I won’t dissipate energy chasing real or imagined criminals or looters – Otti, governor-elect

The governor-elect of Abia State, Alex Otti, who was the candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the March 18 election in the state, says he would probe the outgoing administration of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) under the leadership of Governor Okezie Ikpeazu. The former Group Managing Director of Diamond Bank Plc, speaks on good governance and other issues in this interview on Channels TV Politics Today, monitored by Linus Aleke

A crowd of supporters trooped out in the streets of Umuahia to celebrate your victory at the poll, how did you feel when you saw that while driving into the state capital?

Well, I was quite happy with the way people received the declaration and the return of our party and myself as the winners of that election. People trooped out in their thousands and it was difficult to move in Umuahia. Don’t also forget that Umuahia north which is now Umuahia urban was where we had the highest number of votes during the elections. What it shows you is that people are consistent with what they want. In 2015, we ran this race and we won the election, but it was stolen. It would have been difficult to run for the third time if the reasons I had decided to run in the first place had been dealt with by the outgoing administration. But what we see is that the decay is even getting deeper, and the rot is getting worse. Salaries have not been paid for several months and years, pensioners have not been paid for about 56 months. So, people are tired and they needed change. Interestingly, the same thing that happened in 2015 was going to happen again, one local government in the state is used to commit electoral fraud and manipulation and that is Obingwa Local Government Area. This time around the BVAS was bypassed, in a few wards, and results were written and these results kept mutating, as additional local government collated the result from Obingwa changed. It was 81,000 in the first place and that is why, in the original result sheet, you will still see, the total number of accredited voters in their imagination as 81,000. From there it went to 86,000, and from 86,000 it went to 92,000 until it got to 180,000. But by the time INEC intervened and called for electoral materials to be brought to Abuja for a review, INEC found out that there were only 27,400 accredited voters in Obingwa, and based on that they also found out that PDP scored 9,900 votes against 108,000 they claimed, while we scored 3000 plus votes in Obingwa. And the INEC returning officer pronounced us the winner, leading with over 97,000 votes. So, what came to my mind was that these people are consistent, they know what they want. And I almost wept, giving the thunderous ovation from our people. It just came out in a way that actually move emotions and for me, I had always wanted to develop the state and I had always wanted to ensure that there is infrastructure and that the state is run very well. And if I had wanted to do that, given the emotions that were expressed by voters, I will even do more, I guess I will leave it at that.

How did you receive the call by the outing governor of your state on opposition parties, not to disturb you with litigations but to allow you to concentrate on the business of governance?

When I saw that I was initially surprised given the posturing of the governor, before the election. I had called on him to give peace a chance. I had called on him to de-militarise his local government, Obingwa, where INEC staff were held hostage for 36 hours, where my agent, i.e. Labour Party agent for the local government was battered and left to die. And we had to make an emergency arrangement to move him to the hospital. He is still laying critically ill. When I saw him a few days ago, I was touched. So, I called on him to ensure that the process was transparent and that the will of the people as expressed in the ballot boxes should not be tampered with. So, I felt he was very gracious with the statement and I thank him, even if he realized it late. But then, it is better late than never. Just like he has indicated in his statement, a lot of my opponents, the candidate of APGA, Prof. Ibe, was the first to concede defeat and called on INEC to conclude the collation and declare LP the winner. He felt that the delay that we are all privy to was not necessary. Because at that time, 16 local governments had been collated and I was leading with a clear 94,000 vote margin. Then, he was followed by Bishop Johnson Onuoha, who was also the candidate of APC, and Bishop Emeka Nwankpa also followed suit by calling on INEC to declare the remaining results and announce me the winner. A few other candidates have also done the same. So, if we have many of the candidates conceding defeat, I believe that they will not turn around and engage in the litigation process which can be distracting. But the reality is that when elections are not seen to be fair and transparent when the process was seen to be compromised, it becomes difficult to ask people not to engage or be involved in litigations. So, it is always good to stand for the right things and do the right things. And like the torrent of enforcement and support and concessions that are happening, because in virtually all the local government except one and that is Obingwa local government where PDP rigged, every other result that came out was consistent with the will of the people. The direct answer to your question, I believe that there may not be a lot of litigations and there would not be a lot of distractions. So, I thank the governor for being gracious.

Are you going to probe the outgoing administration?

If you do not look deeply you will not understand. So, I will look deeply but what will I do with my findings? My findings will be for me to understand and know the depth of the rot. There is no doubt that there are few things that do not even require that you look deep to understand. We don’t need to look deep to know that the doctors that are on strike today have not been paid for the past 26 months. You don’t need to look so deeply to understand that pensioners in the state, have been owed their pensions and allowances for the past 56 to 57 months. We don’t need to look deeply to find that Aba which was supposed to be the commercial and manufacturing hub of the state is in ruins. You don’t need to look deep to know that the whole state is like a garbage yard. Neither do we need to look deeply to find that Umuahia, which is supposed to be the state capital is a glorified village. We don’t need to look deeply to find out that our schools are in ruins. Our hospitals are mere consulting clinics. So, there is a whole lot that has gone wrong with the state. Of course, statistics will also help us, understand that a state which was handed over in 2015, with a debt profile of about N34.5bn, owes as of December 2021, about N290bn. Maybe we need to look deeply to know, what exactly it was as of December 2022. But then, all these are problems that we can solve. We are prepared, we had already articulated what we are going to do in our manifesto. One of the major things that we have to do is to ensure that we prepare the state for business. As at same December 2021, the ease of doing business index shows Abia state ranking 32 out of 36 states in the federation, and what that means as I had always maintained, is that if there is an investor, whether local or foreign and he wants to invest in Nigeria, there are 31 other states to look at who will take priority over Abia state. So, we need to quickly work on our ranking in this respect, to a single digit. The reason I am looking deeply is to understand. Quite frankly, I know that the enormity of work that is required in Abia is a lot and I would not want distractions. I had also, stayed here long enough to know that whenever you start a probe, you will begin to get distracted, and by the time you are done with the probe and you probably have a report which would have indicted a lot of people. The process now begins and that process will be going to the high court, from the high court to the court of appeal, and from the court of appeal to the Supreme Court. There was a former governor whose successor actively wanted to prosecute, and it took him 12 years to secure a conviction, at the federal high court and six months after the conviction was reversed by the appeal court. So, I would not like to use the four years and another four years that I believe Abia people will give me to be chasing enemies.

So, what you are telling the outing administration is to leave with any stolen funds, so as not to be distracted in governance, but go and steal no more, is that going to be the case?

Well, with a little modification, if you have stolen any money and it is still with you, please return it. But I am not going to dissipate energy chasing real or imagined criminals or looters, I will not allow corruption, I will not allow our money to be shared. I will like our money to be used to work for our people. So, that is the modification that I will like to make.

What will you do in the area of cutting the cost of governance?

I have time and again spoken out about the cost of governance being a major problem in the country and it applies to the federal government as well as it applies to the state government and local government I believe that my presidential candidate did very well in Anambra state because he reigned in the cost of governance. And that is the same kind of model that we are going to run in Abia. There are only a few jobs we can create in the public sector, so, when we are appointing 12,000 personal and special assistants who don’t have an office but collect money at the end of the month. We are just, creating problems for ourselves. So, we are going to run a very lean government, we are going to cut our coats according to our size. We believe that it is the private sector that should be supported to create jobs. And whatever it takes to support the private sector we would do exactly that. We are not going to run a bogus government. We are not going to get ourselves involved in the very high cost of travel. There are states that I look at their number and discovered that they signed that N2bn was spent within a year to charter private gets which does not make sense. I discovered that a lot of money is spent buying a lot of expensive wines and champagne, which is also not responsible. So we are going to run a lean government, we are going to reign in the cost of governance, so that we will have enough money released to support governance.

Do you think you would have won this election if not for Peter Obi?

Let me start by responding to the slogan of our party that “we no de give shishi,” Labour Party does not give money, but that does not mean, we would be unreasonable. No, far from it, we would be very reasonable. Peter Obi is also very reasonable, he does not just throw away money. Any time that there is something that needs to be done with money, he will ensure that he gets maximum value for that money and that may include going to the market to price things himself. In one of the engagements we had, he said that he would not buy fuel if he was not seated in the car. Maybe he overdid it but that was the kind of thing we need to do if we want to cut the cost of governance. Now, to the question of if I would have won, without Peter Obi. Well, let me draw your attention back to 2015 when I ran under APGA, there was no Peter Obi and there was no presidential candidate, we have it on record that I won that election by a landslide. So, at the time we are joining Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi had not joined the party and we did not know that he was coming to LP. And it took about a week before he called me and said that he has just purchased the presidential nomination form and he was coming to LP. So, we were prepared to fight the way we fought in 2015, to ensure that we win. So, the votes we garnered in Abia could have been helped by Obi may be the margin could have been smaller that is why it is important to always acknowledge Obi because he came to Abia about four times to campaign for us. Even before the campaign kicked off, when we did our annual, for the foundation that awards a scholarship every year, he came and he was part of it and that was in July last year, he came again for the flag off of our campaign that was in November, he came again and yet again. So, I think he has done well for us, both obedient and himself, they did very well to support us. That was why, even in the first election, out of the eight House of Rep seats, we took 6 and sent some people in permanent retirement from politics, and in the Senate, we had one out of the three and hopefully, we would have another one by the time litigations closes. So, Obi was a strong instrument for our campaign. But I can tell you that we had won elections before in Abia state without him and since things had gotten worse between 2015 and this time, I believe we still would have won.

How are you going to fulfil your campaign promise that you will pay the arrears of salaries and pension within six months, bearing in mind the criticism that had trailed that?

Well, they have the right to their opinions but you know that some of us who are finance men and I had spent the last thirty years of my life putting sense around transactions, finance, and banking put together. So, I know exactly what to do. The first thing that I will like to do and which I have started discussions with is to look at each debt, almost N200bn, and find a way to get some write-off, some debt forgiveness, and finally some restructuring. I will sit down with the lenders I had already started doing that in the last 24 hours and a lot of them that we had reached are very agreeable to sit down with us and look at that debt again. I may not have proven it, but something tells me that some of those loans may have problems with them, in terms of interest rate, in terms of the exchange rate, and all that. I know that the finance ministry had been occupied by experts and some of my junior colleagues, but again, our people said that an old woman does not get too old to dance and that she knows how to dance. So, I am going to sit down with the lenders and we are going to be talking about how to restructure them. One of the things I had also discussed with a bank CEO is how to now issue a bond and spread out some of these facilities for as long as 30 years, so that we can have a good room to operate. We also intend to bring some sanity into the Internally Generated Revenue of the state. The current government says they collect about N15bn to N16bn annually. It is a beat too low, I also know that the process of collecting IGR in the state is anything, but transparent. So, by the time we introduce technology in collecting taxes, we would be able to generate a whole lot more than that. We have our strategy well thought out and we are sure that we would be able to deliver on those promises.