A Peoples Democratic Party [PDP] chieftain, Chief Ebenezer Babatope, speaks on the raging controversy over the planned removal of oil subsidy, presidential committee on constitutional reforms and a number of other contentious issues. KUNLE ODEREMI, JACOB SEGUN-OLATUNJI and SAHEED SALAWU conducted the interview. Excerpts:

Recently, a national newspaper quoted you as speaking against the removal of oil subsidy at a public lecture in Ibadan. What do you think is the way out now that the debate is still hot?
Thank you for that question. Firstly, let me correct that wrong notion; it is not true, I never made any categorical statement on the oil subsidy removal in the lecture I delivered to the Oyo State League of Veteran Journalists. I never said that Federal Government should remove or should not remove oil subsidy. What I said was that I call on the government to sponsor a conference on the oil subsidy removal to be led by the Nigerian Economic Society [NES]; the proposed conference will have those who had expressed one view or the other on the debate participating, so that at the end of the day, reasonable conclusion would be arrived at to assist the government in meeting the challenges of the fuel subsidy removal.

I equally suggested that the proposed conference will come out with solutions that will gladden the hearts of Nigerians about government intentions or plans to remove the subsidy or deregulate the oil sector of our economy. Be that as it may, I want to appeal to the organised labour, the Civil Society groups and individuals threatening thunder and hell fire over the fuel subsidy removal to calm their nerves and recognise the fact that the government has continued to raise the consciousness of Nigerians about problems associated with oil subsidy removal for a very long time. It is my strongly held view that at the end of the day, Federal Government’s genuine intentions about the matter will be known by the people and the people will now realise that the Federal Government meant well for the masses.

As a chieftain of the ruling party from the South-West Zone, what is the ongoing effort to reposition the party in the zone for it to regain its  glory ahead the 2015 elections?
We cannot be discussing our strategies on the pages of newspapers. All I can say for now is that we are strategising and when it is time, PDP will bounce back with a big bang in the South-West. Very soon, people will start seeing that. But for emphasis sake, let me point out here that the main reason our party lost to the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in the South-West in the last elections was principally because of lack of unity and internal wrangling among the party leaders. I find it funny when people think that the ACN decisively defeated PDP in the elections. If we were not divided within the party, ACN would have been re-soundly defeated by PDP. I will do a state-by-state analysis of how we lost in the South-West States. Oyo State – the combined votes of the former governor, Adebayo Alao–Akala and Senator Rashidi Ladoja were about 200,000 more than what Senator Abiola Ajimobi scored. Senator Ladoja remained a member of the PDP until a few months to the elections. What I’m saying therefore is that if the votes of Chief Alao-Akala and Senator Ladoja that were PDP had been counted for one candidate, ACN  would  have been seen as a minority party in Oyo State. Besides what I have said, some leaders of the PDP worked for ACN against us. So, the remaining votes accredited to Senator Ajimobi in the election were certainly inclusive of the votes of the PDP leaders who worked against our party’s at the election. A similar thing with the elections of the National Assembly and States’ Houses of Assembly. Nobody could fault Chief Alao-Akala on his tremendous achievements in Oyo, even his critics inside and outside PDP in the state attest to the visible achievements of his administration.

In Ogun State, nobody could fault former Governor Gbenga Daniel for what he also achieved. The PDP lost the state because we could not hold ourselves together. For an example, three political parties – PDP, the Peoples Front of Nigeria (PFN) and the Labour Party (LP), grew out of our party to contest the elections. Till tomorrow, it is clear that PDP is the majority party in the state. Had PDP not been fragmented by internal crises, ACN would never have defeated our party in Ogun.

Now Osun State, we were not suspicious of the evil plot of ACN aided by the now suspended Justice Ayo Salami of the Appeal Court. We did not know that he was going to repeat what he did in Ekiti State in Osun. In other words, our PDP government in the state was stolen and subverted. Secondly, in Osun, we had internal crises and rancour on what we thought would be a governorship election in 2011. What happened to us in Ibadan caught us unawares, but by what we are doing now in Osun, PDP will never allow disunity and rancour to rear their ugly heads again in our fold. We have learnt our lesson; come 2015, ACN will certainly be history in the state.

Talking about Ekiti State, it was the first victim of the evil plot of ACN to use the judiciary in manipulating events in the state. The rest is history. Chief Segun Oni, my brother, was exceptional in the forward-looking administration he ran in the state. By the Grace of God, the Ekiti People will overwhelmingly return PDP to power in the state, come 2015 or thereabout.

Ondo State – the same scenario played itself out in the state, but I’m glad to see that all hands are now on the deck to put our house in order and return South-West to PDP in 2015.

The last local government election in Lagos State had shown that PDP is about to take over the government of the state. No matter the odds, PDP leaders in the state will come together and face squarely the challenges of making our party, the leading force in Lagos State politics. Those, who think that the likes of Bode George, Seye Ogunlewe, Murtala Asorobi, Yomi Finnih, Dapo Sarunmi and other PDP leaders can never work together, will soon discover the futility of their jaundiced views. We are set to come to power in Lagos, come 2015. Finally, we the leaders of the party in the South-West, like I said earlier, have commence strong reconciliatory moves to ensure that we bounce back in glory in the coming elections.

How far have you gone with your ambition of becoming the next PDP  National Secretary?
It is no longer a rumour. It is true, I want to contest the position of the National Secretary of our great party, come next year. This ambition, however, is dependent on some factors. One, if it is true that the PDP had zoned the position to South-West, then it will require the South-West PDP Zonal Executive Committee to officially make a pronouncement on this. Two, the South-West Zonal EXCO will equally alert aspirants to do certain things as a result of such position being zoned to the region; as far as I’m concerned, the party is supreme, whatever the party decides on the matter is final. It is my belief that our party, PDP, must be positioned in a manner that will make it the largest and the best organised party in Africa. There are the African National Congress (ANC) in South-Africa and the Congress Party in Sudan that are formidable just like our PDP. It is my ambition to refocus and re-sharpen the PDP organisationally so that our bid for the leading party in Africa is not challenged by any one. It is also in my blueprint to harness all talents available in the party, viz-a-ziz women, youths, intellectuals and other groups so that the PDP can be a party highly respected and accorded its rightful position of pace-setting in Nigeria and in the black race in general.

Progressive programmes will equally be developed to tap the experience, maturity and age of the party’s elders. It is important to also ensure the completion of a book started by the Dr. Haliru Bello Mohamed-led National Executive Committee of the party on the history of PDP. This will be a practical catechism for all members of the party to carry along in their hands anywhere they go. There are other laudable programmes that will be unfolded as we move ahead in the campaign.

How would you compare the era of political leaders like Chief Obafemi Awolowo and contemporary times?
It will be wrong for us to start to do comparison, because at that time, we had the privilege and the opportunity of working with leaders who had vision, who had foresight, leaders who were courageous, who really fought for the freedom of this country. But now, that is absent. I didn’t fight for Nigeria’s political independence, I was a follower of Papa Awolowo, and many of us were followers of the great Ahmadu Bello, (Nnamdi) Azikiwe, Aminu Kano, C. Okolie, H.O. Davies, Herbert Macaulay and others. But that is missing now, because many of our young men who are in politics now are not prepared to learn. If they are prepared to learn, then we must establish archives which really replenish our knowledge about all these great leaders. At that time, whenever we went for conventions and Papa Awolowo stood there, you knew that you were looking at a man who, in fact, was an embodiment of the history of this country, and whatever pronouncements Papa made went straight to the heart of the problems of Nigeria — the same thing with Azikiwe, the same thing with Ahmadu Bello. But those things are missing now. You see, I am in politics now because I want to keep my life going, I want to be busy. When you are in politics, you are busy. Now, Nigerians, by the elections of 2011, have shown that if they are given the freedom, they would freely choose those who they want, to govern them. But this had never been so. So, I pray to God Almighty to allow our young people who are in politics now to be prepared to learn.

Secondly, all the political parties we have in Nigeria today, including my party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), are not ideological. In those days, the Action Group was socialist in character, National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) was socialist in character, but these days, you have absence of ideology.

But the Soviet Union collapsed even with an ideology.
We are talking in terms of federation. Soviet Union collapsed, Czechoslovakia collapsed, Yugoslavia collapsed, but the Nigerian federation is going on. We thank God for it and we hope it goes on. But, you see, we are not talking in terms of ideology now. Ideology collapsed in Soviet Union because its leaders at that time felt that they should collapse to communism. But that is a different thing about political parties. There must be commitment to the welfare of the poor people

Is there a way we can address some of these issues through a constitutional framework?
We have the National Assembly, we have the state Houses of Assembly and we have other fora by which we can address them. But then the most important thing is for the parties to sit down and examine themselves critically and see how they can advance the political movement of the country to accommodate ideological commitment to the welfare of the people.

You have just been made a member of the Constitutional Reform Committee....
(Cuts in) People have been making mistakes. It is a committee established to review decisions of conferences of 1994 and 2005 and then work out bills of those decisions. It is not a constitutional meeting, but apparently we are going to welcome ideas. At a particular time, the president told us, ‘you can invite nationality groups’ — the Yoruba Unity Forum, Afenifere, Ijaw group, Ohanaeze, Arewa Consultative Forum  — ‘to come and talk.’ We hope that we are going to have the best in that committee, but it is not what many people are thinking; that we are going to subject the Nigerian Constitution to another review.

But people are expressing reservations about what the government is doing. They feel we should go straight to the point and hold the conference.
I have never subscribed to the idea of a Sovereign National Conference for a long time. I covered the constitutional conference of the Republic of Benin for the Nigerian Tribune in 1990 when there was a Roman Catholic priest that moderated the conference. I was in Cotonou, the Beninoise capital for almost four months. You can have a constitutional conference, but to say “sovereign,” then, you ask a question: we have the National Assembly elected by the people, we have the state Houses of Assembly, we have the president, we have the governors, then what is sovereign about the conference you are talking about?  You can have a constitutional conference to address issues, but not “sovereign,” because sovereignty is defined in many other parameters that are different from that.

So, you believe that we will get to where we are going, even with what happened under former President Olusegun Obasanjo and late General Sani Abacha.
The conferences were concluded. I was a member of the Obasanjo constitutional conference in 2005 and we concluded. For example, it was our decision that we should have a single term in this country. I don’t know what happened, but Obasanjo might have had his reasons to say, ‘I can’t bring these things out.’ But our committee, I believe, will be able to unravel all these things and present them back to the government. However, what is important is that in this country, we must thank God that we have already passed the stage where at a particular time, a section of the country believed that the country remained a permanent extension of their private family compounds. There was a time in this country when to be a Yoruba or Igbo man running for the office of the president was wrong. And that is what Papa Awolowo said years ago that one day, an Ijaw man would become the president of the country. Right now, no tribe or group of people can lay claim to feudalist principles to say that some other areas are excluded from power.

The greatest problem we have today is corruption among politicians. How do we solve the problem?
I gave a lecture in Ibadan to the League of Veteran Journalists recently and I suggested that apart from the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), we should have an asset verification tribunal, which will be composed of people who are prepared to fight corruption for Nigerians and which will be set up by an act of parliament, the  National Assembly, and which will make anybody who tells lies there liable to be sentenced to prison for perjury. Corruption is terrible in this country, I must confess to you. That is why Papa Awolowo enunciated three golden principles of public practice. One: don’t enjoy in government, what you cannot provide for yourself in your private life. Two: don’t take gratification from anyone; that the next morning, you will not be able to look straight at the giver’s face. And three: don’t collude with civil servants to defraud the government, for when you do so, you debase the public office you hold and then you compromise yourself. So, I hope that one day, we will be able to solve corruption, even 50 per cent, but right now, Nigeria is a hopeless case.