TONYE COLE: Rivers Judiciary Now Tool in Governor Wike’s Hands

SPECIAL INTERVIEW

The governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress in Rivers State, Tonye Cole, in this interview with THISDAY, discusses the alleged plots by the Governor Nyesom Wike administration of the state, to stifle the change he is proposing. He also reveals his plans to deliver better governance as well as turn a climate of fear into one of peace and prosperity. Excerpts:

When are you officially flagging off your campaign?

We’re in a very interesting campaign season. This is door-to-door everyday matters, regarding what we do at the grassroots. But for the official flag-off of the campaign, we’ve started going from one local government to the other. This weekend, we will begin the local government rally. There’s something about the APC campaign in this election. There’s an understanding that it’s about grassroots support. We’ve embarked on a door-to-door campaign quietly, gathering all the people, going from one house to another, and speaking to them about APC support.

When we’re about to start the local government rally, that’s when some people will say, ‘now they want to campaign’. But believe me, since September, we’ve been engaging in door-to-door campaigns, holding ward meetings, and accessing the grassroots directly and I think it is to our advantage, because for a long time, the ruling PDP felt they would get victory in court and there would be no APC to contest against them.

The PDP selling point was that APC was not going to be on the ballot, telling the people not to be bothered about APC. Our strategy has been contacting and campaigning to people directly at the grassroots, finding out what their exact needs are. This has worked powerfully. Once we start the rally, you’ll see the people coming out, because we’ve taken time to reach them at their base.

So far, what’s the reception been like in your door-to-door campaign?

The reception has been great, because of the two factors I’ve given. The first aspect, which has been a great strategy, is that at the grassroots, they’ve not seen governance trickle down. One of the biggest policies of the Rivers State government is that there are projects everywhere: flyovers, the Law School, etc. So, to the world looking inside from the outside, they believe that Rivers state has all these big projects. Indeed, they’re beautiful projects. However, these projects are mainly concentrated in Obio/Akpor; that’s the governor’s own location. The Law School used to be the School of Nursing but was converted to the Law School.

The Law School had been earmarked for Degema in the Kalabari region. Degema was the provincial capital during colonial rule. Law School was meant to be in Degema so that development could spread. But he took it to his own town. No problem. Then, bridges were being inaugurated; everybody was excited about overhead bridges. Great! Twelve overhead bridges. But where are those bridges located? Ten of the bridges are in Obio/Akpor. Two of the bridges are in PHALGA in Port Harcourt. Port Harcourt and Obio/Akpor are contiguous local governments that make up Port Harcourt as we know it.

Apparently, he’s built 10 overhead bridges in his constituency. Across the entire Rivers State, you have rivers that divide communities; such bridges in the communities will make a huge difference. Between Obakri and Tombia, two communities that you can see each other but there’s no bridge (to connect them). When you build a bridge, there must be a commercial value to it. It must develop and open up the place. If you’re building a bridge within a city, maybe it’s because there’s heavy traffic and you want people to get from one place to another quicker.

Some of the bridges seem to have been constructed deliberately against some particular people. At least, there’s a place called Dikoko, where Igbo traders are many. Most of the bridges, at least two or three of those bridges, were built in targeted areas where the Igbo community is predominant. He totally destroyed their shops; destroyed their entire livelihood around the area. He displaced them completely. They were uprooted from that area, because he had been trying to relocate them for years. The bridge was an opportunity. The entire Igbo community in Rivers State is against the government, because they feel they have been targeted – physically targeted for destruction.

But why’s there no criticism from the opposition party?

I keep saying we’re in a different kind of election. Everybody has not understood yet that this election is a bit different – before you could just climb up to a podium and you could just say whatever you wanted to say. In this particular election, you need to meet people face to face, not just on the pages of the newspaper; you need to go to their area and hear them out. I have been to each of those areas whether it’s the Mechanic Village, Diobu; whether it’s at the waterfront communities to sit down and ask them about their needs and aspirations. This is one aspect of the strategy.

The second aspect that has been burning is the issue of the level of poverty that we have seen at the grassroots. And the poverty is driven from two aspects. The first aspect of it is that no economic empowerment is coming into that area. Without development and empowerment, people are further driven into poverty. The second aspect is when you deliberately begin to remove education, health indices that help people to move forward, you create a problem. This is one of the things we’re seeing.

So, I’m seeing all of these things in rural areas outside of the riverine communities. I am seeing it because I’m sitting down and I’m talking with the people one on one. There are areas best described as ungoverned cities. In fact, they’re ungoverned cities. There’s no presence of government there. They’re governed by themselves. They have their own court system. They have their own police system. They have their own enforcement system. They’re on their own, despite all the rhetoric (by the government). This is the real Rivers State. Now, these are the real people that we have been speaking to.  When you’re doing that kind of campaign, it will take time.

You have to go, sit down with them, hear what they’re feeling and then convince them that this is not just talk; that you’re actually listening to them. That’s why people started talking about the civil service; the entire civil service has not been promoted for years. They’ve not been paid gratuity. All sorts of things happening, including salaries being withheld. The civil service has become comatose. So, we have a government that doesn’t respect the civil service. The government that does not feel the civil service is part and parcel of whatever it is doing. Staff’s morale is at the lowest. To make matters worse, the PDP governorship candidate is a civil servant. In the period when everybody was not promoted, his own promotion was accelerated from an administrative staff to permanent secretary in about four years. So, you have people who’re angry in the system.

This is a pathetic picture you’ve painted. Looking in from the outside, listening to the governor speak on the podium, it is easy to assume he has done so much. Human capital development is important for any nation or state. Since you’ve identified this as one major problem, tell us how you plan to reverse the situation?

Any kind of project that does not take into consideration how to improve human beings in education, in health, in productivity is going to be a problem. And when you do it in a way that’s not evenly spread across the state, then, you begin to have issues that we have. So, some of the things that we need to take into consideration,  is,  how do we make education more accessible to all the people. Because if you get into the university system today, for example,  the state university now has an unwritten quota whereby they admit more Ikwerres, more people from Ikwerre than anybody else.

So, we have to balance it. What do we need to do? Two things: the first aspect of it is that we must begin to bring business back to Rivers State. There has been a flight of business dealings over the last seven years. People have left; they just packed up and they bolted away. We have to bring them back in because once we bring them back, the jobs begin to come in and competition is good for human capital and rural development. Places like TransAmadi have to be revived; it used to be very industrious. It was the production and productivity hub but it’s dead today. We have to bring it back. Next, we have to develop new areas. Port Harcourt is the only city in the entire Rivers State. One of the things we must do is to develop new cities.

How did you feel, when the court annulled your candidacy?

It was just a repetition of what happened in 2019. This for me was a pointer to what was coming. The government had the judiciary in its hands and it was clear it would be a tool that it was going to use. And so, from the beginning, we made sure that everything that’ll be done and the evidence that’ll be brought forward will be extremely difficult to controvert. So, we’re careful. We were determined not to flout any rules of campaigning, because we knew they were going to go to court and we also knew within the judicial system in Rivers State, there were certain courts that when they pass the case to, with that judge in that court, all hope for us would be lost.

The strategy for us was knowing that we could not control nor  could we influence how the cases would be assigned and we knew that the government had the leverage in assigning cases to judges that are friendly to them. We decided that our own strategy would be that, for that judge to make a judgment against us, he would have to create something that will put him in a bad light. That was exactly what happened. The judge didn’t go ahead to do it, however, they broke down the cases into several ones targeting various candidates. We made sure they could not use any technicality loophole at the high court to upend us.

People say they have not been feeling you. When will they start to feel you?

They already have. Two things were brought forward: the executive orders were used to silence opposing voices and parties. Now, it was a build-up. In 2015, one of the things they used massively against APC into the 2019 election was the war of attrition and violence. This executive order was intended to provoke. If you put up banners and billboards, they’ll break them. We complained to the police and we were told to monitor the vandals, arrest them and bring them to the station. We knew there is a system geared towards provoking us. We wrote to the police informing them about our plan to carry out a peaceful protest to condemn the government’s executive orders.

Police said we could not protest but told us to go to court to challenge the executive orders. We went to court. We went to court; an executive order is not a pre-election matter. It’s not even an election matter as far as the judiciary is concerned. So, we went to court and soon realised the case would likely drag for a long time. We decided there was no point continuing on this matter. We concluded that they’re afraid of us and they’re using every means to keep us quiet but what they cannot do is stop us from going to meet people door to door to tell them why they must vote for us.

How have the executive orders 21 and 22 affected your campaign?

The only damage it has done is that it has denied the entire Rivers State the campaign. There’s no campaign going on in Rivers State by anybody at all. However, the beauty of the situation is that it creates avenues for you to be different. The strategy we started with is the correct strategy, giving us an advantage of meeting the people one on one and starting the campaign with the rival party.

Let’s say you win and become the governor, will you revoke the executive orders?

Immediately! It’s dead on arrival. It’s an abuse of power. It’s wickedness. It denies people the right to hear, even the right to choose. It denies people even the freedom of association. It denies people even economic benefits arising from campaigning.

There are allegations that individuals who do not support the Rivers government’s political choices get their C of Os revoked, especially prominent individuals. Is it true and what’s your take on that?

Let’s take certain people who have been prominent in PDP. Austin Opara, Sekibo and so on, including Uche Secondus. These are people who form the core of PDP. They’re the backbone of PDP. There was an imposition by the governor. All the forms were bought by the candidates. Hon Farah was going to contest, they told him, don’t contest. He said I’m coming. It has been determined a long time ago that it must go to the riverine community.

Danagogo, the secretary to the state government, wanted to contest. These are prominent Kalabari people, who wanted and had a right to contest. He denied them the right to contest. Farah’s case was even worse. He arrested him, threw him in prison until the process was over. Once that process happened, this particular group now decided that they would not succumb to Wike’s imposition and he decided to crush anyone in his path by revoking their C of Os. This is not governance.

If Wike could deal with his own party men to that extent, how have you, in opposition, been able to carry on? How does this make you feel as a Rivers person?

Rivers people have become very ashamed of their governor. Many people outside the state wonder what’s wrong with the governor. It has brought the respectability of the office down and so, there is the need to restore the dignity of that office. I think more importantly, personally, as a candidate and for the APC as a whole, what it has shown people is that this is not the kind of government that they want. A top politician told me that ‘we don’t have democracy in Rivers State’ and that ‘our governor is called emperor’.

This has opened the eyes of the people, I think they need to get out of this oppressive fear. There’s no hotel in Rivers State that will agree to host anything that’s PDP. I understand the oppressive fear business people are going through in Rivers, because the governor can bulldoze their properties in one day for publicly associating with his perceived opponents. And I told the business people, don’t associate with me publicly but I guarantee them that my administration won’t let them operate in fear.

I was going to petition INEC when I saw the list on the RAC (registration area centre) PHALGA, Port Harcourt local government. All the hotels are PDP-owned hotels. INEC won’t realise this when they were picking the places. So, we’re petitioning them. You’re picking a critical part of the election process and put in a hotel that belongs to diehard Wike people.

Let’s talk about your frontline opponent, who is a PDP member. Not much is known about him; he’s not known to speak to the public. Have you heard him talk?

If you go through any of the APC platforms, our pictures of meetings, you will see pictures of me with various personalities. But you will never find one picture of him and me together. We have never been in the same environment. I have never seen him. We have never seen each other. He may know me. We have never met at any function and never had any conversation. There were events we were both invited to attend but I had never seen him attend them. So, what does this tell you? It tells you that there’s a deliberate plot by PDP in Rivers State to hoodwink the people and smuggle in somebody they don’t know. There are billboards of him everywhere in the state. So, when it comes to the advertising of him as a character, he’s everywhere. When it comes to hearing him, people have never heard him. What’s he bringing to Rivers State, they don’t know. What does he represent as an individual? They don’t know. How does he sound? Is he aggressive? Is he quiet? They don’t know.

Is it because he was declared wanted by the EFCC?

I don’t know why he’s in hiding. But he definitely is in hiding. He was to be picked up by the EFCC; its operatives came to arrest him. They picked up EFCC operatives. I have never heard that kind of thing before. How do you pick up EFCC operatives? And they didn’t do anything about it. EFCC will have to answer that question. If you check EFCC’s website, he’s a wanted man. The Code of Conduct invited him, because they discovered billions of naira and assets that were not declared by him.

As a public servant, he was still, I don’t know whether he’s stopped now, operating as a candidate; he was still operating as an auditor-general or accountant-general all through that process that he’s a candidate. While still holding office and doing all of that, Code of Conduct went through the process and discovered billions and told him to come and answer questions regarding the discovery. He ignored them. If somebody as a candidate is already breaking the rules of good governance, when he becomes a governor what should people expect?

It appears Wike is desperate to railroad him in and then continue to control him when he becomes governor. How does this affect the psyche of an average Rivers person?

I think that’s where the APC comes in. When you think about it, I think our role is beyond vying for governorship. We see things that most of the people may not be able to see. Unfortunately, things like the executive order and other governmental restraints make it difficult for us to bring the story out as we would like to do for everybody. And then, there’s a way that you speak that you will be heard. We have been hamstrung as a party, APC, in Rivers State, that once you start, you’re accused of inciting violence. So, we’re careful and what we’re left with at the end of the day is a moral obligation that we must prevent Rivers State from continuing in this manner.

For us, we need to work twice harder than the opponents. They have money and they have deployed it massively. The kind of money that Rivers State has spent on this election alone, if they have taken a quarter of that money and put in education, put it in health; if they had put in social welfare, in poverty alleviation, in productive infrastructure, we’ll not be where we are today. Rivers electorate is a bit more aware and has become a bit more vibrant than in previous election cycles.

One can expect pockets of violence by diehard party members. But this election will be decided by a new crop of voters and those ones will be threatened by violence. So, the key to us and INEC is to ensure there’s no violence. Two hundred thousand people have been employed by Rivers State government to ensure that there will be chaos if it is not going in their direction. We will work to ensure that they’re either kept away from the polling booths or they enter into an agreement that will allow elections to hold peacefully.

Is it true Wike could not pay the N30,000 he promised them and that  last time, he was only able to pay 700 people out of the 200,000?

You know something has happened; I keep saying this election is a God factor. This is a different election. I don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria. But for some reason, CBN decided to wake up and came up with a policy regarding the naira redesign. It’s a challenge politically. But I am for good governance.

How confident are you that you’ll defeat the PDP candidate, with the limited resources you have and the draconian rules by the Rivers government?

The short and direct answer to that is: I’m extremely confident. Every day that goes by gives me more confidence. The amount of money PDP in Rivers State has spent and efforts made to stop me from running tell me one thing from the beginning: that I’m the biggest threat that they have. APC in Rivers State, with me as the governorship candidate, has been the biggest threat, giving them sleepless nights. Number one, I remember the bully analogy. A bully is one who makes a lot of noise, creating a scene but he cannot stand it when they stand by.

I’m not going anywhere. I’m not giving them an inch. They think that we’re running. We’re not running and we’re not afraid. They don’t want our voices to be heard. You started this interview by asking when we are starting our campaign. Believe me, we have already started. The jingles are on air. The billboards are there that they’re tearing down and the posters are coming out; the rallies are coming and all of that. The people are ready for the change.

In a nutshell, are you saying the Rivers people are ready for ‘change’?

The Rivers people are ready. They’ve been ready for a while and now we’re offering them the option that they must choose.

The abandonment of the monorail is a major issue. What do you think?

There are many things that have been abandoned, not just the monorail. There are schools that have been abandoned; health centres were abandoned; farms and plantations were abandoned, etc., even scholarships. There were many students that went abroad that the Rivers government was paying their fees, and they were abandoned too. So, there are many things that were abandoned.

The Rivers government has been making big donations to different states and projects by individuals. Will you probe these?

I don’t know if probe is the right word to use because when you spend so much time looking into things like that, you can’t do what you promised to do. Some of the things that we’re going to do is that we’re going to stop that frivolous giving away of Rivers money to all and sundry. In the process of governance, if we discover some things that we must recover, we will take action.

Let’s come to national politics. Wike has been having shadow meetings with several presidential candidates, concentrating more on the APC standard-bearer. He has been trying to strike a deal with Tinubu and news came out a few days ago that he had actually struck a deal, which they both tried to deny. Whether there’s a deal or not, where does this leave you, because he would not strike a deal with him if he doesn’t get something in return?

First of all, it does not put me at a disadvantage and this is what I have made people to understand. Two is, there are two elections here. If there’s an election process that I have come to appreciate well, it’s this election process, not like the other ones, in 2019, 2015, 2011 and the rest. Before now, people just vote for a party, not minding the candidates at the state and national levels. That’s different now. Wike is PDP. Under normal circumstances, there’s what’s called anti-party movement. You can’t be in a party and you go about to talk to another party, you would have been thrown out of the party.

Today, you find people going from their party to negotiate with another party and their party cannot expel them. What does that tell you? It tells you that we’re no longer playing party politics. We’re now in the politics of personal preferences. Our presidential candidate is packaging a deal for himself that will guarantee him to be voted for to a large extent in the state. That’s the political strategy for him and I don’t have a problem with that. It doesn’t affect me at all. They’re two different elections. If my presidential candidate wins, APC has won. So, what happens two weeks later? For me, it’s not a problem. PDP in Rivers State is where APC was when we had so much infighting that nobody knew where you were standing.

Lastly, what’s your message to the Rivers people?

Time is no longer on anybody’s side. We’re now seeing the finish line. We’ve turned that bend and we’re now seeing the finish line. The decision that you make now is going to affect our future. Making that decision now, I want you to think about two things: how much have you benefitted from the government in the last seven to eight years? That’s number one. Number two, what type of government do you believe is going to make a difference in you moving forward? And the final one is, Rivers State where it ought to be today when you compare it to other states in Nigeria?

The first aspect of it, I think you’ll find that you’re not in a good place. Second, that you need a different type of government; third is, you’ll find out that Rivers State ought to and must have been competing if not outdoing or outcompeting Lagos State. We’re not in the same place. I want to give you that guarantee that my administration will do everything to ensure that Rivers State becomes a destination of choice, a country within a country that will compete with the best that Nigeria has to offer.

Rivers State has what it takes and I have what it takes to deliver that but we must work together to achieve it. So, vote for me as your governor and you’ll see that within four years, you’ll be proud of who you have as a governor and what your state has achieved. My business friends, you know you’re my constituency. I understand that you’re afraid. But fear does not grow business. What I want to assure you is that for those of you that have left this space, I want to give you the guarantee through this platform that you will have a governor that understands you and wants to bring you back.

Rivers State has business opportunities. I can identify them. I know them and I know what you need and I want to give that to you. For those of you that are still in the state in spite of everything, then, I want to assure you that you’re my first point of contact such that we can use you, use your resilience, use your knowledge in the state to attract others to come and improve the state. So, don’t be afraid even though fear is what is given. Your fear and hope are secure with me. Your business is secure with me. We can grow together. God bless you!