Dr. Don Pedro Obaseki was the Deputy Director General of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Governorship Campaign Organisation in the recent governorship election in Edo State. In this interview, he speaks on his party’s allegation that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) rigged the poll in favour of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
With the setting up of the transition committee, what is the latest in Edo State?
Edo State has become an unending melodrama, where politics and democracy are not allowed to happen the way they should happen. However, we have a governor who understands the nuances and the dictates of the law.
This is the first time we have had a situation whereby a party which somehow was bulldozed into being declared victors in an election under a hugely disputed electoral heist, which failed all democratic norms.
The biggest electoral heist in the history of the country is being approached by a governor who is calling them to come and let them plan the transition seamlessly. He is calling the opposition APC, who are now coming into power, telling them to come ‘let us plan and do the transition together.’ Edo State is becoming something bad and a bad precedent for election.
The worst is that even when and if this result is overturned, there is no way to punish the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) over this changing the collective will of the Nigerian people, which has continued for so long. If there is a punishment for stealing the people’s mandate in the manner they are doing it, maybe INEC will be willing to discontinue derailing Nigerian democracy.
They did it in Imo State and nobody stopped them; they increased the tempo and upped the ante, and the Ondo election is just around the corner.
In Edo, the umpire disregarded the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal. It disregarded the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BIVAS) and went ahead to declare a result that never existed as far as the election in Edo State was concerned.
Did you see a situation where people were declared winners and those that were declared winners were behaving like people returning from a funeral?
That is to say, they were like ‘yes we have won the election but we are afraid to come out to celebrate it.’ That was the situation in Edo when INEC wrongly declared them the winner. It was pathetic that the will of the masses was suppressed by INEC.
PDP has consistently accused INEC and the APC of rigging the election but do you consider some pre-election issues that might have affected the chances of your party and its candidate like Governor Obaseki fighting many battles ahead of the election. Don’t you think some people even within the PDP might have worked against the party?
Yes, that one is obvious that the governor fought so many battles. When you find a man who is fighting an existential battle, you will understand where he is coming from.
He was in the APC but we guided him into the PDP under the guidance of the late Raymond Dokpesi. It was clear that the governor was fighting an existential battle and you can see the brigandage that is rolling out in all the places. What the governor did is what I will do; it is what every right-thinking person who wants to put us on a better path will do.
The governor is even showing more examples despite how they stole the mandate the people of Edo State freely gave to his candidate by still telling them to ‘come let us hand over to you, this is proper and this is the right way to do it’, putting aside those political issues.
However, to your question on whether it affected the election or not, that is understandable. But the truth is that they didn’t win the election despite the battles he fought.
This is also because whatever issues Godwin Obaseki had with some people had no direct consequence on the turnout of the election in favour of the PDP.
INEC and the APC ignored the turnout and ignored the results that were on the IReV and the BIVAS. I agree that some of the politicians came together against the government and decided to rob our state.
A fighting government is a fighting government and that is his (Obaseki) choice but it was and still is the choice of the people to side with him. The people were on his side despite the so-called fight because whatever actions he took were for the sake of the greater good of the people.
Even now, people are siding with him because he is the only one who has been paying minimum wage; he is the only one that increased the minimum wage and has never stopped paying.
They are siding with him because he is the one fighting those who want to steal the collective patrimony of the people and if that is the reason they are fighting him, so be it.
He is consistent in paying pensions and since he came in, Edo State workers can swear that they hadn’t received their salaries on the 31st of every month; it has always been four days before that 31st.
If you will fight him because in 2021 he told you that Nigeria is printing money wrongly and as a result of that, the N400 to a dollar then, would in the next few years, cross to over one thousand naira to a dollar, so be it.
If he is the man you will fight because he stands on the side of the people; if he is the man you will fight because he stands on the side of equity; if he is the man you will fight because he wanted to stop the political buccaneers that want to destroy the collective patrimony of the people of Edo and the larger Nigerians, so be it.
But know one thing, is that it is the fight that the people recognised, it is the fight that the people supported. That is the truth of the matter.
PDP leaders recently went to INEC to access the election materials as it is the right thing to do ahead of theirappeal and they were denied access. Do you think INEC is denying the party its legitimate demand and is it right to call out the umpire for allegedly blocking access to justice?
That is the sorry state of Nigeria we see today, sitting down and doing nothing. If you sit down and do nothing, you become crippled. Nigerians should stand up and demand the right thing. A thief steals once, and nobody holds him, he steals again and nobody holds him, so he would continue to go like that.
For INEC, from Jega to Mahmood Yakubu, they have continued in this line. The Nigerian people, with Edo State as a test run, have become like a conquered people with no action.
And again, the educated middle class have become like a wasted class, a dying species. And all the media, like the journalists are like ‘Bolekaja’ journalists. I was a journalist, I remember in those days when Bayo Abodunrin was I think in Punch; I was then ASUU secretary. We fought Abacha.
I mean we fought khaki people that carried guns and armoured tanks. I spent six months in a place called Gashua Prison in the present-day Yobe State but then it was in Borno State.
We weren’t scared and we weren’t thinking only about our take-home pay, we weren’t afraid but we were thinking of the continuity and oneness of this country.
And one of the beneficiaries of that singular fight is Bola Tinubu. He cannot, now he has become the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, gainfully or nongainfully so attained, become an albatross to the political system of the country.
You described journalists as ‘bolekaja’ in the face of alleged inadequacies of the electoral umpire; what do you think journalists aren’t doing right in the face of present circumstances?
I just feel that very few journalists can be the arrowhead in calling out those who are undermining the system and the process.
If they know you will call them out and that your call will resonate among Nigerians, definitely they will change. If we have vibrant journalists with intent on functioning as the fourth estate of the realm and being a watchdog, the government cannot do certain things.
INEC in particular has become sore pus in Nigeria’s political evolution and journalists, as the fourth estate of the realm, are unarguably the most important persons in this journey. You are the ones who must educate our people and not call these people on this or that.
You are the ones to educate our people on their civil rights, on their constitutional rights and tell them any time such rights are being trampled upon; any time such rights are being abused and not pandering to their whims.
At the end of the day, what have we done and what are we doing? Edo State is a case study. So many media organisations were not even allowed to certain places.
They were there when collation centres were shut down; they were there when results were called out and they were there when results being called out were different from results they had in their situation rooms.
The stations were there as witnesses to a daylight robbery, although they reported it a couple of days and that ended it. After that, it is all about all that is well that ends.
Unless we can stem the ugly tide, it will continue. From there, Edo will go down, another state will follow until we will be on an indirect road to Venezuela; we become a cubicle Uganda, and we will become a country where our electoral laws, our judiciary and all democratic tenets are on their knees, where our legislature will become a naked version of Portuguese parliament where our executive executes nothing, where our leaders are our collective misleaders, where our take-home pay can never again take us home.
When you earlier talked about the press, I think we should be talking about the freedom of the press. Some journalists have put their lives in the line of duty, some have been taken away and never been found. Now how free is the press in today’s journalism in the aftermath of the numerous examples listed above?
That is very important in achieving the successes you earlier mentioned in the time past. The press should allow itself to be used; the press itself should be willing to allow itself to be locked up, it must be the poster boy of this democracy. Let me tell you that more journalists must be locked up if the press must achieve its purpose.
You as the journalist must be hounded for telling the truth. As a press, you must be afraid to write in the open if you are doing the right thing because you must be hounded, you must be chased because you are telling the truth to them. That is what God has sent you to do through your profession.
This is because you as the press are the holders of the collective conscience of millions of people. And because our judiciary has become a laughing stock, that role of being the last hope of the common man has actually and tactically shifted to the side of the media. This time the hope is really what it is – hope, hoping against hopelessness.
But as a good leader, you must be hopeful of a better time and also as an organization, you must be telling the truth to inspire hope, and the only people who should do that, are willing to do that and speak the truth to the powers always is the press.
With that, there will be hope for this country, a dying nation because everyone knows that when non-state actors begin to challenge and dispense security and establish their order in large parts of the country, the nation is a failed nation. When we cannot talk but look at almost one hundred per cent of the price of goods every month because of inflation, it is a failed state.
When you were paying N195 per litre of fuel a year ago and today you are paying N1,200 for the same one litre of fuel, it is a dying nation.
When there is no aggregate rise in the pay package of the average Nigerian, we are a failing nation. While I commend the journalists, I feel they have not done enough.
What next for the transition committee after the meeting reportedly didn’t hold?
The meeting finally took place. We had a little issue here and then and I am not in APC to know why they couldn’t put their house in order.
The state government has continued to show them how the government is run. There will be subsequent meetings and I hope the APC will wake up to the transition. We, in our party, will continue to fight the electoral heist.