…Says Humanitarian Ministry Purpose Vehicle for Looting
The outcome of the last general election has thrown up the Labour Party (LP) as the country’s third political force with its presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi making appreciable showing in the race that polarized the country along its major fault lines. In this interview with OLAOLU OLADIPO, the National Publicity Secretary of the party, Mr. Obiora Ifoh talked about the poll, the aftermath as well as what the leadership is doing to wrest power from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) come 2027. Excerpt:
Litigations relating to the outcome of the last rounds of elections are rounding up, your party is one of the major opposition parties in the country, going forward, what will now form the basis of political engagements in the build up to the 2027 poll?
As you stated, we just concluded the election and the legal processes that came up afterwards. The legal processes culminated at the Supreme Court. As you also know, we lost at the Supreme Court. Currently, we are trying to digest the import of that judgment, which we felt was not justiciable because every fact pointed to the reality that we actually scored the highest number of votes in that election. By the wisdom of the electoral body and the corroboration of the courts, they thought otherwise. As a party, we have moved on but we are looking at a situation of having a formal post mortem where we would get all the critical stakeholders across the nation including the party officials, including the Obidient Family both at home and in the Diaspora, including the youths who form a great number of our support base to x-ray what happened.
In the end, we will take the good and we will look at the bad as well as the ugly. Together, we would come up with a resolution on how we can go ahead in future elections. It is not an easy thing to just come up and tell you what we intend to do because we didn’t go into the election by ourselves alone. We are going to see all of us that participated in one way or the other in the election on how to carry us all along. Together, we will come up with a way we can work towards future elections as a united indivisible family.
You talk about the youth forming a large chunk of your party’s support base, how do you intend to wow them again to re-enact the feat that the Labour Party performed in the last election?
For us, the youths are our main catchment segment because Nigeria is all about the youth. It is unfortunate that the leaders of the country today are unwilling to yield space for the younger ones. Our party came into the scene with necessary programmes that are youths friendly. These are programmes that have been tailored towards giving the youths hope for a better country and better tomorrow. These were programmes that will midwife a new Nigeria. These are programmes for the possibility of Nigeria making recourse to its God giving abilities, programmes that would change the situation of Nigeria as the potential leader in the African continent.
Amongst the youths, you have personalities, I mean people with different back- grounds and orientation, who are exposed who are willing to return home to help develop the country. Unfortunately, the prevailing situation in the country has made everything impossible for the youth to contribute to the development of the country. We now find ourselves in a situation whereby many youths are leaving the country in droves. Many of these youths are doing beautiful things in different areas of human endeavours in the countries that they have found themselves. Many of these youths are in medicine, in technology, in IT, banking, financing doing wonders.
They are making Nigeria as a country proud in their various countries of residence and they are willing to come back home to replicate what they are doing in the countries that they reside in. the government has made it practically impossible for them to return. The government has made it impossible due to its inability to put in place the primary responsibility of providing security for them. Investment in the country has become a very difficult thing to do. The Labour Party has continued to tell them that a new Nigeria is possible. A Nigeria where things will work again, I mean a Nigeria where youths won’t be labeled as fraudsters or ritualists.
What is your party’s assessment of the current regime since it came into power eight months ago?
There is no gain saying the fact that the government of President Bola Tinubu has pushed the country and the citizens into serious pains and penury. Things are getting harder for the people on a daily basis. I was just reading a few minutes ago a story of a young banker who committed suicide leaving a note to say that he did what he did because the situation was getting harder for him. We have countless numbers of people who on a daily basis jump into the lagoon in Lagos. Armed robbery is now on the rise. A lot of children are currently out of school. The economic outlook is bad, as we speak inflation is now in the region of 30 per cent. Many Nigerians are so poor today that they cannot buy food to eat or to feed their family. Nigerians can’t move around for their daily business activities because they can no longer buy fuel to power their vehicles.
The Nigerian currency is doing badly today against major international currencies. As we speak today, the rate of exchange to the Dollar is N1,300 as against the rate that they met when they came which was below N500. So far, for Nigerians across board, their reality since the coming on board of this government has been a tale of woes. People are losing their jobs in droves. I can tell you that most of the people that travelled outside their bases this yuletide to their villages will not come back to the cities again. This is because they can’t even afford to stay in the cities again. This is what this government has pushed us into in the last few months since it came into power.
You are painting a gloomy outlook, are you accusing the government of being rudderless and clueless?
I can tell you that the situation will get worse in months to come. This is because all the economic policies that they’ve come up with have always somersaulted. Most of them have backfired and are not working at all. Is it not in this same country that a serving minister within three months has stolen N585m into a private account. Is it not in the same government that the minister has paid the sum for so-called consultancy services to a company allegedly belonging to another member of the Federal cabinet. I told you that the level of corruption in the country is spiraling under this current government.
It is unmatched by any previous government. We used to think that the last immediate regime was terrible in terms of corruption but now, I can say that we have jumped from frying pan to fire. So, that is the situation that we have found ourselves in.
How do you see the intervention of President Bola Tinubu who has suspended the minister and handed her over to the EFCC?
What the president has done is purely a political optics. It’s just to create the impression that the government is fighting corruption. Far from it, he (the president) did what he did because this one came into the open. A lot is going on in the various ministries and government establishments that have not been touched. We had to be waiting for the investigator or journalist to bring the fraud into the open before we could now do something about it. By now, the minister of the Interior ought to be fired because a company that he has interest in received a whooping over N400m as consultancy fee. The question is, what is the said company consulting?
With regards to the suffering of the people, the President once said that he felt the pains of the people and those things would get better?
The sufferings have come to stay and it will only get worse as time goes by. Up till this moment, the current government does not have a clear cut policy that it hopes to use to take the country out of the current economic woes that it is currently facing. Recall that when they came into government eight months ago, they came up with a series of intervention programmes and part of it was to use CNG to power vehicles for transportation, part of it was to pay students loans for their studies. They also talked about poverty alleviation. Everyone can see what is currently going on in the country as we speak. To us, this ministry of Humanitarian Affairs is a special purpose vehicle used by government officials to enrich themselves and prepare themselves for future elections.
That is what the ministry is all about. Sadly enough for everyone to see, the ministry is not intervening in any poverty alleviation. It is solely to enrich those in government only. I believe that we have not heard the last of the scandal because we believe that the minister did not act alone. I believe that there are some other people that connived with her in carrying out that fraud. If she should open up, a lot of heads will roll. We heard that some highly placed government officials in Aso Villa were actively involved in the scandal.
