PDP Is United In Abia – Abaribe
Senator Enyinnaya Harcourt Abaribe is the chairman, Senate Committee on Information, Media and Public Affairs. A two-term senator who was deputy governor of Abia State in the Orji Kalu administration, he speaks on his aspiration to govern the state come 2015 in this interview with select journalists. Uchenna Awom was there for LEADERSHIP.

What are the problems the next governor of Abia State will inherit from the outgoing governor?

Let me say that the challenges of development in every state in Nigeria will also be exactly the same that you will have to confront if you are in Abia – underdevelopment, massive unemployment, infrastructure that is not up to par with what you need for a 21st century economy and then of course, the basic ones of education, health, environment and agriculture.

Basically, what I think is the biggest challenge you will to have to face will have to do with all the young men and women who are coming out of schools without a job. First, we will need to deal with how to produce people that are functional in our state at the moment. Abia stands at a very good vantage position being at the top of the whole Niger Delta region and all the ancillary industries in the Niger Delta, the oil and gas and all the other things that go with it and Abia will provide manpower, provide skill set that is already burdened on the ground. Usually, when people want to do anything within the Niger Delta region, they can come to Aba to get it. For specific reasons, all the while, Abia has always had, through Aba, an industrial set up with skilled people, artisans and managerial skilled people who have been doing things locally. Now, what we need to do is to move their skills up and also to be able to train them enough to fit into the manpower needs within the oil and gas region. We think that as a matter of policy, you must be able to move people away from the grammar school literary type education to technical based education now and that you will have to do if you are governor of the state.

Secondly, you must also start to seek newer ways of funding things and you must have to get better ways of doing both internally generated revenue and what comes from the federal purse. For internal generated revenue, what happens today as we have seen, in fact the governor recently, in an interview, also bemoaned the fact that it was so low and there was so much leakages within the system. That means that you will have to deploy technology to reduce leakages and you also now have to find new and innovative ways of doing things and make sure that counterpart findings for the things that come from both multilateral agencies and from federal government, that if you do that, then there are of course other areas that you have to deal with, especially the city of Aba. If you need to increase internally generated revenue, you must have to go to the place where there are industries and where there are people doing business that can pay their taxes. To do that, you have to also show them that what you are doing is in their own interest and for their own benefit. Therefore, you are able to provide for them, physical evidence of what you are doing and get them to buy into it. Then you will get their support and it is that support that Governor Mbakwe used when it was the old Imo State to develop Imo and most of the funding came from Aba actually. So, we are going to have to make Aba a test case for a new government and private sector enterprise.

Of course, I think that given time, you will always have to make your mark and when you make your mark, that is what you go with. That another person has done something and you have to ignore that one he has done, to me, does not help in developing a state. We need to develop our state and we are really in a big hurry to catch up. So, a state where you get N4 billion and you have to compare it with a State where you get N16 billion or N25 billion or N23 billion per month, it means that when you have to do something, you do it in a way that you will get the best value for your money. Of course, you will also have to cut your clothe according to your size. So, the grandeurs projects that are being done in those areas, you may not want to venture into that.



How about the issue of zoning? Has the governorship been zoned to your area? Did consider that before you decided to contest?

As I said, I started my consultations in April; so, between April and May, we went all over the state and concluded it with the party in the state. Ultimately, by the time we completed the consultations in May, June had passed and it was in July that the state party now took the decision to zone the governorship fortuitously to my zone – Abia South zone. So, I could not have come because of the zoning. Actually, I would want to think it was because we had sufficiently told the party the reasons they needed to that made it zone it to Abia South.



There is talk about the governor installing his successor…

Let me say this very unequivocally that at the time when we heard some people making claims of being anointed or so by the governor, I contacted him. I called a meeting of Abia South Senatorial zone, being a political leader of the area, that we needed to deal with that matter. The governor told me that I should please tell the people when I meet with them that he has never anointed anybody and that he didn’t have any intention of anointing anybody. Subsequently, the government of Abia also went on air, on radio and disowned any such statement. I’m sure those statements died down but people who do not have anything to sell themselves with usually try to do reflected glory of saying this man is bringing me. I just call it reflected glory because that means you got nothing yourself to offer when you now have to wait for somebody else to do so.

Also recently, when the governor swore in the transition chairman, he made the same statement and said he was not going to influence anybody; that what he is going to do is to ensure that the field is made in such a way that everybody will have an equal chances of being able to emerge as governor and he said it very clearly that the person who will become governor will be made by three persons – the first person will be God himself because everything that we do as human beings, its only when God wills it; secondly, that he himself as the incumbent will also have a say on how the process is done; thirdly is the party apparatus, that is those within the party who will eventually be the delegates to the congresses that will bring out the nominee.



We have seen from past experiences that the big wigs in Abia find it difficult to work together when the chips are down. It happened in 2003 when we saw divergent views even though they all claimed to be in the same party. The same thing happened in 2007 and it’s been the bane of the party all along. How are you, the leaders of the party, addressing these circumstances as we move closer to 2015?

I think that that matter has already been settled and dealt with by the incumbent governor, T.A Orji. Since 2010 when he came back into PDP, he has been able to weld everybody together; he has been able to bring the different factions of PDP together. So, what we have seen really is that that syndrome of disunity has actually been permanently buried by the way that Governor T.A. Orji has handled everybody. Let me tell you that between 2003 and 2010, for example, several of us never went to Umuahia, not to talk of going to Government House in Umuahia, even though we were senior members of the party. Even though somebody like me was Senator in 2007, we never went there because of the way that the previous incumbent scattered everybody. But today, you can see that anytime there is anything that brings us together, everybody goes to show that disunity has now been permanently buried.