In this interview with Stephen Ukandu, the candidate of the All Progressive Grand Alliance in the 2015 governorship election, Dr. Alex Otti, speaks on his experiences at the poll, expressing optimism that he will get justice at the tribunal
How will you desribe the governorship poll in Abia State where you lost as a governor candidate?
I have mixed impressions but I must start by saying that my honest belief is that the Independent National Electoral Commission as an institution means well. If not, I don’t think the commission would have introduced the card reader. It wanted to push the maxim that one man should have one vote. So, it was a good innovation even if it has not been perfected. Rome was not built in a day.
I think also that INEC set out to conduct credible elections but just like you get in every human endeavour, there are people in INEC that, in liaison with corrupt politicians, ensured that the free, fair and credible elections that we all yearned for did not happen. I am a victim of the manipulations of the ruling party in Abia State in concert with a few bad eggs in INEC to thwart the wishes of the people.
So in Abia State I will not give INEC a pass mark at all. First of all I believe that a system whereby the Returning Officer of the state recanted after cancelling manipulated results in three local governments based on information available to him, reports by observers, and first hand information by INEC staff themselves. He recanted shortly after he was harassed by the presence of foreign bodies that didn’t have any business in the collation centre like the out-going governor, the National Publicity Secretary of PDP and a lot of PDP bigwigs. I believe that such experience shouldn’t have been in the first place. It casts a lot of aspersions on the process. I do not think that it should be tolerated. It is an electoral malpractice. Imagine if President Goodluck Jonathan barged into the collation centre in Abuja and took away Professor Atahiru Jega.
But has PDP alleged that you imported the dreaded Agureri boys from Anambra State to help you win especially in Aba.
That cannot be correct, and if you know PDP, you will know who will do that. Most people in Abia State are happy with my candidacy. They are happy with the change that I will bring, and they know that the only candidate that has a credible programme to pull Abia State out of the mess it has found itself is me. When I have the people, I don’t need Agureri boys. And the people have clearly told PDP that it had tried its best but its best was not good enough, and that it was time to retire just as the party was sacked at the centre. That is why PDP went into intimidation, blackmail, name calling and all that. You will recall that just before the re- run, PDP went to the very obscene level of bringing out coffins with inscription “vote against PDP and die” and placed them at strategic locations in Aba just to scare voters. And they were truly scared and refused to come out to vote.
PDP also alleged that you induced most of the election observers to speak up for you. Was that correct?
If you know about observers, you will know that you can’t induce them. And if anybody has capacity to induce, it is the PDP and the state government and its candidate. Maybe they were unable to induce them and that is why they are accusing somebody else. Everywhere in the world, people take international observers seriously and it is only Abia State and PDP that will be accusing international observers of being induced. I don’t even know them, talk less of inducing them.
But is the REC not your aunt as alleged by the PDP candidate, Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu?
That shows the quality of people that we are parading in Abia State. If somebody who wants to be governor goes on air and starts telling lies, it is most unfortunate. It casts aspersion on the quality of leadership that you expect from such an individual. These things are easy to confirm. Well, people call it propaganda, but I call it bare-face lies. It is not true. The REC is not related to me in any way. Maybe if you publish this interview and our opponents feel that you have been upright in the way you conducted it, you may eventually end up being my nephew (laughs).
Will you also deny that you induced the REC with a whopping N300m to help you deliver as alleged by the PDP candidate?
If the REC is my aunt and what happened to me still happened, then she must be a fake aunt. The only thing is that when somebody is a bloody liar, sometimes he begins to believe his lies. I thought that they should have stopped at calling her my aunt, but for them to add that I also gave her money, they have punctured the balloon of their lies themselves because it defies logic that I will bribe my aunt to deliver for me. If anybody is in position to bribe, it is the PDP and we are aware of all the places that they carried money to but it is not everything and everybody that you can buy with money. So to answer your question directly, I did not bribe her. Note that this same REC presided over the supplementary election and also presided over the declaration of results where my opponent was declared winner. Maybe he needs to tell us how much he paid her to be declared winner over and above the man that allegedly paid N300m and is a cousin.
Before now, you were very close to the government and the governor of the state. Do you feel betrayed or disappointed by anybody?
I don’t feel that I was back-stabbed. What I feel is that the governor had other interests that I couldn’t serve and to the extent that I was not willing to serve those interests, he wasn’t going to support me. I was actually not left in any doubt that he wasn’t going to support me but I still believe that if the process was allowed to go through in a semblance of transparency, I would have emerged. I won’t deny that I was close to the government because at my level, I needed to be interested in what was happening in my state. I also felt that I needed to contribute my quota towards assisting in alleviating the suffering of my people. So, I did support the government with access to finance and ideas about how to make life better for my people. But that is not to say that I would support every action of the governor or that everything he did was right.
You said you assisted the state government get access to finance. Could you elaborate on that?
In terms of my role when I was in the banking industry in helping the state access finance , I wouldn’t be at liberty to begin to disclose them publicly. But I hope if you go to the governor, he will admit that I was helpful to him.
It was alleged that while you were at the helm of affairs in the banking sector, not too many Abians benefited from your privileged position. How do you want to champion the cause of the people you neglected when you had the opportunity?
I cannot respond to every allegation by the state government but if you want to verify how many people I helped, just take a trip to Diamond Bank and make inquiries. Also go to First Bank and find out how many people I employed. Again if you go to Aba, even with the rot that the state government created, you will see how much of the micro, small and medium enterprises loan that I created. I created about a N100bn loan for our people across the network including the North and the South. It was an eye opener for me. I saw that by giving somebody N50,000 loan, in months the person becomes an employer of labour. I found that our people are very creative and all they needed was support. We were the ones that pioneered creating small scale facilities for businesses that don’t have collateral. My argument was that sometimes when we were asking for collateral, it was a way of saying no to the person because he doesn’t have it. Under my watch in Diamond Bank, we took over Geometrics Power plant in Aba. The bank put in both equity and long term loan of over $500m . The whole idea is that the very day Geometrics begins operations (and it is ready now), PHCN (public power supply) will go off in Aba, and the city will have 24 hours uninterrupted power supply a day. Then our SMEs will come back to life.
PDP also accused you of spending money like the American multi- billionaire, Bill Gates, during the elections. How did you come about your campaign funds? You were also rumoured to have struck a pact with Nigeria’s richest business mogul, Alhaji Aliko Dangote who allegedly helped in financing your campaign with an understanding that you annex the state to him if you had won. How correct are all these?
I don’t know how much money Bill Gates has but the people complaining of spending so much money may be talking about themselves because they were spending the state treasury. They were not paying salaries. A lot of people have been owed for months. Local governments go for joint allocation and come back and do balloting of which LGA to be paid. Pensioners and teachers have not been paid. What was important to them was to spend our commonwealth to win an election. But the good news is that I am not indebted. The other good news is that I didn’t spend what I did not have. The final thing is that there is a tendency for people who don’t have ideas to think that money buys everything. But the truth is that Abia people truly wanted a change. So they didn’t need anybody to spend money on them. But I gave Abia people a message of hope and they looked forward, and still look forward to the day I will assume leadership of this state so that their dreams will be realised. They didn’t need to be given money. We know those who gave money and where they gave the money- how they stood at the polling units and were giving people N1000 to vote for them.
Who were those people that you said allegedly gave money ?
PDP of course. I am not saying that I didn’t spend money but I didn’t spend the kind of money they imagined. But it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have money to spend. I have worked and I have impacted people.
I won’t deny Dangote- he is my friend. But I can assure you that he didn’t even give me a dime. The point remains that Dangote is my friend and will remain my friend but we never had any agreement concerning my political ambition. Punch
