Secretary General of Conference of Nigeria Political Parties (CNPP), Chief Willy Ezugwu is in this interview spoke on various issues including expectations from the 10th National Assembly, government’s removal of subsidy on petrol and call by his group for the resignation of chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)
What is your take on the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly, particularly the emergence of the leadership of both chambers of the federal legislature?
The CNPP), which I serve as its Secretary General, has already has congratulated the new leadership of the National Assembly and all the lawmakers on their inauguration. However, I want to use this opportunity to urge them to prioritise the overall interest of Nigeria and Nigerians in their decisions as they begin to exercise their constitutional powers as legislators.
While party may be supreme, national interest outweighs party interest. So, the new President of the Nigerian Senate, Senator Godswill Akpabio and Speaker, House of Representatives, Hon. Tajudeen Abbas, must ensure that they will not go down in history as rubber-stamp leaders but consider the interest of the country in any relationship with the executive.
Don’t you envisage that some people may see your charge as calling for a confrontational Assembly?
If you recall, I warned against moves by some interests loyal to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to ensure the inauguration of another National Assembly with rubber stamp principal officers. I said ahead of the inauguration of the National Assembly that the plot portends danger to the survival of Nigeria’s democracy as Nigerians may not be able to endure another four years of executive-legislative connivance against the interests and well-being of the masses.
I also said then that the basic elements of democracy, like the principles of separation of powers and oversights, will be further jeopardized in an event that such selfish and undemocratic clandestine move towards foisting another rubber stamp legislative arm of government on the people succeeds. The basis of my argument was that no society can make reasonable progress, where the legislature and the judiciary pander to the whims and caprices of the executive arm of government.
This has been the primary reason for the failure of the ruling APC to keep its campaign promises, particularly resulting to the woeful failure of the Federal Government to meet the primary duty of any government, which is to ensure security and welfare of the people.
As a matter of fact, mutual respect for the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances among the arms of government is the basic foundation for good governance. But since 1999, a healthy system of checks and balances has not been fully upheld in the interest of the Nigerian people.
For the Tinubu administration to meet its basic duty of ensuring the security and welfare of the people, each branch of government should be allowed to exercise its powers of oversight because the relevance of separation of powers and its implications for good governance cannot be overemphasised.
Therefore, it will be in the best interest of the present administration to prioritise meeting the very many expectations of the people by upholding the doctrine of separation of powers and checks and balances. There is need for harmony among the three arms but it must not be at the detriment of good governance and rule of law. So, I call on individual senators and members of the House of Representatives to consider the interest and wellbeing of the electorate within their respective constituencies before any decision is taken.
Your group recently called for the resignation of the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). What informed that position?
The CNPP is not alone in this call. Other civil society organisations under the aegis of the Coalition of National Civil Society Organisations (CNCSOs) in conjunction with the CNPP demanded that the chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, should resign from office. We did not stop at demanding for his resignation; we issued a 14-day ultimatum to Prof. Yakubu to step aside or we will galvanise all democratic and legal means to force him to do so.
On what grounds is your group insisting on Yakubu’s resignation?
The INEC chairman, who failed to deploy the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) it procured despite billions of naira wasted on the 2023 general election is not worthy to remain in office and must not be allowed to continue to waste the nation’s resources in the conduct of future elections.
We are disturbed that INEC, under Prof. Yakubu, has constituted itself into an obstruction to justice in the electioneering process in Nigeria by becoming a partisan umpire and opposing petitioners, who are in the various tribunals to seek justice after being allegedly rigged out in the elections. It is also worrisome that despite having been severally accused of manipulating the February 25 presidential election results, counsel to INEC, Abubakar Mahmoud, recently aligned with the position of the candidate of the APC to object to the presentation of subpoenaed witnesses, who were INEC ad-hoc staff during the presidential election in the petition filed by Atiku Abubakar and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
We recall that at the recent resumption of proceedings on Atiku’s petition, one of the witnesses, Egwuma Friday from Kubwa area of Abuja entered the witness box and prayed the court to admit his witness statement, but all respondents in the petition, including INEC, raised objections to stop the witness from testifying. This is the same INEC that has been accused of manipulating election results by deliberately refusing to transmit polling units results as promised real-time.
From mere allegations, a staff of INEC, Abedemi Joseph, told the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) that they were instructed by the commission under Prof. Yakubu, their employer, not to give copies of election results to political party agents, who declined to sign the results. These make it obvious that until the INEC chairman exits the commission, rebuilding confidence in the electoral body will be impossible due to the now battered image of the commission in the eyes of the electorate.
More so, INEC under Yakubu took four years to mislead Nigerians by creating false impression that uploading of the election results to the BVAS real-time was the only way to go for the country’s electoral system. But contrary to expectations, INEC made it impossible for electoral officers to upload the results of the presidential election real-time from the polling units, which may have created room for the upload of manipulated election results.
Besides calling for the INEC chairman’s sack, we equally call on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other anti-graft agencies as well as the Department of State Services (DSS) to immediately commence investigation of the N105.25 billion budgeted by the commission for acquiring 200,000 units of BVAS machines as the budget has been found to have surpassed the estimated market cost by a whopping 30.4 percent, yet Nigeria lost the anticipated benefits.
Some people may see your call for Yakubu’s removal from office as hasty….
Why should the INEC chairman remain in office after wasting 34.51 per cent of the total sum of N355 billion budgeted for the 2023 polls on the procurement of biometric devices that never worked? In a sane clime, such an official, who failed woefully to conduct an acceptable general election after receiving all he asked for should have long resigned.
It is on record that the CNPP and other CSOs fully backed INEC in the build up to the 2023 general election and insisted that all that the commission required should be made available to it since its chairman assured Nigerians that they will conduct free, fair and credible elections.
The same promise to do what is right was made by the INEC chairman at the Chatham House before the elections, but today, the world is seeing Nigeria as a mockery among the comity of nations, especially with the testimonies emanating from the election petition tribunals, where INEC staff are indicting the commission.
If the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, who followed the instructions of former President Muhammadu Buhari to redesign the naira to ensure that illicit funds were not deployed for 2023 elections could be ordered to step aside from office, why should Prof. Yakubu, who has done more harm to the psyche of the electorate than any past chairman of the commission in Nigeria’s history remain in office?
Prof Yakubu dashed the hopes Nigerians in a credible electoral system, raising voter apathy to the highest level and for us, it is time for him to quit the stage as INEC chairman.
What is your take on the Federal Government’s removal of subsidy on petrol vis a vis its impact on the populace?
I am disturbed that without any cushioning scheme to mitigate the negative impact of the policy on the masses, the Federal Government went ahead to increase pump price of petrol nationwide. As desirable as removal of subsidy on petrol may be, a government that has the masses at heart would have first put in place intervention programmes to ensure that Nigerians do not continue to suffer unduly.
A total rehabilitation of the nation’s refineries or construction of new ones and introduction of subsidised mass transportation schemes as well as improvement on the nation’s railway system are just a few of such intervention schemes that should be in place before the total deregulation of the downstream sector of the Nigerian petroleum industry.
I, therefore, call on President Bola Tinubu to reconsider the timing of his full implementation of the subsidy removal policy and first put in place measures that would reduce the burden of the policy on already impoverished masses of the country. With the unprecedented poverty and job losses in the last eight years of the previous APC administration, it may be catastrophic to increase the suffering of the masses without commensurate measures to enhance the welfare of the ordinary citizens.
Credit: Daily Sun