Former Speaker of the House of Representatives and former member of the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Hon Ghali Na’Abba has said in his 16 years sojourn in the PDP, the only regret he has is working for President Goodluck Jonathan’s election in 2011.
Na’Abba who resigned from the party last week, in an exclusive interview with LEADERSHIP Sunday, said over time, he had lost confidence in the ability of Jonathan to lead the country and though he had tried to advice on the need for the proper things to done, his advice was not heeded, hence the decision to leave the party.
“My only regret is partaking in the election of Goodluck Jonathan. I have really regretted being among those who partook in the campaign to have him as the president of this country even though I did it altruistically but I think he has betrayed this country. What he said when we were going to begin was that he would work to ensure and sustain the unity of this country.
“Today, he has become the most divisive president in Nigeria. He has divided Nigerians along religious and ethnic lines. There is no week that he would not go from one church to another, issuing political statements. The Archbishop of Jos, Bishop Kaigama had to warn him to stop doing that. Imagine today if General Buhari would be moving from mosque to mosque campaigning, what would happen to the country, the same Buhari they are accusing of wanting to Islamise Nigeria. I believe that this man must go. We need a leader that has values in this country,” he said.
The former speaker who has since joined the All Progressives Congress (APC), further accused president Jonathan and his party, the PDP of working to either ensure that the general election, scheduled to begin this Saturday, do not hold or setting the stage for the result to be discredited, if it is not in their favour.
“They either don’t want the elections to hold or they want to chip away the credibility of the elections once they lose. They want people to accept that there are anomalies in what INEC is doing,” he emphasised.
On the issue of interim government which his new party has accused Jonathan’s administration of, he said while he was not privy to some of the information at the disposal of those who had been in the party longer than him, the protests against the use of card reading machines and for the removal of INEC Chairman, Prof Jega were orchestrated by the PDP.
“I am not aware. I just joined the party today and I am not privy to all the information that members of the party have at hand but I know that the kinds of things going on particularly with those protests in Enugu where MASSOB was protesting against card readers – what has MASSOB got to do with card readers? These people are people who want to break away from Nigeria and the government is patronising them. I watched the leader of MASSOB trying to discredit INEC, I believe he is been sponsored by the government. I saw the leader of OPC, Gani Adams speaking against card readers.
These are militias that are anti-Nigeria and the government is patronising them because in the end, it wants to use them to promote violence once it is said that the PDP lost the election because they have seen the disaster about the election and that cannot win. That is why they are doing all these to orchestrate violence,” Na’Abba said.
While noting that Nigeria’s constitution does not allow for interim government in any way, he averred that it would therefore be illegitimate to have one in place.
On the achievements of President Jonathan, he maintained that he had not done anything worth praising him for, saying, “I believe that everything he has done, he is supposed to do it. When you campaign to become the president, you must know that what you are supposed to do is to see to the welfare of the people.
So, the things that were done were not extraordinary things. I have not seen any extra ordinary thing that Goodluck Jonathan he has done. In youth unemployment, which is very explosive; you were witnesses to how millions of our young men gathered in the stadium and some of them because of stampede, died while looking for a job.
I just read two days ago that the president gave the families of those that died N75 million and jobs. That is one year after and up till now, the minister who organised this scandalous situation is still a minister and nothing has been done about it. So, the extraordinary thing would have been that those millions of young men and women were given jobs by the administration.
“If for example, by the end of the four years he has been president, a substantial number of our youths through creative means have gotten jobs, I would say yes, Goodluck Jonathan has done an extraordinary thing but if you construct a road from Benin to Ore or from Calabar to Enugu, this is something that you are supposed to do; it doesn’t take any extra intelligence for anybody to do it once there are the resources.
But there are things that are explosive in this country; and that is why I gave you the example of youth unemployment. It is a very dangerous and explosive phenomenon. Every time they lie that they have created jobs; the last time he said that they had created 3 million jobs but I have not seen the jobs. So, there is nothing extraordinary I can say that he has done.”Leadership .
|
