Attacks On TAN, Jonathan Highly Unconscionable – Udenta: Dr Udenta O. Udenta was the national secretary of the defunct Alliance for Democracy (AD) In this interview with STANLEY NKWOCHA, Udenta, who is now the director of communication and strategy of Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), hits back at those criticising the organ as well as President Goodluck Jonathan, describing them as unconscionable. He also spoke of his expectations for 2015 As a leader in TAN, you sure must be happy that the President has finally declared. How did it feel? I feel very fulfilled and I know that all those who are closely associated with this project – the leadership of the PDP, the various organs of the party, and millions of ordinary Nigerians who demanded that he contests the 2015 presidential election are also deeply fulfilled and profoundly moved by that historic decision. What do you make of the criticism that trailed the declaration? The declaration came at the right time except that there are some people who know what the rest didn’t know – that there will be a terror attack on the eve of the President Jonathan’s date with history. But in a more serious sense , those who criticised the declaration are indirectly aiding the terrorists in causing a change in our national values of courage, determination and resolute will. They want to foist a siege mentality, a bunker mindset on the nation – precisely the ultimate agenda of the terrorists. As a proud people we must strive to live our lives as normally as possible to the chagrin of the terrorists, even as we empathise with the victims of these agents of darkness and support our government and the armed and security forces in combating and destroying them. Your Organisation, TAN, hasn’t been spared harsh criticisms. Are some of these criticisms unfounded? These unconscionable attacks on TAN and President Jonathan stem from a distorted mindset and a warped worldview laden with insensate animosity, pathological hatred and the cruel application of amoral political principles. The APC is embarrassed by TAN’S success and the effortless ease with which we deconstructed and delegitimated their false narratives about President Jonathan’s ability to govern the nation efficiently. If you examine the context and content of their wild and fanciful claims you will notice that it is nothing but a rehash of the pitiable falsehoods they have been peddling for sometime; claims that are rightly confined to the garbage heap of forgotten history where they belong. How do you mean? In the sense that TAN has ran over one hundred television jingles broadcast over seven thousand times in four of Nigeria’s leading television stations, demonstrating, with verifiable facts and figures, that President Jonathan has performed very well in key national sectors. And in the sense that TAN organized seven major, well attended citizens democratic conversations without a single pushback or counter media programming by these very lazy armchair critics who are nothing but profoundly confused, wandering political souls. Take the case of Governor Fashola of Lagos state for example. His rising media profile may well stem from the fact that he may well be undergoing grooming for a major political assignment within his party. That is no skin off the nose of us in TAN, yet every time he opens his mouth to attack TAN, insult the person of President Jonathan and demean the office and institution of the Nigerian Presidency, he reveals the depth of his ignorance and portrays himself as a subject suffering from what I have previously described as the baffling disease of intellectual indolence and strategic imbecility. Apart from being a beneficiary of massive Central Government investments in Lagos State from the colonial times to about 1991, in the same way that if Abuja were to ever become a State in future, the inheritor government will benefit handsomely from the on-going investments in the FCT. Fashola should, without delay, publish all Lagos State’s revenue receipts since June 2007, both revenues from the Federation account, IGR, sale of bonds, loans, etc, in all leading newspapers in Nigeria. He surely has the money to do so. Nigerians will be shocked by the scandalous criminal looting of the people’s patrimony invidiously covered by high media propaganda, sanctimonious self-effusions and emptiness. Why have you singled out the Lagos governor? Precisely because Fashola is not just particular about TAN, he is obsessed by his mission to criminalize and demonize it as an entity. As he has embarked on this destructive course he must be reminded that TAN is not a faceless organization or an amorphous public advocacy platform. TAN is rich with highly informed and very knowledgeable human resources who are spiritually, intellectually and strategically equipped with the right skills and tools to respond to the challenges we daily confront. He must be reminded that every time he attacks TAN he is attacking each and every single one of us, our integrity, our reputation and our very humanity. Every time he attacks TAN he attacks me as its spokesperson, its public face. He surely must be naive not to expect a strong rebuttal from TAN. Let me make it abundantly clear that from now hence not one single attack on TAN or President Jonathan will go without a robust response from us. Some of us have come a long way and do not need to blow our trumpet. And you may ask if I know Governor Fashola very well. No, I don’t. When I was the national secretary of Alliance For Democracy (AD), he was a very lowly aide to Governor Tinubu, so our path never crossed. But as often happens in Nigeria with our style of leadership production and reproduction, he somehow became the darling of the Lagos political establishment that proceeded to foist him on the State as its governor. I don’t know where he was between 1993 and 1998, but surely not in the struggle for democracy or in political exile or detention because I would have known. Speaker Aminu Waziri Tambuwal just indicated interest to run for the Presidency. There is the issue of whether or not he should resign having decamped to the APC. What is your take on that? Let us deal with the moral element. The decision to resign or not, even in the context of the legal issues surrounding his audacious political move, rests squarely with him. It will be a test of his character and moral stature, his inner ethical impulses and his spiritual resolve. Yes, I am very much aware that in fundamental terms, bourgeois political practice often times transgresses and subverts bourgeois political morality, meaning that as a member of Nigeria’s growing tribe of political nomads he may listen more to his cold political calculations than the constant intimations of his conscience. Having said this, my personal take on the matter is that he should take the narrow path of honour rather the highway that inexorably leads to political perdition and resign his position as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, a position he immorally occupies. Again, having joined the club of name-callers whose idle past time is to heap abuses on President Jonathan because they have very little to offer the nation in terms of governance ideas and empowering vision as he did recently at Ilorin, he should be reminded that there are those out there who have elected to protect the humanity of our President and defend the integrity of the institution of the Nigerian Presidency. Enough is enough even though he may have ran with his mouth, as the saying goes, to garner the accolades of his fellow travellers that foregathered with him. And the spate of political decampments? Let us take a cue from Prof Jega’s two potent statements of late on the matter. During the last All-Political Parties and Political Stakeholders Summit, Prof Jega declared that political decampment across board is a form of crippling political nomadism that imposes unnecessary stress and strain on Nigeria’s democratic process, stultifies the growth of party infrastructure and damages the coherence of Nigeria’s political evolution. I cannot but agree with him that this trend is a curse on Nigeria’s democratic system and an eloquent testimony of the vacillating, opportunistic and amoral character of some Nigerian political elite. Again, just a week or so ago, Prof Jega also stressed that carpet-crossing is not a feature of the Nigerian constitution. I also agree with him. His first position is loaded with ethical issues, the second with legal principles. A while ago, Governor Amaechi of Rivers State celebrated the 7th anniversary of his Supreme Court triumph without telling the crowd that his name was not on the ballot box, that he did not contest any election and that indeed only the names and logos of political parties appear on Nigeria’s electoral ballot papers. He also forgot to add, carried away as he was with his obsession of running President Jonathan down- apparently his only known path to political stardom and glory- that part of the Supreme Court rulling is that governance mandates are conferred only on political parties and not on individuals, meaning that he is still carrying the mandate of the PDP, a mandate he cannot transfer as fancy possesses him. I know this from experience because in 1999 Alliance For Democracy (AD) won the Oyo North Senatorial District but there was a doubt about who was the legitimate candidate of the party for the said election. Months after Peter Adeyemo was sworn-in as Senator the issues lingered on at the tribunal between him and Chief Mrs Ayoka Lawani. The AD eventually resolved to settle the matter out of court and literally awarded the seat to Peter Adeyemo. The Senator Joy Emordi situation in Anambra State, as painful and tragic as that was, and the situation with the then CPC’s candidates for Katsina State, attest to the veracity of this position. Governors Amaechi, Kwankwaso, Wamakko, etc are without doubt renegade members of the PDP who have decided to immorally transfer the party’s mandate to another through dubious legal parameters and political gamesmanship. The current Nigerian enterprise will benefit more from the clear provision in the 1979 constitution that stipulates that an elected office holder will relinquish his position if he or she decamps to another political party. The late Alhaji Abubakar Rimi towed this path of honour and resigned as Governor of Kano State when he decamped to the NPP from the PRP, paving way for his deputy, Alhaji Dawakin Tofa, to be sworn-in as Governor. The present generation of Nigerian politicians should tow this path of honour and not engage in reprehensible political conduct that bothers on ethical ataraxia when they wilfully transfer a collective mandate delivered to a political party to another, and thereafter proclaim their States new frontiers of their latest nomadic dwelling point as the Rivers Governor and co-travellers currently do. What is TAN’s interest and how optimistic is TAN of a Jonathan victory come 2015? Our optimism stems from the success of the on-going project of deepening Nigerian democratic system and human transformation prerogatives by the Jonathan administration in the context of the paradigm of national transformation. You are living witnesses to the revolution TAN has brought to the national advocacy space and the ground breaking multimedia strategies we have used to showcase the achievements of the Jonathan government. When you add this to the massive political apparatus of the PDP that has met and overcome different historic tests in the past fifteen or so years, there is no doubt that President will be re-elected handsomely in 2015. Need I add that as things now stand Nigeria has no viable political opposition in terms of a radically different and contradistinctionally located ontological, philosophical and ideological divergences of values and principles, meaning that the APC is nothing but a pale imitation of the PDP in spite of the loquacious claims and false narratives about its progressive credentials in the hands of its pseudo-demagogues. If anything the metaphysical space around which the post-1998 political infrastructure was constructed is substantially de-ideologized in consideration of pluralistic ideological categories. It permits only the operation of ideological singularity except for those social forces that attempt to de-legitimize this metaphysical construct. Is that what folks like Rivers Governor, Rotimi Amaechi are doing to the Presidency through incessant criticisms? Some would opine that it is politics playing out. Is that a wrong notion? I have tried to address this issue elsewhere. May be the Rivers Governor has lost interest in governing the people of Rivers state, so he finds morbid joy in attacking the President. May be he has a significantly reduced workload that frees enough space for him to indulge in the idle past time of demeaning the President and his office. Again, don’t forget that some individuals take pleasure in criticizing others to announce their social and political presence, to show that they have arrived and to assure their drumbeaters that they can take on just about anybody, any target, no matter how unjustified these attacks may be. You know he is always in the media so it won’t take you too long to ask him. May be I will be the next target of his insolent disdain of contrary views. How easy is it to sell the Jonathan brand in the midst of escalated insurgency in some parts of the country and the Chibok girls saga? Couldn’t the President have done more? As a patriot, I will first of all extend my condolences to the families of all those whose lives were cut short by these barbaric hordes, and deep sense of empathy with those who are either injured or displaced by these callous and shadowy forces of darkness and evil. I extend a hand of encouragement to the men and women of the nation’s armed and security forces who put their lives on the firing line that we may be safe, who confront an enemy the often times do not see and who are waging an asymmetrical war the art of which they were previously untrained for. I will most of all appreciate our President for the steady, mature and robust manner he is confronting this threat. President Jonathan is doing the right things, taking the right steps and co-ordinating well with our regional and international partners. Of course, there is always room for improvement in terms of intelligence gathering and sharing of data, community buy in into the war against terror and a holistic approach to peace enforcement and peace building as is to be expected in all new threat situations whose dynamic and elemental essence are previously unknown. Yes, it is easy to sell the Jonathan brand in the context of the current situation in some states in the North East in the same way that it was easy to sell the George W Bush brand in 2004 in the midst of two wars and the Obama brand in 2012 while those war were still on-going, and are still on-going if I may add. Lets come back to TAN once more. TAN has become highly visible in the polity, especially with your rallies and robust public advocacy methods… (Cut in) … We are proud of our declaration that TAN is an idea whose time has come. We are not only proud of the accomplishments of President Jonathan in his first term in office, we are proud Nigerians who are intent in telling the Nigerian story in the Nigerian way. We admit that our nation, like most other societies, have deep challenges, but these challenges can never be allowed to define the Nigerian condition, the Nigerian character. In our public advocacy campaign we do not politicize the terrorist scourge in some parts of the country as some others do. We do not haul abuse at our President, demean his office and person as some others do. We do not travel abroad to desecrate the homestead for a mess of foreign accolades as some others do. We are not possessed by a narcissistic bent of mind nor are we citizens suffused with hubris, the tragic type that sees belligerent narratives and cesspit incantations as the fundamental essence that define one’s being as some others do. What is your idea of 2015? What form should the campaigns take? My vision for 2015 is an electoral process that is efficient and an electoral practice that is credible, free, fair and transparent. The campaigns must be issues- based, ideas-driven and devoid of rancor, bitterness, and obscene desperation that the APC currently typifies. Finally, my vision for 2015 is one in which every vote must be counted and in which every vote must count. 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Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 21:25:19 +0000
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