Comrade Ini Ememobong is the Publicity Secretary of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Akwa Ibom State. In this interview, he speaks on issues concerning the PDP and ongoing investigation of judges among others.
What is your take on crisis in your party?
The party is undergoing a rebirth and in every rebirth, rejuvenation and renaissance, you have to destroy something to rebuild. When the party came in 1998, it was an assemblage of great minds. This is a period of rebirth, it is a period when the party is saying that having lost power at the national level, we can reinvent ourselves. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. So, this is the period where the party must examine most of the things they have done before. I am sure that at the end of this phase, we are going to come out stronger than we were. A lot of things went wrong in 2015.
Dispute resolution process
Even those, who played various roles that led to the situation we found ourselves today are regretting. The election was basically PDP against PDP and each time you fight against yourself, the opponent wins. However, the PDP needs to have an unbiased dispute resolution process. If we had that, a lot of the things that happened would not have happened.
You said Nigeria is now a police state, how do you mean?
When the residences of judicial officers were raided, when a court will give a ruling that an accused should be produced in court and it fails to happen, when a court would grant bail to accused persons and the persons would not be released, and when a government house is invaded. What else defines a police state? There is absolutely no better definition of a police state than what we are seeing today. People are feeling more insecure today than they were before. For instance, Sanusi and Soludo expressed their personal opinions in Kaduna and the next thing people started saying that their tenures in the CBN should be investigated.
You are from Akwa Ibom where the DSS raided the Government House. On the heels of that was the raiding of the residences of Supreme Court justices. What is your take on the development?
When they raided Akwa Ibom State Government House, we condemned it, but most Nigerians kept quiet. Now, it is the turn of Supreme Court justices. If people keep quiet now, whenever the President and his vice disagree, the office of the Vice President may be raided. I pray that one day the DSS would not raid the president’s abode. The DSS should change its name from Department of State Security which of course is unknown to the law because the act establishing it describes it as State Security Services. I don’t know where they got department from. They should change their name to the Department for the Protection of APC interest. When you recall a man from retirement, who evidence shows, was a member of the intelligence and security unit of the APC presidential campaign, the person cannot remain neutral. When they went to National Judicial Council and couldn’t get the desired result that made them to embark on the raid.
On APC government
We are experiencing change. They didn’t promise positive change, so, we are not surprised. They just said ‘change.’ And things have changed. I’m happy that it was Sanusi, the former CBN governor, who said there is a deliberate policy to maintain two dollar prices. And they are busy creating artificial billionaires at the expense of Nigeria. Till date, the Federal Government through the Presidency has not reacted to that. Now, where is the positive change? The political marriage of strange bed fellows that made the APC, has also changed.
The judges are saying that there were attempts to bribe them to take certain decisions in favour of certain interests. In your state, a governorship candidate was fingered in this issue. What is your take?
I am happy that the name of a minister was mentioned. Remember that at a particular point, the judgment was leaked. We are not fools.
We will not be quick to forget that they wrote in that document that when they get to the Supreme Court, they will lead a delegation to the President and ask him to intervene directly.
Maybe they led a delegation because I believed Justice Inyang Okoro, who said that the minister came in the name of the President to influence the judgment of the court.
Therefore, it is left for the people who have been mentioned not just to issue veiled press statements but also to clear their names. If you think His Lordship has wrongly accused you, go to court. There are things that had been going on and rather than allowing the sleeping dog be, they had to come up and raid the people to intimidate them.
Culled from Vanguard.
About aktrending
0 comments :
Post a Comment