By Bashir Adefaka
Senator Ben Obi, Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on Inter-Party Affairs, is one of the leading South-Easterners noted for his political brilliance.
Action Congress Vice Presidential Candidate during the 2007 presidential election that produced late President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua-led People's Democratic Party's Federal Government, the High Chief has brought his wealth of experience in a way capable of attracting and catching the respect of the nation's geo-political zones for the government he serves. This, indeed, stands the Anambra State-born astute politician out as a great political fighter in this interview. Excerpts:
Senator Ben Obi? How did it begin?
(http://vml1.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Ben-Obi.jpg?9d7bd4) (http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/01/president-jonathan-cant-contest-on-pdps-platform-ben-obi/ben-obi/)Sen. Obi Thank you very much. I come from a very humble family background. I was born into a family that is very religious, very keen and interested in discipline. I was actually born in a barrack because my father was a policeman and my mother was a nurse. I have two brothers ahead of me and three sisters after me and it was one, united, loving family.
Because of the type of job my father was doing then as a policeman, we were used to moving again and again; for every posting of him I went along with and that of course took me to many places, thus I was able to speak many languages. Because of his postings also I attended various schools. I was one of the pioneer pupils of the Corona Preparatory School. We actually started the Corona Schools; we had the preparatory, primary schools and so on. I went on from there to Benin for my secondary education. I was also in African Church Grammar School and Igbobi College, Lagos before I travelled out for my further education and came back with Masters of Philosophy from the University of East London.
How did it start, I mean your career?
When I came back to the country in 1975, you now, my maternal uncle was then a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Transport and Aviation and he said, "Look, whatever you want to do in life, it is very God to start from the civil service. He then took me to the Federal Minister of Transport and Aviation and then I was purchasing officer at the Airport in Lagos. Actually it was during the time I was there that the Murtala Muhammed Airport was built by Straberg. You know, I had a lot of activities within the Airport as at that time.
That of course is the story of my beginning and it was from there at that point that I met a good number Nigerians that later on became very important members of the society. I was very mobile and it was from there that I veered into politics.
What was the society like in your growing up days?
It was a very, very disciplined society. It was a society where tribes and tongues didn't matter. It was a society that was peaceful and organized, let me put, regulated and we had relationships across the country. Nobody cared where you came from because it never mattered.
We were in school together with our friends from the North, West and we didn't even mention (tribalism) thing that is commonly found in discussion today.
As good as the time was, can one be correct to say you were complacent as members of the society at that time?
Oh! At that time we were still looking forward to a better Nigerian society; despite the fact that things were okay. And even, then we thought that was the beginning and that things were going to improve and become better; that what we had then was even poor. Behold, I mean if you transpose what we had then with what you have now, you would see that we have been taken back to the stone age and this is not the dream of our founding fathers. It is not the dream of those that created the modern Nigerian nation! It is not the dream of those of us who grew up within that era!
How then can Nigeria be made better?
You see, we have the duty to make this country great and I am one of those who remains unrepentantly passionate that this thing must improve. Like I said, I'm unrepentantly passionate about it, that we must move this country forward. We have no other country to run to and we have no other place to go to.
Was it as a result of this that you recently called on all parties to join hands with President Goodluck Jonathan or were you doing that in your capacity as SA on Inter-Party Affairs? I mean knowing party politics for what it is in Nigeria, how much of a flight can that make considering the fact that President Obasanjo made the same call that brought the Alliance for Democracy (AD)'s Chief Bola Ige into his government and see where it ended?
Well, I am saying that we recognize that there are opposition parties. Right? And as far as we are concerned, it is your right to be in the opposition but equally I am saying here that at each point there is a demarcation between time to politick and the time to govern.
So, my point here is that we have passed the line of politicking. We are now all about governance. And when we are talking about governance, we need all hands on deck as a country, as a people who are faced with challenges that are completely alien to us. It calls for Nigerians to be united in tackling all these challenges.
Terrorism has not been part of our culture and will never be part of Nigerian culture. Those are imported ideas.
So, to that extent, my duty is to call on all political parties and all political leaders to team up with the government at this time to fight the security challenges once and for all. My knowledge of security challenges of this nature is that all hands must be on deck. It involves everybody. When there is an attack, it does not identify a Southerner or a Northerner; a Christian or Muslim; a female or male or whatever. No clear cut demarcation; it's everybody.
So, we have to come together. We have to unite to tackle it and this is what my call is all about, that all of us must team up with the government to fight this more serious situation.
As a member of the government you have a very brilliant idea about tackling national security challenges. But some ethnic nationalities rose from a meeting in Lagos and called on the President to convene a Sovereign National Conference being their basic proposal for a more realistic way of solving the nation's many problems. The President declined to toe their line, though appreciated them. Why do you think he didn't accept their proposal?
The President has spoken about that. Like you said, they came to him and addressed the matter.
In my own opinion, I believe that there is nothing wrong with Nigerians dialoguing. I mean it is always better to jaw-jaw than to war-war. I have always believed that we should sit down and discuss our country, you know, to discuss how we can make this country a great nation.
When you talk about sovereign; then that is when I don't usually agree because members of the National Assembly would say no, that they already have an elected National Assembly representing the people of this country and anything sovereign is vested in them.
But that doesn't say people should not discuss. We can do that. We can engage ourselves in a conference to agree that we want to move forward. To that extent I align with the view of the President on dialogue, which encourages people to talk and dialogue. As long as things are resolved, they will move the country forward and take us to the next level. So that is the position.
When we talk of moving Nigeria forward, we shouldn't lose sight of significance of economic power. Justice Paul Nwokedi (rtd) once said that during their Biafran expedition abroad, but Bulgaria refused to support Biafra becuause, as they said, supporting Biafra, that is the Igbos, would mean emergence of another Japan whereas one Japan was already too much for Europe. The point I'm making here is that, every region in Nigeria has its own potentials. The East is unarguably credited with potentials for technological development aside the perm kernel it had when the West had cocoa and North had cotton. What are you stakeholders of the East doing to harness those potentials at this critical period in the nation's life?
Well, this is matter that will have to take us back to memory lane and end result of it will not be too palatable in the sense that immediately after the war, you know there was this thing like an unwritten constitutional policy not to allow people from the South-East to rise. Until recently there were some positions that people from the South-East were not even allowed to hold. So, you see, the feat, which we accomplished during the war, the technological feat, which we accomplished by way of producing explosives and improving on them; manufacturing all sorts of weapons and doing many things and improving on them; our aircrafts and so on. All of that came to one.
At the end of the war, one would have thought that a forward looking nation would have grabbed those engineers, put them into a place and said to them, "Look, we want to improve on these ideas of yours. We want to make a lot of that you did during the war this time that there is no war. We are all one. We want to use those things to build a great Nigerian nation."
But no, what happened was that those guys were frustrated. In most cases, they were humiliated and most of them, out of frustration, passed on; one after the other.
So, you see, until recently, when our people were being integrated which started from the Shehu Shagari era and gradually to ... Now that we have been fully integrated, which was the reason why we did what we did when the steering committee insisted on doing the kind of burial we did for late Emeka Ojukwu, to bring back the consciousness on the funeral and to ask Nigerians if we are really going to be one and Nigerians responded in the affirmative and participated immensely to all that arrangement.
Now we believe that we have to go back to the drawing board and mobilize our potentials in the South-East as great merchants and see what we can do. I mean, like you rightly said, every region had what was used as its golden egg: you know, cotton in the North, cocoa in the West, palm kernel in the East. Basically I believe, like the President Goodluck Jonathan administration now is giving very serious commitment to agriculture.... We have the Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Adeshina, who is doing so well and people are talking so well about him all over. The result is beginning to come out bright and shine. So we have to go back to the land.
We did most of the things we did for this country from agriculture and the land is still there very fertile. So I believe strongly that President Goodluck Jonathan is on the right track with regards to his interest in the agricultural sector and if we do the right thing about agriculture, we will get the land reserved.
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