years. given the huge resources involved in electioneering in Nigeria, I said there was no way I am going to do it. But they said No, this is not about money.

Those are parts of the discussion that led to ‘we no dey give shishi’. They now started telling us don’t give anybody shishi. Come, we the voters, the people will be your backbone. It will only require our voter cards. And that’s why on their part, they made an effort to either transfer voters’ cards or register anew or just get their existing cards ready for voting come February 2023. So, my desire to represent my people is a response to a clarion call to join the growing Peter Obi movement, So, finally, I’m ‘Obidient’ and I am positive that the people of Ogbaru are already ‘Obidient’ and the numbers are growing by the day.

What about Nigerians in general, are you confident that they will be ‘Obi-dient’ by 2023?

Yes, if we desire a positive change, to move our country from consumption to a productive economy, then, a greater number of Nigerians, in terms of voters should be ‘Obi-dient’ in 2023.