Souhteast Governors have Mortgaged Ndiigbo Future—Max Gbanite
Jonathan’s era worse than Abacha’s
Zainab Suleiman Okino
@kwenu, Thursday, November 25, 2010
A.U
Max Gbanite is an international businessman, a security expert and member of the
IBB campaign organization and its policy initiative. Gbanite is passionate about
the realization of the IBB presidency having followed his works since he (IBB)
first came to office, during the June 12 annulment and beyond.
Gbanite, is from the Southeast, but said the zone’s silence or support for Jonathan will be the second in the history of Nigeria, when Ndiigbo’s future is mortgaged; the first being their inaction during the first military coup led by Major Kaduna Nzeogwu. That resurrection, he said was the first mojor disservice to the Igbo cause. Though generally seen as a pro- Igbo coup, Gbanite said it is the greatest anti- Igbo coup in Nigeria. Ndiigbo, he said, should call a spade a spade; reflect on what will happen to them in 2015 because bearing Ebele does not make Jonathan an Igbo man. He referred to Jonathan as the most flip-flop president Nigeria ever had based on his policy inconsistency, and that his era is worse than Abacha’s because of pervading insecurity in the polity.
The IBB man said SAP for which his principal is vilified, is the precursor to the deregulation of the telecommunication and broadcast sectors. The 12.8 billion oil money IBB received he said represents the total amount his government got in eight years and which went into the funding of the Third Mainland Bridge, establishment of universities of technology and colleges of education and the creation of 11 states and 239 LGs, and the decisive movement to Abuja. He spoke on the Okigbo report, the killing of Dele Giwa and why journalists have refused forgive IBB and what he called the Facebook generation.
Nigerians seem to be united in their opposition against IBB based on some salient national issues during his first coming that are yet to be resolved. What do you have to say about that?
Well nobody has come up with any empirical statistics and evaluations on the number of Nigerians that are against Babangida; but that notwithstanding, lies when constantly rehashed appear to be the truth. On the issue of Dele Giwa, General Babangida has repeatedly shown that he did not kill the man and if you go and search, I wrote an article on this, Dele Giwa: Facts and Hearsay.
Based on my research, there was never a time Gani Fawehinmi in filing his papers in court mentioned General Babangida’s name in all the court papers. However what he said was that the security agents at the time in the person of General AK Togun and General Akilu, both retired, were the ones he took to court. The Lagos High Court examined the case and ruled in favour of the accused, not guilty. The Court of Appeal did the same and up to the Supreme Court. The legal luminary, the late Rotimi Williams defended these people against Gani Fawehinmi. So these are rehashed issues and Nigerians ought to be able to migrate from these lies into better things.
Then you talk about the Okigbo report; it wasn’t an indictable report; Okigbo was asked to review the Central Bank, the money that accrued to the federation, the highest crude sold during the era of General Babangida; highest at that particular point in time was 1850 and the Gulf War lasted from three months to six months, so he couldn’t have made 12.8 billion over a period of six months. What was reviewed by Okigbo was over a period of ten years and documents have been published to refute it but nobody wants to listen because Nigerians have damaged psyche. The Nigerians you mentioned, they want to believe one part of the story. I haven’t heard anybody saying that Obasanjo killed Bola Ige or that he killed Harry Marshall or killed Aminosoari Dikibo or had a hand in Dipo Dina’s death or Funsho William’s death, but all these dastardly acts happened during his regime.
There was poor security and we have always had poor security. That is why we need a General Babangida to come in and review these security issues because he was the first president to invest in security by establishing five different zones for the police. Before then, they had only two zones. It was the same General Babangida that divided the national security organization into SSS, Defence Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Agency and charged the SSS to protect the Constitution and Nigerians against any regime.
His administration did not even use the SSS against Nigerians. Again it may interest you to point out that Sani Abacha could not even influence SSS to do any of the things that he wanted to be done against Nigerians: arbitrary arrest of people, that was why he created the Strike Force as a parallel agency but during Obasanjo era, he brought in an outsider in Colonel Kayode Are to head the SSS and that polarized the agency along ethnic orientation and he started using them to terrorize Nigeria.
Instead of SSS protecting Nigeria, they were now protecting the regime and that has been carried over to the Jonathan era. These are young men who do not wish to be forced to carry out orders of a president if it is contrary to the constitution so they have their hands tied. And if you recall during the Oputa panel report, the SSS was exonerated because Abacha could not use them to terrorize Nigeria. So what is happening to the opposition, and Dokpesi is quite alarming.
Why do you think IBB is such a hard sell despite some of these positive things that are in his favour compared with the likes of Obasanjo and Abacha; why is he still a hard sell if he is this good?
The reason why he is a hard sell is that if you look at eighty percent of current editors in most of the newspapers today, all had their seed germinated under the National Concord. They were the young Turks of Abiola’s newspaper and they are yet to forgive him for that singular act called annulment, but they do not know the history that led to that annulment. If he wanted to annul, he would not have allowed Abiola to emerge in SDP after joining a party within ninety days, but there were a whole chain of events that created that annulment. So because of that, they are all suffering from retroactive resentment and they have painted him ugly in the eyes of Nigerians and the youths of today; the Facebook youths, who do not research anymore; who didn’t read textbooks in the university, rather they read handouts.
They are the ones who feel that this man is really what the press says he is and that is not the truth. Babangida never claimed to be a saint but he is an expert in taking good decisions and majority of the decisions he has taken has affected the lives of Nigerians positively more than negatively.
What SAP, will you say it is negative or positive?
Very positive, I spoke with Kalu Idika Kalu, Babangida is not the architect of SAP. He is the president of Nigerian burdened with difficulties; we were an export/import oriented economy.
We are still…
Before him we didn’t produce anything, even our textile industry was not strong
It is still down?
It went down today because of lack of power but during his time the power sector was on, it didn’t have epileptic power supply as we have under Obasanjo. Don’t forget that the entire budget of Babangida’s eight years administration is equal to one year of Obasanjo. Yet he was able to build Abuja, first phase; he was able to build third Mainland Bridge; he was able to create eleven states and each was given developmental grants from that money. And the states that were subdivided from the new ones were also given a cushioning grant, so that they would not to feel the impact of the division and he created 239 local governments and they were all given take off grants to set up their headquarters. From which money? The same money and with this oil that we have. He was able to build colleges of agriculture and the federal universities of technology in the six geopolitical zones.
With this same money, he was able to give the Nigerian University Commission close to 260 to 500 million grants. Another word for SAP is deregulation, you needed to open up the economy; that SAP set the foundation for the GSM telephone, deregulation of the telecommunication industry by giving license to private hands; deregulation of the broadcast industry where independent people now have AIT, Silverbird, DBN and other broadcast facilities in Nigeria. There are close to 300 Radio stations in Nigeria, all under SAP as you call it, so it was good. The structural adjustment programme is an ongoing thing; the mistake that was put in place is that a date was appended to it.
Look at what America is going through today, a leading economy is going through their own worse structural adjustment programme; mortgages are falling, foreclosures are everywhere, and unemployment is so high. The industrial base of America is almost non-existing; china has taken over. America has become an import nation yet our economy is not even up to a fraction of that, but America is restructuring its economy and it is also called Structural Adjustment Programme.
Let us look at the other side of the Babangida quest; you are from the southeast, in the north where Babangida comes from, there are many candidates so the votes are going to be divided; Obasanjo is going to bring the south-west to support Jonathan, the south east where you come from holds the ace but the south-east seems so divided, nobody can even tell where it is going to. How do you see all these playing out?
That is what makes us dynamic because we have never been a people where one person tells us what to do. We have been very independent minded and quite often it plays against us when it comes to power dynamics.
Who do you mean by us?
The southeast that you are talking about; now this is the second time in the history of Nigeria that the southeast, Ndiigbo, is going to make a decision that will affect the Igbo generations of today, tomorrow and those yet unborn and I must say that in making that decision, we must be very cautious. The first was in January 15, 1966 after that Nzeogwu’s coup; the nation waited to see if any prominent Igbo man would condemn the coup. The likes of Mbazulike Amaechi who was a parliamentarian and who has hurriedly endorsed Jonathan today, the likes of K.O. Mbadiwe were busy restructuring themselves for personal gains, forcing Nwafor Orizu to handover government to Aguiyi-Ironsi.
Aguiyi-Ironsi was a reluctant head of state, he asked the civilians to call government but some cabal within (just like Jonathan has a cabal today) goaded him to carry on, that ‘you don’t relinquish power, you must take power and that cost him his life.’ And then the silence of this prominent Igbo allowed the nation to think and believe that the Igbo people had an agenda in that coup of 1966 that led to a pogrom which ultimately led to the civil war and we lost what we had gained in Nigeria. That coup was the greatest anti-Igbo coup in the annals of Nigerian history.
Today forty years plus after, the Almighty God has again given us an opportunity to write our name in the history of Nigeria by calling a spade a spade. Granted all of us don’t belong to PDP but those of us who belong to PDP must tell the truth that; that the PDP attracted a cross section of Nigerians was because of article 72c of the PDP Constitution and not because of the Federal Republic of Nigeria Constitution and that article 2c talks about rotation. We must step up the plate and call a spade a spade and those who are in PDP must come out and say, we support zoning.
That is why I respect people like Jim Nwobodo because he is a founding member of PDP and he was there when that constitution was drafted; I respect Ekwueme, he is a founding member of PDP and knew about that constitution. Having said that, we also now have to look at 2015 which is a contentious date where we feel as Igbo people that we have a date to produce a president for Nigeria even if that man is a drunk, but we want to have a closure to the civil war. We now have to say that you cannot produce a president by yourselves and that is why the Ijaw people saw reason and the need to reach out to the north to discuss the support for Jonathan then and even now.
They also reached out to the south-west but the south-east is the only region they never reached out to. Instead the office of the presidency arrogated upon itself the powers to stop the Igbo from having a meeting in Owerri. As diverse as the north is, the north remains an admirable entity, because, there in Kaduna, those who were for Jonathan were allowed to have their conference; the likes of Jerry Gana, nobody stopped them, nobody stoned them and those who were for zoning were allowed to have their meeting and that is the maturity of the north in political accommodation and that is lacking in the south-east. Today the governors of the south-east rose up and told their delegates to support Jonathan, I am not surprised because none of them were elected in the first place; they were all selected against the people’s wish.
So if these governors we all know are in control of things, and the governor of the southeast are in support of Jonathan, what are the chances of IBB despite the fact that he said that he would hand over to a southeast person in 2015
His chance still remains fifty-fifty. IBB never entered this race believing that it would be handed over to him on a platter of gold; if he did then my estimation of him would be different. It is a battle, it is hard work; we in the IBB campaign organization must step up the plate and go to the grassroots of Igboland and alert them on why they should resist this because the governors appear to have mortgaged the future of Ndiigbo. If you are telling me that Jonathan is an Igbo man because his name is Ebelemi not Ebelechukwu; Ebelemi is an Ijaw name, Ebelechukwu is an Igbo name. If you are telling me because his father respected Zik and named him Azikiwe, the same way Nnamdi Azikiwe named his first son Ayodele; does that mean Ayo is now a Yoruba man? If Dora Akunyili is telling us that his name is Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan, her name is also Dorothy; does that make her an Irish woman? So we must go to the Igbo and tell them these Governors don’t mean well for Ndiigbo in entirety.
These governors are the same type of people that didn’t speak against the coup of January 15, 1966 that cost us lives. We are the true Nigerians who live all over the nation. If a riot starts tomorrow based on the backlash of this presidency, we are the first casualties. The southwest has remained quiet and Obasanjo in his mischievous, virus manner has planted this seed of division and no time in the history of Nigeria has the nation been so polarized the way it was in 1966. That is what we are revisiting today and this crisis must be managed properly and carefully also.
The Independence anniversary bomb blast occurred and the presidency is directly and indirectly pointing accusing fingers at the IBB campaign office. What do you think of this?
It is of great concern to me, I was in America when this happened and as a security expert, I would think that if 9.5 billion was appropriated for the Independence celebration, at least thirty percent of that money should have gone to security preparation. There is a joke somewhere, where somebody alleged that when security issue was mentioned, somebody said, well, we are a happy people, nobody is going to cause problem for us. Yet the international community warned and MEND confessed that they also sent messages. First of all, the SSS is working under capacity, it is under-funded in the first place and right now because of this zoning and no zoning, it is being used to pursue presidential agenda; therefore they are polarized along ethnic and religious line as we speak and that is dangerous for the security of this nation. Having said that when you have such an alert, when SSS took a greater risk in towing vehicles away from the area, no one noticed the K-9 unit which is the dog unit of any bomb disposal unit; you cannot use artificial intelligence to detect bomb, you must use human intelligence.
Does it mean that the SSS doesn’t have that K-9?
Have you ever seen the dog sniffing anywhere? That means they don’t have it; it doesn’t exist in their system. They should have a squad with dogs trained to sniff out explosive liquid, gas, plastic, metal explosive, and all sorts of explosives. Those trainings are available internationally but nobody wants to empower them to do that, it is not a priority to the presidency.
We are a happy people
Yeah because we are a happy people; now when you even receive that warning, what I expected them to do is to cordon off the whole area three miles radius and tell people, ‘don’t drive your car, park your car, we will provide buses to take you to Eagle Square.’. I expected the SSS the night before to have started snooping around with their dogs and the police bomb unit because only a dog can sniff out; it is dogs that sniff out drugs expect those that are swallowed that are seen on x-ray. You can hide a drug anyhow in your box, it is a dog that will come and sniff and bring it out and that is why NDLEA has a success story today, the Nigerian Customs has a success story today but Nigeria bomb disposal unit does not have the Dog unit or the K-9 unit and somebody jokingly laughed and said they probably would have eaten all the dogs.
Having said that, it is troubling that the president will arrive at conclusions and jeopardize investigation and that is why Buhari is not wrong in saying the man lacks maturity and experience. Then number three, days to the ceremony, you changed the DG SSS, you changed the police boss, so there is no continuity. the new man come in looking to consolidate and will pay little attention to the blueprint of providing security to the celebration. Instead he would put a reactionary force, a force that would react in case there is a problem rather than a proactive force that would prevent anything from happening; that is not the character of a president that is in control. When George Bush came in and changed all his security chiefs, Al-Qaida saw it and took advantage of it; when Obama came in, he kept everybody and didn’t change anybody until now that there is no important ceremony. He is now changing them but America is much more sophisticated because they have a system that works, that is driven by collective ideology and not by individual ideology unlike here.
How about the allegation that they are trying to rope in the IBB group?
It is unfortunate, when it happened; I called a friend and said watch the political direction the wind is going to blow. This is a nation that has a record of government being in complicity of bomb explosions; so I will also suspect the government of Goodluck Jonathan since MEND through you people, the media have said that they have informants, they have collaborators within the government and since Okah has also told the county through Aljazeera that someone in the office of the presidency phoned him to implicate the north; that doesn’t augur well with the system. Prior to the celebration, some renegade forces already started putting posters in Abuja; Bomb explosion of Dele Giwa, these posters were seen in some places in Abuja pointing to Babangida. So you call a dog a bad name before hanging it? Babangida that fought for the unity of this nation has nothing to benefit over the break-up of this nation. Raymond Dokpesi, a man that employs close to five thousand people, a conglomerate has nothing to gain in the break-up of Nigeria, he benefits more; if Nigeria beaks-up, he can only transmit in the south-south region but because of what we are today, he is able to transmit from Jos, from Kano, from Lagos, from Abuja and all over West Africa.
So it is in his own interest but because he begged to differ with the presidency over this issue of zoning; he sees Jonathan as a third term extension of Obasanjo and the violation of the section 72c of that same PDP Constitution of which he is founding member of on principle; now they want to stop him. The president is also looking at stopping a Babangida, which means you want to compete with yourself only. In international community, he has said that he is going to conduct a free and fair election yet he is tying the hands of competition, which is not fair. Posters of Babangida in Abuja are being removed at night on the orders of the FCT minister, that is not competition; how can the north that has never been known to make bombs and blow up on the streets now be accused when MEND has a precedent.
The same president when he was vice-president had his country home in Bayelsa blown up, and up until recently, MEND has blown up Atlas Cove in Lagos, nobody has been arrested and then when he was acting president or even as president, the deputy Governor of Bayelsa’s house, bomb exploded there, nobody has been arrested. When Governor Uduaghan held a meeting in Asaba, a car exploded, none has been arrested and Edwin Clark never made a comment on that bomb blast neither did the president. It is sad that what happened on Independence Day happened, it is a dastardly act against the co-existence of Nigeria but I don’t think the direction the president is going is the right direction.
If the SSS is allowed to do their job, they should even call all the advisers of the president, all ministers, take up their telephone and ask for phone logs of all their phones and check their passports; all those that have visited South Africa in the past one year and during the world cup, who met with Okah and who didn’t meet with Okah, what was the discussion; take the phone log of Edwin Clark’s phone and how many times he spoke to all the militant generals.
What do you think is the effect of some of these unguarded statements that the president has made?
Well, I want to first of all comment on infrastructure before commenting on the sadness of his comment. This is a man who read zoology all his life in one particular university. In other words, he is used to dealing with plants and animals and has limited interaction with human beings before getting into politics. Therefore that foundation gives him the audacity to talk to people as if they are animals and he exhibited that when he went to Toronto, when he first said that those who are agitating for zoning are afraid of competition, are not educated enough to compete which I think is a very funny comment coming from him.
And today those that are out to compete are being restricted from the competition environment. Then, the second time he banned Nigeria Football Association without advice and when he was now advised, he unbanned the NFA. Then the bomb issue came up; before then he came out and said that you cannot zone the presidency of Nigeria and that there was no zoning, only to find out that in 2002, his signature was number 34 among the 47 that voted for zoning. Among the 51 people that came to that meeting, 47 voted for zoning and the rest said no and he was number 34 which means he suffers selective amnesia. Then the bomb blast, he did not even wait for investigative reports to be given to him as a leader, he immediately made a comment indicting a section of the country that he is asking for their votes. Number four, he has allowed the dictatorship of the Christian righteous which is the Pentecostals to divide the nation along ethnic and religious lines. What Gideon Okah did not accomplish in his military coup when he exercised the core north, they are trying to accomplish by exercising the core north from participating in this election and thinking that it is now time to Christianize Nigeria, it is wrong. I’d rather be a president of a united Nigeria than a president of a divided Nigeria, so he in my own estimation would go down in history as the greatest flip-flop president we ever had.
So you are already assuming that he will win
So far, he is the president of Nigeria and being the president of Nigeria as of now, I am defining him as a flip-flop president, he reminds me of a farmer that puts the cart in front of the horse only to find out that the horse is supposed to be in front of the cart and reverses it. So he claims to be running a Yar’Adua programme, Yar’Adua believes in rule of law, does he really believe in rule of law the way things are going? And he has sacked all Yar’Adua loyalists yet he is claiming it is a joint Yar’Adua ticket. Edwin Clark comes to tell us that if a pilot and a co-pilot are on a journey and the pilot dies the co-pilot finishes the trip. Whereas aviation law says that the co-pilot looks for the nearest airport and land and the pilot’s body, the co-pilot and the crew are taken away for interrogation to explain how the pilot died and the new crew takes over and finishes the journey. So the nearest airport for Jonathan and his crew is 2011, that is where they should land so that a new crew can take over and finish this journey to 2015. But it is very fascinating when you see Octogenarians, Septuagenarians lying to the next generation of Nigerians; what has become an Ijaw agenda is now transformed into a south-south agenda and even a national agenda.
What happens if General Babangida does not get the ticket of the PDP?
I want to say that the General himself is a military man whose actions helped to end the war contrary to what Obasanjo will like to claim. If it were not for the (infantry and armored) battalion that captured Uzuakoli and in the process Babangida got a bullet in his body and then captured Umuahia creating an evacuation of the Biafran headquarters; then that forced Biafrans to capitulate faster enabled Obasanjo marine commando to race to Amichi in Nnewi to collect the article of surrender. IBB’s division could have gotten to Amichi but he wasn’t looking for glory, the way Obasanjo was looking for glory, so today Obasanjo wants to claim that he won the war.
So why is he (IBB) looking for glory now?
Babangida is not looking for glory, Babangida has looked at his covenant with the rural community which was first put in place under Mariam Babangida’s Better Life for Rural Women and saw that that covenant has been shattered. We had an opportunity under the wings of locust, the eight years of Obasanjo that crude sold for 150 yet there is nothing in the rural area to show that we made such amount of money on crude. So Babangida now says I am going to devalue power from the center and give more power to rural development, we are going to make sure the local government chairmen partner with town unions and district heads to develop the rural community; I am going to dissolve Federal Ministry of Agriculture because nobody farms in the capital and make it a regulatory agency and that money that they normally get which they do not send to rural areas where farming is done will now be sent directly to the farmers so that they will hold that money and form cooperatives amongst themselves and feed Nigerians adequately; and the international community is looking for Nigerians to export more agricultural products.
I am still asking one question, what happens if Babangida is demystified?
I don’t want to use the word demystified because Babangida has never used the word do or die like Obasanjo did and today Obasanjo says it is operation totality, that means PDP will annihilate anybody that stands on its way. Babangida has never used such a word, he still remains a Nigerian. Babangida still knows that if he doesn’t win the election, it doesn’t make him to become Obasanjo, he will still remain Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, he will still remain in the hilltops of Minna and those who are his friends will still visit him. The issue is as a general, I am quite sure he has a second option and that option is not what I am going to articulate in this interview because we will get to that bridge and cross it at that particular point in time, but suffice it to say that amongst all who are contesting for this election, he stands head above shoulders with his policies and programmes and he has done so much to advance this nation. Many people went to the universities that were created by him, many people are beneficiaries of NDE, many people live in this FCT, many people have used Third Mainland Bridge; he is not afraid to take decisions and yet he is not afraid to take responsibility when those decisions fail. That is the mark of a leader and that is why I call him my friend and that is why I will campaign for him yet it is not a do or die thing.
So what is your last word to President Jonathan and his campaigners?
My word to Jonathan’s people is since you have refused to respect the zoning that made Jonathan deputy governor of Bayelsa, the zoning that eventually made him the vice-president and you insist in over heating the polity, you are going to enjoy what comes out of it. But if Jonathan claims to be a democrat and claims that there will be one man, one vote, free and fair election, he should stop using security to stop those who are in opposition from campaigning; he should stop using police to stop Nigerians from exercising their rights to congregate and support their own candidates.
Can one liken the situation we are in to the Abacha era situation?
Worse than Abacha era situation, I just told you that we are on a precipice like January 15 1966 to the July of 1966 when Ironsi didn’t want to contest but was forced by a cabal to contest. Jonathan never wanted to be president, he found himself as acting; if he did not know his rights as a vice president and the functions of a vice president when in the absence of a president and needed doctrine of necessity to be effective, the whole nation rallied round him and gave him that. Now those northerners that rallied for that doctrine of necessity are the same people he is calling terrorists today.
But most of them (Northerners) are also in support of him now
Who are they? The Jerry Ganas?
No, I am talking of governors, senators and house of reps members and a host of others.
There is something in Igbo land which we laugh at; we say a promise made to a prostitute is not guaranteed after they leave your house. So I want to believe that those senators are playing the game of preservation; they want to have a ticket to come back as senator; a senate president will want to come back a senate president because it favours him to remain a senate president if the president is from south-south. If the president is from the north, he ceases to be a senate president, he will just be a regular person there. So where do you think he will cast his vote? So all these things are for self preservation, it is tantamount to a senator going to his constituency and buying bags of rice and giving them machines, where did he get the money? What happened to their constituency project? He has pocketed the money and people are jubilating that he bought them computers; meanwhile it is their right.
And their money
Their money, today the Jonathan camp is putting advertorials in newspapers, radio and television stations with government funds and not necessarily campaign funds for the president. Yet if an opposition does the same, the security agencies will arrest them and say, where did you get the money? That is not open space. I’d rather like to address the international community to take note of what is happening in our country today and be able to address or advise the cabal that is holding Jonathan hostage to allow the breathing of electoral space.
Finally what do you think of Okah’s confession and his trial in South Africa?
I want to say that the last is yet to be heard on this Okah’s situation. We are going to go to part two, part three of this Okah’s situation but suffice it to say that Nigerian security agency needs to step up the plate in collaborating with the international community.
But they are already saying that they don’t believe in what Okah said
Well I haven’t heard the security agency saying that rather I have heard remnants of the presidency saying that they don’t believe what Okah said and it is simple. Pick up the telephone of all those who work within the villa, who are closely associated with the president and most of those who are from the south-south and look at their call logs and then check their passports who have visited South Africa including Edwin Clark.
Don’t forget that during Abacha era, government agency, a renegade section of the security was exploding bombs in Lagos and NADECO was being blamed for it when in actuality it was not a NADECO event. People see opportunity to make money and they capitalize on it and during that era the security vote for Lagos state was increased for Marwa, the security vote for the National Security under Gwarzo was increased. When a certain section of the State Security Service went to do their duty to the constitution of Nigeria and investigated and found out that that those bombs were not the actions of NADECO and filed a report to the national security; they didn’t know that their report would put them in trouble. The national security turned around and said that they were planning a coup and they were removed from the system and put aside so that that the money making machinery will continue.
So government also needs to look inward. Are there elements within the government that want to heighten the situation and create an environment where money has to be made in security votes? During the era of Odili in Rivers, he received the highest security votes because there was a turbulent activity of militants but today Theodore Orji did not receive high security votes because of the kidnapping because it is a southeast State, it is an Igbo state. The Igbo don’t really count in this federation and that is what Jonathan’s camp is trying to tell Ndiigbo; that they are now going to take the position of Ndiigbo in 2015. If this is what Ndiigbo want and collectively agree with, so be it. Then you don’t have to agitate for an Igbo president in 2015, you have put a nail on your political future for the next forty years because an Ijaw man cannot hand over the presidency to you and no Yoruba man would cast a vote for an Igbo candidate for the presidency of Nigeria even when the rest of the nation agree that it is the Igbo man’s turn. They will rather abstain from such elections but an Igbo man voted Obasanjo and I stand to be corrected.