Ezeokenwa: Dream of APGA’s Founding Fathers Realisable Under My Watch

Savouring his Supreme Court victory in the long-drawn national leadership tussle with a factional group in the All Progressives Grand Alliance, the youthful National Chairman of the party, Sylvester Ezeokenwa, in this interview with Onyebuchi Ezigbo, says he envisions a brand new party driven by the genuine progressive ideology to rebuild the nation. He also expresses optimism that the dream of the founding fathers of party will be realized under his watch. Excerpts:

Flowing from the Supreme Court judgement which validated your leadership after months of crisis, what is the mood of the party?

I would like to be as brief and short as possible; there are no crises in APGA, and that is the only way I can answer the question. What we had was an artificially engineered INEC crisis, which the Supreme Court has delivered its judgement in our favour, and that is why I said that it was no case at all.

As I said before, I placed this blame on the doorsteps of INEC, and I don’t think that I would go further than that. Why I pointed at INEC was that INEC purported to have enforced a non-existent order of court recognizing a total stranger as an officer of the party. That was what happened and if you take up your dictionary and check up the meaning of faction, you will see that when there is a faction, there is presumptively a group in place and that is either a division or disagreement and that group becomes polarized, not when you are a group still intact, coordinated, still united and some strangers who have no business whatsoever with that group goes about shopping for a court order or court judgement to come and take over the structure of that group and when they couldn’t get it, they now sought the intervention of the supposed umpire.

Let me draw an analogy I did to another cleric. Incidentally, I always have discussions with many of them because if you know how the Nigerian system works, the average Nigerian man is deeply religious. And I believe that part of the thing you do to foster development is to try as much as possible to bring the religious leaders in agreement with what our development plans are.

As a political party, we have discussions because they wield religious powers over their followers. And I asked a very simple question, and said as the head of the church, can an adherent of another religious group come with a court order to take over your position? He incidentally called me to see how to settle the issue in APGA. The Constitution is the ultimate working document that regulates whether you are an officer, at the wards, local government, or state or national; it is the same constitution that regulates and is abide by everybody.

The party had a convention as demanded by INEC, and the party notified INEC of the venue for its convention, where executives were elected the following day.

The impostor said he conducted a factional convention, and I said how and under what authority.  The President of Nigeria is Bola Tinubu, and we know the people he contested the election with as Nigerian; you know that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi were all contestants during the poll. Sowore was a candidate, Kwankwaso was a candidate at their various political parties and we knew who got elected. And another day, someone says I have an order from a High Court in Zimbabwe that I am now the President of Nigeria, and everyone just sat back and allowed him to administer the country.

The problem we have in this country is that we condone a lot of madness, and that is why issues like this will keep occurring.

When people ask these questions, I get unnecessarily emotional because we are the enablers of these things. And I blame the media because nobody does inventive journalism anymore, and they should be able to come out and report these things. But sometimes media houses give credence to this rubbish please allow me to use that word. This is a supposed leader, a supposed parent preaching about having a better Nigeria when people can’t come out and say the truth simply because they do not know where the next meal is coming from.

It is sad, very sad, but the answer to the problem that I can tell you is one united progressive family, and we are simply interested in how we can contribute our quarter to nation-building, and that is our ultimate vision.

Primarily, we are Nigerians. There is always what the Anambra governor says, and when he does it, I get emotional. He says, “There is the reason why you and I were made to be Nigerians”. You could have as well come from Chad, if you believe that there is a supreme being who pilots the affairs of humans, then you can find out why God made you a Nigerian instead of a Swedish.

And if you can find out that Divine purpose, that is the only way you can contribute your quarter to nation-building, and that is what all of us in APGA are doing.

And we have consistently tried to show Nigeria what we can do, using Anambra State as a model. Unarguably, one of the most popular politicians in Nigeria today is Mr. Peter Obi, and while people shout Labour Party up and down, I just want to remind them that Peter was a product of the APGA School of Good Governance.

How stable is APGA presently and what plans do you have to improve on the fortunes of the party?

We are firmly in control of the party and we have about 30 other national officers elected along with myself. We are bound to be in office untill the next convention in 2027. If he feels so compelled, because I don’t know what is in his mind, because a man who is trying to enthrone disorder in a political party, cannot have anything worthwhile as his agenda. Because if you are serious about making positive change, then you cannot attempt hostile takeover.

It is that simple, and so if he feels so compelled, he is at liberty to first of all go down to his ward to register as a member because that is the first precondition then you can now aspire to vie for any office. Incidentally all the offices as enshrined in the party constitution are free. Even you yourself when registered and feel compelled you can aspire to be the Chairman of the party tomorrow. This is what is accrued to the members of the party.

But I can tell you with all confidence, that we don’t have any issue in the party I have repeated it severally and with the good work Governor Soludo is doing in Anambra state, I see nothing that will stop his re-election.

In 2021, before he came into office, he won 19 out of 21 local government areas in the state. And with the monumental achievement he has recorded in virtually in all the local governments. You see when sometimes people read his CV, I wonder if it is in this country that such person exist.

Because everyone knows the economic situation of the country, what inflation has done to the naira, and invariably to the performance of most Governors in the country because today, most Governors just exist to pay salaries. Yes it is a monumental achievement for a Governor in Nigeria to be able to pay salaries regularly and there are states with a salary backlog of about 30 months. Again, an acceptable norm is new Governor retrenching workers employed by his predicessor. So when Soludo came in he did rather employed over 12,000 workers in addition to the one he met on ground at the current minimum wage of N70,000 and he has stated implementation. In addition to that, he has thousands of projects littered all over the place most of them nearly completed, as at the last count, we have about five hundred and something kilometers of roads fully tarred and upon these, not even a kobo has been borrowed and you said if a man in his right senses will go and face such man in an election, and I won’t be such peron.

What are your plans to advance the fortunes of the party?

You know, as a political party, there are limits to what you can do. Before I came on board, I have a program for the party which I call ‘DRIVE’ principle. And that forms the core mandate of what we set out to achieve in office. First of all D stands for discipline.we felt that the best way to grow the party, is to foster the culture of discipline within the party.

How do you respond to an alleged concentration of APGA chairmanship in Anambra state?

I can tell you something, while we are trying as much as possible to foster a national political party, we equally have to be wary of the risk you run. Because you must juxtapose these arguments side by side because the leaders of your party go a long way in determining the faith of the party.

So, you must be sure of the level of commitment one has to the party and probably that is why the party has decided during the last convention because one mantra that we have all heard, when we were little, was that the youths are the leaders of tomorrow and you keep seeing old men being recycled in various positions of leadership.

And APGA as a political party decided to take the bull by the horns by electing very young set of national officers and so instead of talking the talk, we decided to walk the talk but at the same time as I said, everything that you are doing you must be very careful not to derail your achievement and that is where passion, commitment and understanding comes in.

So you must be sure that if you are handing over the leadership of the party to any individual, such individual or individuals must be people who are committed to the ideals of the political party.

Sadly enough, it appears much of this concentration is in the South East. This is not an indictment of other regions. Probably, their historical issues and alignment might show where their allegiance is. Just like we all know, APGA is a party that has been riddled with all manner of crises since its inception, and at times I believed it was deliberate to stifle the growth of the party, for every single time we had ten steps forward, we got some eight backward as a result of one court issue or the other.

And I can start from the beginning; not long after the party had been registered after the 2003 election, an attempt was made by the then National Chairman. I am sorry to say this may be an indictment on his person. Probably, if he had continued as the national chairman at that time, Mr. Peter Obi wouldn’t have succeeded with his matter at the tribunal because allegations were made then and there were substances to those allegations that he had connived with the man who was declared then as the duly elected Governor to compromise the case of Peter Obi at the Tribunal and consciously, he had called some witnesses that were meant to testify at the tribunal to threaten them, which led to some members of his working committee to move in and suspend him and ultimately to expel him in a bid to salvage the party the matter at the tribunal and that was what led to the success of the party in 2006 and the swearing-in of Peter Obi as Governor.

 We expected that the man would have shown some remorse, rather, he became emboldened in 2008/2009. He tried again to resurrect bid for the National Chairmanship of the party, and that has given rise to APGA running in circles when it comes to crises in 2004/5. We had another one in 2008/9. We have 2009/13. We have 2019, so it seems like a quadranial event for APGA. This is the appropriate time to answer this question of yours; the crises we see in the party are not necessarily a result of the 2027 elections.

I don’t think so because the party is still trying to build rather, there is an attempt to kill the party by some elements. The ungodly elements that we have in Anambra state are the only state APGA is controlling because the only way to terminate APGA is to ensure that the party loses its control of Anambra. So there are people whom I call political merchants. They have no recognizable and legal source of livelihood other than looking for where to foster trouble in political parties. And we have a handful of them, and so for the right price, they are willing to proceed to any court in the land, even if it is in the remotest village, to get an order.

So that is the peculiar problem the party is facing. If you notice APGA’s pattern, it doesn’t always arise during the presidential election. In 2009 it arose pre election of 2010 of former Governor Peter Obi, in 2013, it arose ahead of the Governorship election in the same year, the same thing happened in 2017 and around the month of March, or April, one Agbaso went to a high Court in Enugu state to obtain an order that he was the Chairman.  As at that time, the man was not even a member of APGA.

You see there is no kind of madness I have never seen in this country. He got a court order even when he was not a card carrying member of the party. The worst part of it is that the Supreme Court has consistently warned that issues bordering on the internal crises of the party are not justifiable, yet these judicial officers continue to tarnish the image of the judiciary.

And because of these few rotten eggs, the judiciary has been called all manner of names and the people forget that we owe our continued existence as one nation, that we owe our democratic stay in Africa and to the world to the Judiciary. Because when the Military held sway, it took courage And very bold Judges to nullify certain decrees, Edicts and decisions made by the military and we shouldn’t forget that most of these Judicial officers paid with their lives.

And so that is why I bulge when people try to make very vie comments against the judiciary. It remains the last hope of the common man and if not for the judiciary, I can tell you for free that APGA is in existence, is because of the Judiciary. Because anytime they go to shop for those orders,they altimatly fail because the Appellate courts will always set it aside. So I am not one of those who condemn the Judiciary because of few rotten eggs, no. I can say it at any time that the party stands today, is because of the Because it would always come to uphold the truth over all manner of falsehood.

Are there fears that the only APGA Governor, Prof Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra state may leave the party ahead of 2027 General Election?

Well I am not a prophet and there is no way I can answer this kind of question properly without being a prophet. I am not Governor Soludo. But if you are talking about the seeming crises we have in the party, then I can tell you that it is a thing of the past. I don’t think you remember that Governor Soludo, is the National leader of APGA.

And as a political party, knowing full well that it is in existence in a country with diverse ethnic groups that most of the negotiations and decisions may be needed to arrive at any political decision and when that quest for Nation building arises, APGA will always be at the fore front of what will benefit the country and the man to lead the discussion, is the National leader of the party, who incidentally is Governor Soludo you are talking about.