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Why PDP is at war in C’River –AbangAmbassador Soni Abang, a two-time chairman of Cross River PDP speaks on the lingering crisis in the state and proffers solution ahead of the 2015 general polls. Excerpts:
Your state has been in the news in the past few months, what’s really happening?
Politics. This is a transition period towards the 2015 general election. A lot of people have ambition and normally, everybody will want to do everything in order to succeed. That is exactly what is going on in Cross River State right now.
But there is an allegation that there is a perceived tussle between Abuja-based politicians and those who are based in the state. Can you elucidate on this?
It is a new development. As a foundation member of the Peoples Democratic Party in Cross River State, I was here in Abuja at the formal inauguration of the party. I won an election on the platform of the PDP in 1999 as a local government chairman. I was one of those building blocs of the party then. Two years after my emergence as council chairman, I was persuaded in 2001 to resign my position in order to head the party in the state as chairman. When I took over the leadership of the party, PDP was not the dominant party then in the state. The opposition, All Progressives Party (APP) had the majority in the State House of Assembly with 13 members and it produced the Speaker then. Governor Donald Duke of the PDP, had just 10 members in the House. That was the situation when I became the state chairman of the party in 2001. By 2003, the arrangement changed. Majority of the opposition members of the House, defected to the PDP through my intervention and by the time we were getting Duke back for a second term, PDP had an absolute control of the House with 25 members.
At the National Assembly, when we started in 1999, we had just three APP members in the House of Representatives with only Senator Ita Giwa in the Senate. But by 2004, everbody had become PDP. We were able to build a political family into a very cohesive unit. There were three guiding principles to all these. First, we believed that everybody is important as a politician and as a member of our party.
Secondly, we also believed that electioneering is a process of human relations and we went all out to exhaust all levels of consultations and integration that we could achieve to put an ambition on the table. Thirdly, we also believed that politicians could deliver more dividends of democracy to the people if the cost of politicking could be reduced to the barest minimum.
By 2008, those who came to the National Assembly and even those who ran for governorship, if I am to quote correctly, I don’t think there is anyone that spent over N2 million to go to House of Representatives or N5 million to go to Senate. I am not sure that anybody even spent up to N200 million to become governor of Cross River State as at 2008.
That was exactly how it used to be. If the PDP family in Cross River State is willing to call some people Abuja-based politicians, and see others as Cross River-based politicians, then, there is a fundamental problem. I can not pretend as if I don’t know what the problem is. All the three cardinal principles that I enumerated that led us to achieve cohesion, had been grossly violated; if we have to be sincere with ourselves. The leadership of the party in the state today, is not the leadership that evolved with the creation of the party. It is even not the leadership that understands the PDP. It is a recruited leadership. That is the first mistake. So the loyalty of the leadership is tied directly to the leader of the party in the state at the moment. It is whatever he says is what they also say. It is whatever he wants that they also do. So, there is no more room for consultation, for dialogue. It is a situation of somebody giving out instructions and people following the order. If the leader of the party in the state hates you today, the whole party apparatus, declares you persona non grata. That is what is happening.
You said you know the problems and the dramatis personae involved. Can you be specific?
I don’t want to mention names because I still believe that we have a window to have an in-house dialogue where we can tell ourselves the truth. We all know what the problem is and we cannot pretend about it during an in-house discussion. We need to identify what went wrong, where and how to resolve it.
Can we still say that Cross River is still a core PDP state at the moment?
If we go to the 2015 election with the way things are, I am not too sure that the PDP will have a good outing in the state. The present leadership did not emerge through the same process that brought us in. As a serving local government chairman, it was a consensus among all the party leaders that I should come and head the party. It was not the decision of one individual but today, the choice of the state chairmanship was the decision of one or two persons. They wanted somebody, who will just be there to do their bidding. The state chairman, everybody knows, is a civil servant who had just retired. He was the Clerk to the state House of Assembly. He doesn’t know anything about party administration. He doesn’t even know the people he was supposed to administer.
As one of the chieftains of the party in the state who had seen the implication of such actions, what did you do to prevent it?
As I speak with you, I have not interacted with the leader of my party in the state for about two years now because we have issues; we have disagreements. That is the truth.
What exactly is the true position of things regarding the ward congresses in the state. There are allegations and counter-allegations that Abuja based politicians doctored the outcome of the poll?
First, let us identify the remote causes of the current PDP crisis in Cross River State before looking at the immediate causes to be able to understand the whole scenario. The remote causes that brought us to where we are, is a situation where a lot of people had been excluded from the political process of a party which they jointly formed, which they are still members and which they belong to. Caucuses are being constituted and leading members of the party are not members of the caucuses either at their wards, local government areas or even at the state level. They are not part of the decision-taking arrangement.
The heads of the caucuses are appointees of the government of the day. They are just there taking instructions.
Members of the caucuses are people that, ordinarily, have no business deciding policies for PDP in Cross River State! That is how bad it is. So, you now have a choir of some sort, in all the caucuses. When the choirmaster says hey! everybody choruses hey !!! down the line. The real leaders of this party have been watching this unfolding scenario with keen interest.
If you raise any objection, they prop up one fellow from your local government and appoint him as the leader against you. From Bakassi to Boki, the situation is the same in Cross River State. It has been festering for over three years but as peace-loving people, everybody has kept quiet, hoping that there will be a time when we can all come back together to say enough is enough. But unfortunately, nobody thought that was important. They wanted to drive the transition process into gear. That is why you have this fallout today. Instead of calling some people Abuja politicians, they should rather say that the crisis is between former leaders of the party and current leaders of the party in Cross River State. That is how phenomenal this whole disagreement is. It is not about the Senate leader. I have not been in the picture all along. I am speaking for the first time.
There are also, allegations in the media that the Abuja-based politicians, led by the Senate leader were those who wanted to destroy the party in the state. What is your reaction to this?
That allegation is not true. First and foremost, the politics of Nigeria today requires that you rally round someone who has institutional relevance in order to be heard. The Senate Leader, today, is the only one in Cross River politics that has institutional relevance. Everybody and anybody who is aggrieved in the state today, rally round him. We are making him our new leader and our new champion.
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