The National Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Edozie Njoku has been in a leadership tussle with factional chairman, Victor Oye. In this interview with reporters in Abuja, Njoku chides the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for refusing to recognise him as leader of the APGA despite a Supreme Court order. ERIC IKHILAE reports

Why has APGA remained perpetually in a leadership crisis?

Let me answer that very simply. Any party in a country with a rule of law, who has gotten to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has given a judgment and maybe you say the judgment is ambiguous, and it has gone to be enforced by a lower court, and the lower court has said, party move out of the office, you are not the chairman, and INEC don’t recognize him and INEC is still recognizing. INEC is in a better position to answer this question because it refused to obey a Supreme Court judgment that settled the crisis in the party. Why is it interested in prolonging the crisis in the party?

Are you laying the blame on the INEC chairman?

There is a court judgment there from the Supreme Court and the lower court enforcing it, and he’s not obeying it. The question should be, why is he not obeying it?

What is Mahmood’s interest? Is he a member of APGA? He should obey the court order.

When Timipre Silva was removed as the APC governorship candidate in Bayelsa State, he immediately obeyed the order. Is there any order less ambiguous than this order of court? But he obeyed Silva’s order and as soon as Silva won in the Court of Appeal, his name was reinstated. Why don’t you follow that same trend?

But this crisis predates Prof Mahmood’s tenure. The APGA has always had a leadership crisis; there was a time when it had three national chairmen. You were heading one of the factions…

No, I had gone to the UPP. It was Umeh and Okwu. Then, I had left APGA.

Is reconciliation still possible in APGA?

When we won in the Federal High Court, I’m sure you saw it in the media and it was on Arise TV, I said it and I told them that my recommendation to the party was for myself and Oye to step aside to allow us to build the party, by bringing in someone else as the national chairman. But, they all said I was a madman. Till I have now won in the Supreme Court. Yes, we’re very open to reconciliation.

Are you still open to the idea of the two of you stepping aside?

That was then; not any more. I have won the legal battle as the national chairman and I intend to carry on and fight the battle to the end. There is going to be reconciliation. What we need is the recognition to do reconciliation.

There is a perception out there that the APGA has some kind of working agreement with the APC and President Tinubu. What’s your response to that?

If we had a legitimate leadership and it decides that working with the APC will be in the interest of the majority of its people, why not? At the moment, the party has not been built up to the standard in which we in the NWC want to build it; it’s more or less looking like an Igbo party with inverted commas. This is because it has a very big support in the grassroots of the Southeast.

But the question is whether that engagement or whatever they are doing is illegitimate. As far as the Supreme Court is concerned, they don’t have the right to do that. They are using Prof Mahmood to hang on to power. In the true sense of it, they should not be the ones discussing that engagement because the people are not with them. As you can see from the election, they don’t enjoy the support of the people.

What’s your relationship with Governor Soludo?

I don’t have any relationship. I’ve spoken with him for about an hour once and he’s sworn to different people that over his dead body will I be national chairman. But, we’ve never met; I’ve not sat down with him before. Even a very big businessman in Anambra State tried everything to bring us together to negotiate. But, he turned down the offer.

He knows the reason why he doesn’t want to meet me.

Soludo is the only governor currently elected on the APGA platform. What could be the reason why he is against your chairmanship of the party?

He mentioned something about a Catholic bishop going as far as saying that the APGA is an Anambra party. Now, to rephrase your question, to what extent is some religious cabal responsible for Soludo’s obstinate position in the APGA leadership crisis?

You see, I wanted to be very clear on what you were saying. My clearness on that is that there is a very big misconception that even we as Nigerians must grow beyond.

There are 36 states in the country. Until Peter (Obi) became governor, we had nobody. That Alex Oti and Stanley Amuche did not become governors in 2018 on the APGA platform was because of the role that the then-Governor Willie Obiano played.

The party is different from the governor. The governor used the party, no matter what anybody thinks, as a vehicle to get to where he is. So, he should use his position to destroy the party.

One thing people must learn is to stop taking stipends from the governor. Work with him and be straightforward with him; treat him with decency, even if you don’t like him.

But the party must be run like a party. If he wakes up from his sleep and feels that he doesn’t like my way, he doesn’t have anything to do with the price of garri. We have won at the Supreme Court and I’m the national chairman of the party. So, it’s not up to him alone to decide who he works with; he’s not the party.

The APGA is supposed to be a national party because the secretary is from the north. Why is the crisis restricted to the Southeast?

No, the crisis is not restricted to the Southeast.

But the people that went to court…

Look at the names of the people who got this judgment. Otunba Latif, Ogida, and Alh. Rabiu is the one who got this judgment. It’s not me.

Your tenure will be ending in May; I don’t know whether you will be interested in re-contesting. The current atmosphere in the party may lead to a succession crisis…

When we get to the bridge, we’ll cross the bridge. But the most important thing now is that we’re a country of the rule of law; the judgments should be obeyed. If by then he gets all the judgments against me, then we’re out. You understand? And he has all the resources to do that. But judgments should be obeyed.

That’s the point I came to explain here, that judgments should be obeyed. No matter the sentiments behind it, because we’ve been through a lot with different governors to be able to achieve all these judgments. Is it not the work of God?

So, if the judgments have been gotten, and what it is, it’s for the world to come out and say, obey the judgments because if he has won at the Supreme Court, I wouldn’t be sitting down here talking about what I’m saying. If he had won in this one, I wouldn’t come here and be saying what I’m saying. I would have gone back to my bed and slept.

But the fact that we have won makes it incumbent on him, even if he’s the president, to obey the order. I was not happy to see the CBN governor when he was there lamenting about orders not being obeyed.

So, now, he must learn to obey orders because he will not be there forever. That’s the crux of what I’m saying. I’m not just talking about APGA. The party has its problems, which I believe we will sort out internally. But the most important thing is to obey the orders.

What is your assessment of the current state of the nation?

I just got back from England on January 2. As you know, I’m from the Southeast. I just lamented where we find ourselves as we talk about the state of the nation. I’m sure the president of Nigeria is also lamenting about the state of affairs in Nigeria today. In 2012, we used to take our ATM (from Nigeria) to buy things in England. You could go to the ATM and get money; just as recently as in 2012. We used it to use our ATM card to shop in England and you will get the money at even a slightly better rate than the black market.

Three years after that, when Buhari now came, they stopped and started rationing it; the maximum you could take was 200 pounds. Now, it’s non-existent. But that notwithstanding, most Nigerians can’t afford to travel abroad, so that should not be a norm.

Coming back to Nigeria, you see the level of poverty we have. You see the price of petrol. You see the price of food. You see the price of everything. You ask yourself, how does a normal person survive? If you take a taxi from here to where we were, it’s about a 10, 15-minute drive. In England, it will be about 12 pounds. Do you understand? And then that man will use the 12 pounds, some of it, to repair his car.

But here, the guy told me N8,000 and I’m pricing him N7,000. Do you understand? So, our problem is so endemic. If you look at a new hotel within four years, it will be run down. It will be so people in the eye, that it will eventually run down. You employ someone who’s begging you, telling you that his life depends on the job. In three years, you see his outlook in life has changed.

You go to a church, you see young children eating biscuits, and drinking coke inside the church. It was never like that when I was young. You see, leaving a church, you see children running up and down. Go abroad, you see people standing in the line. But, here, you will see a big man jumping the queue to pay before somebody else at the supermarket. You will equally see your driver driving through red lights. You see all kinds of things. Then, you ask yourself, where did Nigeria go wrong? So if you’re asking about the economy, nobody can ever, that’s a question that should not even be asked because we see daily that it’s in a mess.

You cannot blame President Bola Tinubu; you cannot blame anybody because Nigeria has gone to a stage whereby even our moral standards have all been eroded. A country where the Supreme Court can give a judgment and one man sits in his office and says, I slighted him; I will never give it to him. It’s not his father’s own. It is God that gives power. Eventually, he will give me that, and I will get that recognition because it’s God who gives power, not man.

So, what’s the way forward?

The way forward is that I’m running to be the national chairman of the APGA and my focus is on how to rebuild the party to become a forward-moving party. The question of the way forward in Nigeria would be better addressed by the ministers and the president.

But, in your opinion, what is the way forward in Nigeria?

I have not finished taking the logs out of my eyes, why should I take out the one on Mr. President’s? (The Nation)

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