Paul Odili, a journalist and former Communications Manager of Delta State Government during the tenure of immediate past governor, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, was the All Progressives Congress, APC, candidate for Ndokwa/Ukwuani Federal Constituency in the 2019 general elections. He shared his experience with newsmen in Asaba, the Delta State capital. Godwin Udoh was there for The Nigerian Xpress.
What were your experiences like as a candidate in the just concluded general elections?
Sadly and lamentably, our politics is buying and selling. That is the honest truth. As a society, there are certain incongruities in our thinking. In Delta State, you simply have to buy power. It is not about you vision, it is not about your competence, it is not about your programmes or objectives. You simply have to buy power and that is lamentable. It means then that people with capacity but do not have the resources would struggle to come into the system to have that effect. I am sure you must have heard about the famous vote buying thing. It is real. People actually bargain for votes; we will vote for you if you give us money. Even when I was campaigning, I knew it was going to play out. I knew that people were going to ask for money but my question to them was always that the money you collected from politicians in 2015, is that what you are surviving on till date? Not one person told me yes. I said how much did you even get? Some said N500, N3,000, N250. Common! A society that can pauperise the people to the extent that they actually give up their rights for N250 or N1,000, what kind of society is that? I also posed the question to them if they ever wonder that the people they put in offices, they don’t usually see them until election time. They don’t take your calls. They don’t visit. There is no developmental programme going on. You lament that your roads are bad; the schools are bad and so on. The resources that would have been used in doing those things are what they amass and come with a fraction to buy your votes. At that point when I engage with them, you often see people begin to reflect. I see a sense of remorse; a sense of willingness to change but the sad part is that I was sending out a message, I was trying to prick people’s mind at the grassroots that when a man gives you N1,000, he has accumulated so much for himself. He is into giving you part of what is your entitlement. And for taking it, you have actually forgone some other things that could be of general benefit to everybody. I was hoping that the message gets across to the people. But during the last elections, it repeated itself. There was massive vote buying. I talk about political education, and that is where every one of us, including journalists need to really educate our people.
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Are you saying that you were not aware of all this before going into the election?
No, you know in 2007, when President Yar’Adua was declared winner, even he said the process that brought him to office was questionable. I am not trying to tell you that I was not aware of all this. My point is that we have been in this for twenty years. So the rhetoric that our political process is changing is not true because I have engaged in the process. I am dealing with this issue as a practical matter. You see, the thing about democracy ultimately is about change. If after 2007 and over ten years later, you would expect that society would have made some progress in terms of how it appraises some persons who offer themselves for public service. In my own example, the record of the PDP candidate was extremely poor. He was a two-term House of Assembly member, majority leader, two-term House of Representatives member, now he is going for the third term. His record was poor in terms of having a vision, having the competence to deliver on the promises he made. People just did not want to see him. His campaign was opposed by the people. They refused to see him in many places; he had nothing to campaign with because he had nothing to show. He was a failure and a disaster, and the people did not hide it. Now, if a man is so unpopular amongst his people, how did he win? If you need to go back to an office, there must be something you have done. In my local government, Ndokwa East, there was actually nothing on the table. When he came for campaigns, he was asked a simple question; can you tell us what you have done? He could not answer because there was nothing to say. In his local government, there was no answer. In Ukwuani LGA, he could not answer. How do you then return somebody who has absolutely nothing to show? Is that not showing that there is something wrong somewhere?
Maybe it was a case of dealing with the devil you know rather than the angel you didn’t know…
… No! That issue came up. Devil is not known for giving you anything good. I would rather deal with an angel that I know can bring something good. Devil is a devil; he cannot come and give you anything positive.
Can you contrast your practical experience with that of the President-elect who is widely touted as someone not giving to vote buying?
Everybody knows Buhari; he is a stickler for rules and regulations. He is the last person who will give money to buy votes. His reputation for integrity is impeccable. You need to even compare Buhari with the guy I contested against who had nothing to show. Mind you, President Buhari has done excellently well; there are a whole lot of things that he has done well. And across Nigeria, in four years, he keeps saying this which is true; a lot of people are governed by their emotions and mass hysteria, especially instigated by the elites. The man has said, look, the time PDP was in office, this and this did not happen. I am in office for four years, this and this and this happened. There are feasible records that you can examine. To the extent that he is able to deliver on his promise in four years is enough for him to win his election. And the votes are there to see. Is it in agriculture, infrastructure, power and others? He may not have impressed you but there are things to show. If you say Buhari should take visceral responsibility for vote buying, that means we don’t actually want the problem to be solved. It is impossible. He will set the policy and demonstrate with personal example. It is now left for people to follow his example. I keep talking about rhetoric from INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission). There is no policy in Nigeria that you cannot undermine if you are determined to. It is not necessarily about Buhari saying I am clean. He is doing his best but we should also cooperate with him, buy into his vision for a better society. If we desire a more efficient, less prone to violence electoral system, we should all come together and collaborate. Only Buhari cannot deliver a true Nigeria of our dreams. We are all just abdicating our responsibility if we leave it to him.
If given the opportunity to reform the electoral process, what will you bring on board?
I will first react to the rhetoric that our electoral process is improving because we have card reader and all that. No. There is still a lot of work to be done. I admit it is work in progress. What are the issues to be dealt with? First of all, I talked about political education, it is extremely important. Our people are not politically educated; our people need to understand what is really going on. It saddens me that what you find in Delta and, perhaps, in my federal constituency is that a few people are in total control of the resources of the constituency. And the ordinary person is not asking the right questions, and is not making the right decisions, as in how do we get things done in a way that things will change. I see that people do not think that government can actually improve their lives qualitatively, or that politicians can. There is a level of cynicism that is so embedded in the psyche of our people that for them, whatever they get immediately is good enough. And how much do they actually get? The small man gets peanuts, even there is scramble to get the peanuts. If we educate our people, they will make the right decision, they will ask the right question, they will be more vigilante. When you talk about rigging, manipulation, it is done in acquiescence with the people. They either don’t care or they don’t protest. Our future is at stake, our commonwealth is at stake. Some people are taking advantage of that. So that will be the critical area I will engage in. Political education, public empowerment, people need to have that information, mobilise them towards that direction. It is difficult to do but clearly, that is the way we can get out of this. Otherwise, nothing will change.
In view of the factional crisis that rocked the APC in Delta State, would you have considered your party winning majority votes in the elections?
The truth is this. We know the manipulation that happened; the rigging. Clearly it happened. We have evidence of that all over the place. The figures don’t match up with the actual votes declared, no question about that. But I also admit that APC needs to look itself in the mirror. There are a whole lot of hard questions that the party needs to answer sincerely, honestly and openly. You mention crisis, I admit. When you have a political party that is not very cohesive, in which fifth columnists are all over the place, there is power struggle to the point that the party’s interest is not necessarily the most dominant in political calculation and planning, I admit all that. Yes we may not have performed up to expectations, to some persons. Even though, there is another school that says we are contesting against a party that has been in power for twenty years plus, which also means that as a party, we should have been more serious in terms of how we come into the equation. But I am also saying that if there is a system on the ground, due process, let us follow through.
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Do you also suspect some form of internal sabotage particularly in the governorship election?
Seriously speaking, I am not ruling out anything. Eventually the party will make a very clear statement on that. I am not the governorship candidate; Ogboru is (governorship candidate). He has a broader perspective of it. I expect him to make his own statement regarding that. But from what I see, what I know, there are a lot of hard questions to ask, the whole process that produced the result that we see.
You were part of the PDP for 20 years, why did you defect?
I was there for eight years under the government of Dr. Uduaghan. You know you get to a point you see that the system, the PDP system became very problematic for my conscience and political philosophy, and I knew I could not fit. The question then was how do I express myself? I had always had political aspiration. I could have joined any party but I sincerely believed that the APC has a very solid programme that I could identify with. Our politics are not necessarily ideologically based. It is just a question of where best can you express yourself and get the support. I knew that the structure in PDP was not going to allow me to run. I also know that there was a need for us to have a different perspective. I have engaged with PDP chieftains and I saw that they were not interested.
Do you subscribe to the idea of taking money from politicians and voting your conscience?
In retrospect, it may sound good, saying that take the money and vote your conscience, but the morality in it is the question. We learn every day. During the campaign, I said to people to take their money and don’t vote for them. But right now, that message appears not to be sinking. I am not the first person to say it. I didn’t create it; it’s always been there. But I then reflected on human psychology. Is it possible? Let’s be honest with ourselves, to get money from somebody and do another thing? Even though I had proposed that too in retrospect, it is not a workable solution, it is unrealistic. It has not worked for anybody.
